Pic: Shannon Hayes dressed as Uncle Sam with a sheep dressed as a soldier for the costume theme: Uncle Sam Wants Ewes, clipped from the Times Journal Newspaper sometime back in the late 1980s(??).
It’s August. Everything feels like it is in suspension. The hermit thrushes and winter wrens have grown silent on our morning walks. The creeks are still. The natural world feels as though it is pausing to draw breath before an enormous sigh….It’s like swing that gets wound up in one direction that stops and holds still before the mighty unleashing as it whips madly to unwind way. It’s not a pause of exhaustion, but of anticipation, of all that is about to explode as the seeds we’ve planted bear fruit, the song birds begin their winter migration, and the celebratory fury of the harvest season is in full swing. It is in this pause when I am ending the podcast for the year, at a time when changes are madly happening in my life, when, in spite of the suspension of the natural world, the words I type seem to be out of date before I can even set them free for you to find on the web. But this moment is quiet. So I’m going to use it to look at those attributes that have gotten Bob and me this far, and that I hope will get us through the coming seasons of change. Because one thing is certain. It sure as heck hasn’t been aptitude.
…The calendar may declare this to be midsummer, but seasonal changes are happening down in town. August is the time of our county fair, and when SUNY Cobleskill, the college in town, welcomes students back after the summer break.
My history with both local institutions is longer than I’d care to admit. Both of them forced a kind of reckoning about what my future might be like. Both were wrong. And in that wrongness, they shaped my future.
When I was a kid, my Dad, who worked as a professor of animal science at SUNY Cobleskill, was interviewed by a student about our family farm for the college paper. They asked one particularly poignant question.
“What is the future of your farm, Dr. Hayes?”
His response:
“My son will probably take it over.”
There it was, in black and white print. Never mind that I loved Sap Bush Hollow like crazy.
I’ve spent a lot of years since seeing that clipping, pondering why my dad thought my brother would take over the farm, and I wouldn’t. I suppose it might have been a moment of unintentional sexism. But I think his remark was informed by something more.
My Dad knew something about me.
I lacked aptitude.
Sean, my brother, was loaded with aptitude. He would pepper my dad with questions about lactation, estrous cycles and parasites. During August when Sean was three, Mom and Dad enrolled him in the nursery school at SUNY Cobleskill. When school was done for the day, he would sit in the back of my Dad’s animal science classroom while Dad taught his last class for the day. A few weeks into his nursery school sessions, the teacher called home. Sean had begun explaining artificial insemination to the other toddlers. By contrast, the August I turned three, I was also enrolled in nursery school. And the teacher also had to call home, not because I was demonstrating a preternatural understanding for the agricultural world; but because I took one look at all those kids, crawled under a table, went into the fetal position, and refused to come out.
There were more signs of my lack of aptitude. I suffer mildly from Scoleciphobia (sko=lisaphobia)— a fear of worms. And not just earthworms. We’re talking about maggots, round worms, ring worms, tape worms, lung worms, barber pole worms…you name it.
That doesn’t instill a farmer with confidence that his daughter has a future in livestock prone to parasitic infections.
It gets worse. The August before Dad was interviewed for that article, I participated in my first season showing sheep at the county fair.
Participation in the county fair isn’t as much a part of farm culture as it was back then. In fact, we’re so busy running the farm in August, we never have free time to get down there. But back in my childhood, participation in the fair was pretty much a command performance for any farm kid.
For those of you blessed enough to be unfamiliar with fair culture, 4Hers can enter any number of contests with their livestock to compete for cash prizes. Classes exist for all the major breeds; plus cross breeds. I was never interested in any of that. There was only one class that had my attention: the costume contest. This is where 4Hers had an opportunity to dress up their animals in crazy costumes.
And it is what inspired me to be the first person to design a leopard print bikini for a sheep….
But that’s a story for another day.
In order to participate in any of the competitions, including the costume contest, every 4Her was required to enter something called showmanship: a competition where we were judged on how clean we looked (all white dress was required), how clean our sheep looked, how serenely we could walk our animals around the show ring, and how composed we could remain under the scrutiny of the judge. This was the class that EVERYONE watched. This is the class that EVERYONE cared about.
