Lessons From A Kitchen Disaster

It’s the middle of May, and I shuffle the bills like playing cards.  It’s that time of year, when all the savings from the end of last fall have run dry, and I’m scanning due dates, matching them up with the the farm’s production and sales schedule:  pairing feed bills with chicken pick-up dates; lining the credit card due date up with the opening day of the farmers’ market.  Last year, I faced these problems with angst and despair.  This year, it feels more like a game of chess — a series of tactical maneuvers that I need to map out, with the interesting challenge of finding our way through to this season’s renewed cash flow.  And while I like to complain about these pecuniary challenges vociferously to the rest of the family in order to instill fiscal responsibility, I quietly enjoy the challenge.   I have a quiche to thank for that.

I dumped the quiche on the kitchen floor of the cafe one morning last summer, my own over-tired, stress-induced frantic movements to blame for the accident. Our farm’s cafe was slowly gaining a reputation as a place for good food, good people, and good times.  But at that point, Bob and I hadn’t seen a day off or a paycheck in months.  And for all my love of community and the pastures and hillsides, I was not jiggy with an empty bank account and a broken-down body as the consequence of operating a business that only seemed successful on the surface.

As farmers with vision and creativity, we are the foundation for building sustainable rural economies such as have never been known in history.  But if we follow our own long-standing agricultural tradition of worshipping perpetual fatigue, stress and poverty, these new economies are going to crumble the second we’re no longer able to stand. And that’s not all that will crumble.  Our families will fall apart; our children will leave, our land will go untended. 

And whoever’s left living near me will have a raving madwoman for a neighbor.  

So  as I mopped this beautiful quiche off the floor, I decided that if we were going to carry this farm and community business forward, then there would be one governing rule.

Less stress.  More profit.  

I know.  It’s not supposed to go that way.  But  I no longer respect what the rest of the world tells us about high stress and hard work resulting in greater profits. In that moment, as quiche custard smeared around me, that commonly regarded truth became a lie in my eyes.  And I set out to prove it. 

So Bob and I shut the cafe up Sunday night.  We needed a break.  And we couldn’t spend a dime.  We packed up the kids, the dogs and the camping gear.  I left an autoreply message saying we’d gone camping for a few days.  Then we went a mile up the road where the cell phones don’t work.  We stayed there for three days, camping on the edge of a pond, skinny dipping, exploring new swimming holes in the area, hiking, watching sunrises and sunsets.  And I let my mind wander.

I thought about profit, and I thought about stress.  And while I was there, I realized 3 truths that completely changed the way I looked at everything:

1. The Problem is the profit.
2. One cannot realize the profits until one recognizes profits.
3. Overwork destroys profits.

Let’s start with that first one.  

1. THE PROBLEM IS THE PROFIT. 

I was angry.  I felt like the feed bill got paid, our butcher got paid, our herd manager & insurance guy got paid, even the kids got tip money.  But the owners weren’t getting paid.  The rent checks  we received from our building went right out again to pay the property insurance, the home equity loan, and for health care costs.  And the ability to get up each morning and work our tails off was the reward for all that payment.  

But while I was sitting there thinking (Please note: I was beside the water, on a weekday, with no one to tell me where I had to be when), I realized I’d chosen this set of problems. 

I chose the continuation of my family farm and the revitalization of my community as a problem to tackle.  It’s hard to do.  If it wasn’t, the problem wouldn’t exist. 

Prior to that moment, I thought I had chosen this problem because I wanted to experience the solution.  But then it hit me:  life is about problems.  Solutions are just a tiny part of life. The meat of life is about experiencing and tackling the problems.  If I’m lucky enough to see the outcome of a vibrant thriving farm and community someday, on that same day, I probably won’t be propping my feet up devoting my life to passive celebration of my success.   I’ll be facing a whole new set of problems.  That’s just the way it goes. 

And as I pondered this interesting problem that I’ve chosen, I considered all the problems that I haven’t chosen, that simply don’t enter my world: I don’t deal with office gossip.  I don’t deal with a commute.  I don’t worry about how my kids are treated in school.  I don’t have to attach my self worth to a job promotion.  I don’t have back problems from sitting at a desk all day.  I don’t have pent up rage issues from having to hold my tongue all the time.  I don’t have to try to figure out how to exercise more; or how to eat better.  

Bob and I chose to struggle with finding ways to get along with my parents and stay in business with them.  We chose to negotiate that business with our children and an employee.  We chose to take the risks tied to buying an old building in a run down town and turn it into a community asset.  We chose to grapple with making a family farm profitable.  We chose these things because we were drawn to them.  If we turn everything around and get a profitable business out of it, it will have been these struggles that we will happily remember. They’re beautiful and they’re interesting.  The problem is the profit.  It is the set of puzzles and challenges that we get to play with every day. 

Let’s move on to the second truth.

