Humbleness in Agriculture

For me, acknowledging what I don’t know is as important as what I think I do know. I am now 65 and except for a 10 year hiatus in/with academia, have been involved in agriculture all my life. For the last 15 years I have also been an organic inspector, which has brought me into contact with many organic farmers and processors of organic foods.

I figger I am now officially a senior – even though retirement is not in any of my plans. In one of my paradigms, my senior status indicates that I am now an “elder” – with connotations of experience & wisdom. Some days I relate to both those terms. This post is about times when I don’t.

I have been sharing this experience recently with my friend Dan, who has a 500 tree apple orchard. Although Dan is about a decade younger, we both note that the longer we live, the less we know for sure. Here is the crux: after decades of experience – when we thought we would be experts in our field, we find there are very few things that are always true.

So what’s the problem? First off, we appreciate how much we do know: we no longer have the angst of being new to the basics: soil fertility, plant growth, etc; but even those are incredibly complicated and what seems obvious one year is totally contraindicated the next (or several years later). It doesn’t seem fair: really, I was paying attention to the weather, the health of the plants/crops, and nurtured them the best I could – yet the outcome was totally different; eg, usually, the sorghum we grow from transplants is healthier and more productive than the ones we direct seed in the field, but in 2010 – it was exactly the opposite. So what is the lesson here? That really I don’t know – after all? Humbleness? OK, I got it.

Another prime example is my experience with honey bees – see next post (forthcoming).

Fortunately, Dan and I also share a lively sense of humor. We laugh at ourselves: at how we – the experts – find ourselves guessing at what happened last year and what to do next. Further, laughing at ourselves is more fun when we do it together.

Sometimes, I feel frustrated that I don’t have more definitive answers when folks ask my opinion and about my experience; and yet, perhaps that is part of the wisdom: the absence of definitiveness when dealing with life – soil, plants, critters, etc. It also relates back to my earlier posts re Spirit in Agriculture: a reminder to celebrate the mystery in agriculture. Perhaps that is the wisdom.