So, before my dad was interviewed for that story, I’d gone into the show ring for the first time.
Now, coming from a production-oriented farm, my brother and I didn’t really have traditional 4H projects, like really tame sheep that we would have hand-fed and kept like pets. We were a meat farm. We knew better than to form attachments. The animals that we took to the fair were the animals we could catch.
So when I went out into the showmanship ring for the first time with about 20 other kids, my feral sheep balked. While the other kids all stood perfectly still with their hands gently holding their tamed sheep, my sheep lunged and took off.
And took me with him. My show whites and I got dragged around the ring once…then twice….and then three times.
I will never forget how the county fair looks from the ground-up as the side of my face was dragged through sawdust, feces, urine and gravel.
My show whites were no longer white. I had lost all dignity and composure. My dad and a couple of other men were finally able to head us off and helped me get to my feet. The judge came over and granted me permission to exit the class.
I refused to go.
He shrugged, placed me at the bottom in last place, and left me there.
My father was well known locally because he was a popular professor of animal science. Our family used to travel around during the summers while he judged county fairs all over the northeast.
And here was his daughter, dirty, cut up from head to toe, and in last place.
There are moments when we are raising our children that can be so painful, we are beside ourselves. I don’t know what happened to my dad when I left the ring that day. I know he disappeared. Now, as a grown-up, I think I know him well enough to suspect that he had probably gone off to shed a few tears of his own. Because if there was one thing he knew about his little girl in that moment, it’s that her heart had been broken. And while he could slaughter animals and poke his fingers through parasites, he couldn’t bear the thought of seeing his baby girl in pain….especially when she was showing a lack of aptitude for something that he loved so dearly.
So he probably slipped away to where no one could see his own tears.
And what he never knew was that someone else slipped in.
That’s the cool thing about being part of a community. Sometimes, our parents can’t handle being our parents. And when you’re part of a community, someone else can step forward to get the job done.
And on that day, a man came and found me at my sheep pen, where I was crying all alone. He knew my dad from work, and his son was in my grade at school.
He leaned over the pen as I watched this beast that had led to my family’s public humiliation and told me something very important.
He told me that I was amazing.
Apparently he’d watched a lot of kids show their livestock. And animals spooked all the time.
“But you know what always happens?” He asked me.
I shook my head and kept crying.
“The animals get loose. You’re different,” he told me. “You never let go.”
But I wasn’t a stupid kid. I knew I lacked aptitude. “I’m not good at it,” I explained to him.
“And that’s never going to matter to someone like you,” he said. “The only thing that’s ever going to matter is that you care. Because if you think something matters in life, you’re never going to let go.”
Funny, now, how the field of positive psychology has a name for this trait. They call it grit.
And I remember all that fair gravel and sawdust ground into my skin back then and think, yeah, no kidding.
So when my dad was interviewed for that college paper, he was answering honestly about thinking his son was the more likely candidate for taking over the farm. But he didn’t yet understand something critical.
I cared about it fiercely.
And that’s one of the things that the research into grit tells us. Talent or aptitude doesn’t count as much as effort. And effort comes when you care about something.
I didn’t show aptitude for farming, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from witnessing the effects of the farm crisis and the dysfunction of farm culture at that time. I could see the vocation was broken. I began to notice that the kids who won the ribbons at the fair got them because somebody had money to pay for the best genetics, because they had the leisure to make pets of their animals. But the production farms themselves, growing food as a livelihood, were slipping away to debt, chemicals, broken homes, substance abuse.
I wound up going to grad school to study it. (Luckily I had an aptitude for academics.) But the more I studied, the more I realized that the only way I could be true to my heart was to exit academia, where I had aptitude, and return home to my family’s farm where, as I’ve been saying, I had very little. That was nearly a quarter century ago.
This August, as we juggle Mom’s health care needs and feel the support of an amazing crew customers, friends and employees helping us hold it all together, I’m marveling at what that farm has enabled for Bob and me. Even with a lack of aptitude, we were able to raise our daughters in the business while homeschooling them. They’ve got bank accounts and retirement savings and they’re going to college debt-free, and they both work Sap Bush with us. And yes. They even appear to have aptitude.
