“Jim!”  George, one of Dad’s favorite customers, calls from the front of the cafe all the way to the kitchen in the back.  “You got yourself a new job!”

He waves and smiles.  Dad must have his hearing aids on, because he looks up from the three bay sink, where he’s spraying down some bowls before loading up the dishwasher.  Dad grins and brandishes one of my stirring spoons, minimally scraped clean of cornbread batter.

“We got a line item for this, George,” he shouts back.  “It’s called unpaid family labor!”

That line item weighs heavily on me this summer.  It was only three years ago when I was crunching numbers, making projections with Bob, Mom and Dad as my sounding board,  figuring out how to use the cafe to cash flow the salary of Kate, our herd manager, so we could bring her into the business full time.  It’s been a decision we’ve never regretted, where Bob and I moved away from our weaknesses (livestock handling,where Kate had us beat by a long shot), and toward our stronger skillsets (working with customers and running a kitchen).  The farm hasn’t seen a much profit yet, but we’re breaking even. 

Then there’s Dad.  He reminded me this spring, his scientific head cool, that he’s 71 years old.  He doesn’t feel like slowing down right now, but I need a plan in the works. 

So I’ve been running numbers ever since, looking at the possiblity of expanding hours on the cafe, studying the barriers to that, estimating the costs of overcoming them, then re-scrutinizing the new labor bill that would ensue.

“I love all the labor laws to protect workers,” Rachel Gilker of On Pasture told me over sushi one afternoon last spring.  “Everyone gets a living wage these days.”  She popped a piece of salmon into her mouth, swallowed delicately, then smiled brightly.  “Except the farmer.”

There it was again:  unpaid family labor.

Over the winter, another customer who teaches a course in Agricultural Sustainability at Columbia forwarded me a discouraging 2014 New York Times Op Ed:  Don’t Let your Children Grow Up to Be Farmers.  A month earlier Bob had forwarded me another story from Salon:  What Nobody Told Me About Small Farming: I can’t Make a Living.  For all the optimism my generation has spurned about the future of farming in America, I’m seeing the same issues circle around again and again and again.  

But next year, Sap Bush Hollow Farm will celebrate 40 years in business.  I’d like to say we made it because we were so much smarter than all the other farmers that went out of business.  But the truth is this:  Our secret lies with the grandfather brandishing the batter-smeared spoon from the three bay sink; with the grandmother who greets customers; the teenager practicing her latte art behind the espresso bar; the pre-teen who delivers customer meals on roller skates; the sister-in-law who shows up to manage us on busy cafe days; the close friends who jump up and pitch in; the husband who drives the meat to the farmers market every Saturday morning; and the mom, who flips the farm-raised eggs on Saturdays and Sundays, and who then crunches numbers all day Monday.  

Unpaid Family Labor. 

It isn’t that we’re uncompensated.  The farm keeps our cost of living to a minimum.  It pays all the family partners rent checks for the real estate we’ve contributed to the business.  And it even provides us with some earned income, although it isn’t predictable, and it never matches the number of hours we invest.  But with two partners in their seventies, I’m faced with finding a way to replace unpaid family labor with paid labor:  a living wage for every hour invested.  Yet one agricultural minimum part-time salary with employment taxes and workers’ comp will cost as much as Bob and I earn off the farm combined in a single year.  

I crunch, tweak, run different scenarios and make projections on how I can afford that next person.  And then, no sooner do I figure out how to balance it out, I realize the next problem:  I can expand gross income to cover expenses, but I still cannot increase Bob’s and my income.  Bob and I are admittedly ambivalent about the prospect of making more money, but if I don’t build the capacity in the business to cash flow real salaries, then the next generation faces the same problem as we age out:  Replacing an unpaid labor pool with a paid one.  

Truthfully, I’m more fascinated by this problem than discouraged.  This is a problem Bob and I chose to work on when we joined the family business. If it were easy to resolve, I might just get bored.    It pushes me to keep learning and thinking.  