2. ONE CANNOT REALIZE THE PROFITS UNTIL ONE RECOGNIZES THE PROFITS

The best-known kick back of having a farm is that we get to eat great food.  That’s one form of payment, one form of profit, that we recognize immediately.  But we get so wrapped up in the “poor me, poor farmer” story we tell, we forget to pay ourselves.  

It’s a great story:  

We farmers work harder than everyone else.  We farmers can’t make money ‘cuz everyone else makes money off of us.  Farmers are the only business people who buy retail and sell wholesale.  

We wear these hair shirts like badges of honor.  Poor us, poor us poor us.   And when we get our hard-earned money, we put every drop of it back into our businesses.  

It may seem great to keep investing in the business, because we’re all addicted to the farming habit, but it perpetuates a cycle of Poor Me.  I once took a farm business management course where the instructor told us we had to pay ourselves first.  His reasoning was that if we can’t do that, then the business isn’t viable.

We can’t always draw cash out of the business, that’s true.  But until we can draw cash, we can draw other things, like good food.  But there’s more. 

We can draw time. 

The farm offers us time:  Time to be together.  Time to drink coffee while other people fight traffic on the way to work.  Time to go for a walk.  Time to linger over a meal.

But the reality is that most of us don’t take it.  We buy into the mainstream culture that tells us there is no time.  We look around us at all that has to be done, and we keep working: answering texts, responding to emails, pulling weeds, running numbers, counting sheep, moving cattle.  We’re forever tackling “just-one-more-things” we think we can accomplish before we allow ourselves to fix supper and enjoy the songs of the spring peepers. 

Cash, if we don’t spend it, builds up in an account.

Time doesn’t.  Time is our greatest profit in farming.  And if we don’t recognize it and we don’t take it, we lose it.  Parents get old and die.  Children move away.  Our energy wanes.

If you take your time payment, you get your memories.  

So leading up to this great spiritual pilgrammage to the side of a pond, I was thinking about the dollars I wasn’t taking from the business.  But while I was spending all my energy worrying about the dollars, I was letting the time waste away.  

When I came home from my pilgrammage, I blacked out on my calendar my time.  That included afternoon naps, morning walks & days off.  It’s scary to do that when there’s always so much to be done. It’s scary to do because farmers toil.  That’s our identity.  That’s how we define our self-worth.

 But remember Parkinson’s Law?

Work expands so as to fill up the time alloted for its completion.

What would happen if we farmers  claimed time as one of our rights, as one of our fundamental profits, as being at the core of our identities? What would happen if  daily we said to ourselves:  FARMERS HAVE TIME TO REST AND PLAY?  We would toil a whole lot differently.  

There are still weeks when we have a big push.  But two  years ago, during the growing season, I worked seven days per week. Last year, with time as my first form of self-payment,  I was able to get the same amount of work done in 5.  Why’s that?  Again, Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands so as to fill up the time alloted for its completion.  Insisting that I allow myself time, I focused on getting efficient in order to achieve it.

Our family started having a lot more fun.Then Dad pointed something out to me. We were building up money in the bank account.  Bob and I were able to start drawing pay.  We were working less, but the farm was slowly coming into the black.  Why was that?

That leads me to the final truth:

3.  OVER-WORK DESTROYS PROFITS.

 When we overwork, we wear ourselves out.  We increase the stress levels on our bodies, which results in inflammation, and we start to break down. The Framingham study found that over a 20 year period, women who took infrequent vacations were more likely to have heart attacks than those who vacationed regularly.  In a nine year study* of 12000 men at high risk for coronary heart disease, researchers found that those who took annual vacations had fewer heart attacks and lower overall mortality rates than those who didn’t.

When we overwork, we strain our relationships.  Our families fall apart. Divorce is expensive. 

When we overwork, we make stupid mistakes on the job.  We get hurt.  Getting hurt is expensive, and it means lost productivity.  

Overwork leads us to spend more.  It makes us desparate for instant gratification. Flip through a glossy magazine sometime and study the  furniture adds appealing to affluent overworked people in our country.  The ads often promote new expensive couches.  They’re pictured in beautiful, clean, calm rooms.  And they prompt people to keep buying couches.  But very vew of us actually need the couch.  Most folks I know already have plenty of places to sit down.  They just need time to rest & play.  When we’re overworked, we fall for that kind of marketing.  We throw what little money we might have at problems that really just require time.  

But there’s more to this. 

Resting, taking the time that I mentioned above as the first form of payment, can help INCREASE profits.

How can that be possible?  Let’s have some fun with brain science.  

Dr. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest: Why you get more done when you work less, explains that the resting brain is active.  It switches to a default mode netowrk, what he calls “a series of interconnected sections that activate as soon as people stop concentrating on tasks, and shifts from outward-focused to inward-focused cognition.”  

Basically, while you’re chilling out, the brain starts doing big work.  