And I sit here during these pre-dawn hours, listening to the crickets as the rain patters on the roof, and ponder how we managed to do that. For certain, Mom and Dad’s aptitude helped.
But Bob & I did have three other important traits. And those three traits, I believe, are what enabled our family to grow, build wealth, be innovative and have a lot of fun during these past few decades.
Bob and I are not experts in pasture management, we’re lousy gardeners, and our animal husbandry skills leave a lot to be desired. But we are gritty, foolish and joyful. And when it comes to making this life …or any life work, I think it counts for a lot. As a send off for this year’s podcast season, I’d like to explore those three attributes
GRIT: Ok, you already know the story about what happened to me at the county fair. And while most farmers have long been familiar with the concept, Dr. Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at University of Pennsylvania and author of Grit, has really spearheaded the national conversation on the subject, exploring how talent, or aptitude, often has very little to do with success in life. What really counts is passion and perseverance; the willingness to take the knocks and hardships, and to get up and keep going. Or, as Woody Allen once said, 80 percent of success in life is just showing up.
Now, anyone can just show up to do chores, to go to the farmers market, to sit down at the desk and pay bills. But farming, I’ve learned, requires a lifetime of investment to recognize the returns, and it’s easy to be angry for a lot of that time.
It’s easy to be angry because land is expensive, taxes are expensive, insurance is expensive, vets are expensive, labor is either exhausting or expensive (or both), and marketing is time-consuming. It’s easy to be angry that this nation’s cheap food culture means that most of the population, even though they now give lip service to the idea of local food, don’t really want to surrender the convenience and affordability of big grocery stores and pay small local farmers for the true cost of our food. They will fall for the convenience and price points of corporate greenwashing that uses marketing to tell the story of earth-honoring family farm values, but that ultimately hides the truth of how they produce food, then externalizes all the costs that small farms like ours have to absorb.
And there have been moments over the past 24 years where I have literally fallen to the ground, pounding my fists like a baby, crying about all of this: that the cards are stacked against us in such a way that there’s no reasonable path forward..And if it means there’s no way forward, then the way of life is threatened, the land is threatened, and our food security is threatened…
This is a very dark place for a farmer to hang out.
I used to scream about these facts to anyone who would listen. Until the day came when I realized they were poisoning me.
It isn’t that they aren’t true. They are frighteningly true.
But equally true is the fact that, well, we’ve got ourselves are truly fascinating problem.
And we all know that it wasn’t my aptitude that called me to this vocation.
It was passion. And the passion wasn’t for picking through sheep turds looking for worms under a microscope.
The passion was for the problem. It’s a puzzle that intrigues Bob and me. We talk about it over morning coffee, we talk about it during Sunday dinner with our family, we talk about it over cocktail hour. The problem pulls me out of bed each morning before the sun comes up, just to work on it. Sometimes I work on it through what I produce in my cafe kitchen, sometimes with bookkeeping, sometimes with marketing, sometimes with research and writing. But it’s not the rosy glow of success that pulls me out of bed each morning. It’s the intrigue of all the problems we’ve yet to solve…
And that leads me to one of the key attributes of how we’ve solved many problems:
Trait number 2:
We’re foolish.
If you’re at all familiar with tarot cards, you’ll recognize The Fool. It’s the first card in the major arcana. The fool doesn’t know what he’s getting into. That can be a dangerous thing. It can also be a beautiful thing. When we mock someone, we call them the fool. The one who is easily duped.
But the fool is also giddy with possibility. He doesn’t judge. He is open to all options. He isn’t stuck in what has become a very dangerous habit in farming:
Doing something because it has always been done that way.