So to address it this summer, between binge reading vampire novels, I’ve been devouring books on financial literacy and business management, looking for new insights, reviewing concepts I may have forgotten, and preparing to write the business plan for the next five years.   A lot of the writings, with their attempts to inspire me to all the easy ways to get rich, leave me giggling.  Every one of those authors who manage to be clever money managers are able to get up and do their thing each day because of the food that nourishes their bodies.  And if that food didn’t come from a factory farm, then chances are it was the product of unpaid family labor.  In spite of this, the authors encourage me to ask the big questions:  How rich do I want to be?  What am I willing to invest to get there?  Some of them even leave blank spaces at the end of each chapter, so that I can fill in my responses. 

My mouth twists in knots as I consider the question. I leave the spaces blank.  Instead, one night over supper on the screen porch, I put the question to Bob, Saoirse and Ula.  “What does it mean to be rich?”  I ask.

The thrushes echo out from the forest behind us, and Bob only half listens, because he hears a scarlet tanager singing from the maple on the eastern corner.  Rich, for him, is lots of birds to watch and listen to.  Saoirse leaves the table and flops on the old couch, inviting the dogs up to snuggle with her.  Rich, for her in this moment, is a dog hug.  Ula considers my question first. 

“When I was little,” she tells me.  “I thought being rich meant you had a rash.”

“I think it means you get a fancier house,” Saoirse stands up from the couch and goes to look at the sunlight bouncing off the maples and lilacs.  “But I don’t think I’d like it.  Not if I couldn’t be here.”

I look at Bob. He pulls his attention from the scarlet tanager’s song and shrugs.  “Being rich means I can afford to give money to other people, I guess.” And then they all look at me, waiting for my answer.  

I consider being rich.   It’s a funny question.  I can’t see riches offering more than I currently have or want.  I want to hike in the morning and drink my coffee in the woods or beside a stream.  I want to sit on a Saturday night with my family and swap stories about what happened in the cafe that day.  I want to see my customers and hear about their lives.  I want time to write, time to school my children, time to be with my mom and dad.  I have all that.  What could I want that I don’t already have?

“Lobster,” I finally volunteer.  “Being rich would I could eat fresh lobster whenever I wanted.”  My brother is a marine biologist on Cape Cod, and much of his work right now involves negotiating the sticky tensions surrounding the near extinction of North Atlantic Right whales that keep getting caught in the lines of lobster traps.  Tensions have been running high as he and his colleagues work to sort out the big questions between one culture’s right to a livelihood, and one species’ right to exist.  I hope they work it out, because I really love lobster. 

I think about him.  I think about how we clash.  I also think about something he said one time after one of our fights.  He needs this farm to come home to, to rest and heal, so he can go back out to face what he faces.  There is no amount of riches I could garner that could do better than what I do now.  If riches mean lobster, riches mean a family farm. 

I pitch my latest math problem out to the family; how do I replace Pop Pop’s unpaid labor with paid labor, and still make ends meet?  Saoirse and Ula jump all over me.  “That’s our job!” They are emphatic, and I am uneasy.  Already, they understand all too well how this economic system functions. 

“You’re not ready to make that choice,” I tell them.  I dread them moving into their adult lives, too in touch with an entire family’s hopes and dreams to know their own.  

“You insult your daughters,” I leave the table mentally and travel back in time to last spring, where I was sitting across the table from Rachel Gilker, eating sushi, where I expressed this unease that I might unwittingly cajole my children into the family business against their wishes. “You didn’t raise them not to know their own minds,” she said.   Remembering her words, I stop arguing with my children. 

The economics of a family farm are just this way. And while my work right now is to improve upon them, I cannot say whether they are any more or less fair than the economics of the rest of the world.  They function on people blowing up at each other one evening, then showing up to support each other the next morning.  They function on working far harder than you would for anyone else, even yourself.   They function on one generation carefully looking after another, on an animal scientist leaving his livestock to wash dishes for his daughter; on a grandmother showing up to work two weeks after heart surgery, because she wants to see her customers; on a teenager who practices mise-en-place in her mother’s cafe kitchen and watches over her shoulder as she crunches numbers; on a roller skating 11-year-old waitress who will sit for hours with the turkey poults; on a lanky Dad who plumbs and tinkers and hefts and scrubs endlessly without complaint.  They function on having a different understanding of what it means to be rich, and on the socio-economic, ecological and political importance of welcoming everyone home.