Researchers have looked at the brains of highly creative people and found that this default mode networks kicks in in the regions of their resting brains,.  There are higher levels of connectivity across certain areas, and then, certain parts of the those areas stay engaged once they switch to a concentration mode.  

That’s a long way of saying that the brain, in its resting state, is nearly as energetic as the engaged brain.  

By giving our brains rest, Dr. Soojung-Kim Pang  explains, we are encouraging our default mode network to become more developed.  

Rest helps us be more creative.  It helps us problem solve more effectively.  Winston Churchill navigated Britain through WWII and took a nap every day.  So did George Marshall.  They advised Eisenhauer to do the same. Douglas MacArthur got very grouchy if he didn’t get his nap.  Interestingly, Hitler didn’t nap.  He used amphetamines and coke to avoid sleep for days on end.  See where overwork got him.  

Sara Mednick, sleep researcher at U. of California Riverside (nice work if you can get it), found that napping for an hour or more each day – a nap long enough to dream, improves performance on memory & perceptual tasks. See where resting starts to increase profits?

But to be truly beneficial, the rest needs to happen a certain way.  When we nap, we can see the benefits easily.  Taking time to nap is an easy farm profit to garner, and as we tackle these challenges of using our farms to rebuild our rural communities, that creative problem solving ability will be critical.  

But we have to do more than take a nap.  German Sociologist Sabine Sonnentag researches “recovery” in work: the process of recharging the physical & emotional batteries.  She looks at the effect of weekends on replenishment of energy levels during the week; on vacations and satisfactions in the days, weeks and months that follow; as well as the effects of having a good nights’ rest.  

Her work consistently finds that people who have the chance to get away mentally, to switch off and devote their energy elsewhere, are more productive, happier, get along better with others, have more focus and are better able to deal with challenges.  

But in order to do that, we need to be able to switch off.  

That’s hard to do when running a business.  Its hard to do when tight finances are causing stress.

But it doesn’t have to be.

As I realized the importance of breaking away and taking real time off, I started playing with it.  The first thing I did was leave the phone turned off when I was taking time off.  Then, that day of taking off down the road became a habit.  We just left and went camping, or we took day hikes.

We didn’t use all our time off to mow lawns, catch up on  laundry and take the kids to activities.  There were times when that was necessary, but I learned we needed to have times where that wasn’t. 

Sonnentag found that there are four major factors that contribute to our recovery when resting:

Relaxation, Mastery Experiences, Control, and Mental Detachment.

Relaxation is any activity that’s pleasant and undemanding.  That’s easy enough with a good movie.  

Mastery Experiences are activities that are interesting and that you do well.  They should be challenging and mentally absorbing, like playing a game or doing a puzzle,  going on a new hike, tackling a knitting project or playing an instrument. They should be both mentally absorbing and enjoyable.

Control is where it gets tricky.  That’s  the power to decide how you spend your time, energy and attention.  That means family duties and chores can’t be dictating all your time, or else your time off won’t be effective at restoring your energy levels.  So if you’re taking time off to run your kids’ to soccer & hockey games, and that’s not something that thrills you and engages your mind and helps you relax,  you’re not  taking productive time off.  You’re taking mental energy away from your business and losing it under the car seat.  We all need to do some carting around here and there, but its not our job to spend our healthiest years running our kids to activities.  They can learn a lot from boredom while you relax. 

Finally, our time off requires detachment.  If you keep checking your phone, the time off isn’t doing anything for you.  This is true for vacations, evenings, weekends, or whatever your equivalent days off may be.  

This stuff doesn’t have to cost money.  It can be picnics or a camp out on the back forty with the phone off;  morning snowshoe walks, some stew and a game by the fire.

.  

I know the sheep get out.  Or there’s a frost warning.  Or there’s a sudden heat wave that threatens the livestock.  Or a flood.  Or a hurricane.  We can’t ignore these things when they happen.  But if we take our time first, allowing ourselves to be replenished, we’ll be quicker, more fit, more creative and more effective in our responses to the troubles.  And our businesses profit from that. 

Thanks to that quiche,  that little camping trip where we tuned out the world did exactly what a perfect vacation should do.  It broke us away, restored our spirits, and gave us the energy to jump back in to the project of creating a viable business and a thriving community.  

I spent my whole summer and this past winter practicing those three truths I learned, focusing on this idea of LESS STRESS, MORE PROFIT.

And as we practiced them, I noticed our energy levels increasing.  And we started getting more creative. We thought about new ways to market our farm products, about how ways to run the cafe more effectively, about new business ventures (check out our new Farm-to-Table vacation rental!)

And we had a whole lot of fun.

And we started selling more meat.

And we started getting more business at the cafe.

And we started drawing paychecks.

And this May, thanks to that ruined quiche, as I face the seasonal cash-flow dearth that leads us out of winter and into the growing months, I’m not going to forget these lessons.  These are my challenges and my joys.  This is a life I wouldn’t trade for any other.

*The Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial for the Prevention of Coronary Heart Disease sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.