Those of you who aren’t into tarot might be into Zen Buddhism. Here, we can see the fool represented as beginner’s mind. The beginner’s mind is one that is not yet jaded. As the famous Zen Monk Shunryu Suzuki once explained, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
I would like to pretend that a lifetime of concerted meditation is what enabled Bob and me to develop this attribute. But it’s probably a result of our lack of aptitude. Since we lacked aptitude, we didn’t fully buy into the accepted norms of farming and business. We questioned everything. We had to learn everything the hard way. Sometimes, that meant we were slow to grasp critical concepts…like, why do we have to balance the checkbook against the Quickbooks again? Or, can’t the chickens figure out how to go in on their own at night? Or, no…that sheep wouldn’t get it’s head caught in there….Or, surely turkeys must have some survival instincts, right? Or, if I build a website, folks will just show up and give me business. I don’t have to do any search engine optimization or marketing.
But it also left us questioning some really important assumptions, too, like:
Why do farmers think that working very very hard is the only path toward self-respect? What would happen if we worked less?
And that led me to start searching for answers that were far outside of agriculture. I connected with Dr. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest: Why you get more done when you work less. He taught me that the resting brain is actually active. It switches to a default mode network, 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”(p.35).
Basically, when 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 network activates in the regions of their resting brains. There are higher levels of connectivity across certain areas, and certain parts of those areas stay engaged once they switch to a concentration mode. So, basically, the resting brain is nearly as energetic as the engaged brain. And while that doesn’t mean the chicken brooder gets shoveled out any faster, it does mean that rest helps us be more creative. It helps us problem solve more effectively. I’ve learned that the best way to solve a cash flow problem isn’t to keep staring at my accounting software, but to go out for a walk. The way we navigated out of the processing bottleneck that happened during Covid was by sitting in the woods for hours at a time, which resulted in us completely changing our marketing strategies to a variety of CSA options that our customers wound up preferring.
Seeing how rest made us work smarter led us to change how we operate the farm. No one works full time. EVERYONE is a part timer. It reduces injury, enables everyone to work on their personal passions, makes it easier to fill in when someone has to be out of work, and allows us to be much happier and healthier on the job. It also leads us to creative problem solving. We problem-solve like true fools.
For example, when we wanted to expand the farm business and we couldn’t afford to buy more land because we couldn’t compete with the real estate market; for a fraction of the cost of another farm, we opted instead to buy the town’s post office/former firehouse building and create Sap Bush Cafe.
The experts said the cafe wasn’t viable. It was located in an area with no foot traffic. The electric company wouldn’t allow us to have enough electricity to run it daily. The health department created all kinds of hurdles because we were on a well and not a municipal water supply.
But fools think differently. We thought the cafe was perfect because it was way cheaper than buying another farm. It played into an area where Bob and I have strong aptitude – the kitchen. And rather than stretching ourselves to build our sales by driving farther and farther afield to more exhausting farmers markets, we gambled the area was beautiful enough and the food from Sap Bush and the other local farms would be delicious enough, that people would be willing to make the drive.
When they said we could only be open one day a week, well, we realized that too was a gift. More rest!
When the pandemic shut the cafe down, we used paint, spit and polish to create the honor store, so people could freely access our our farm products day and night. We used our food distributors to help us build it out to become our hamlet’s only 24 hour self-serve grocery. We eventually re-opened the cafe, but the honor store kept going, because it saved us labor, increased convenience for the customers and improved our bottom line.
Being foolish helps us think outside the box. It keeps us open to learning new things in fresh ways. And it has helped our family to perpetually express the last attribute I want to talk to you about today.
We are joyful.
I toyed around with this week’s story a lot; trying to figure out whether I should talk about being joyful first, or last, or not at all. Going through what we’re going through right now, it feels almost sacrosanct to explore joy, to admit to joy…even when we are going through sad and scary times, as we’re experiencing with Mom.
Because it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing, ya know? Like, rural community life, the farms, the fields, the stone walls, the fresh food, the streams and mountains, and good health…they all make us joyful. And that joy makes us passionate. And that passion gives us grit. And the grit gives us the strength to keep jumping up each time we get knocked down, and to keep thinking of new ways to solve problems. And we do that by being fools with beginner’s mind…
Or you could say that our grit and foolishness enabled us to make a life where we could be joyful. No matter what we face.
It’s all true.
But here’s what’s more important to remember.
Whether we start with it or whether we end with it, joy is something we work at.
Because it’s easy, especially as farmers, famous for over-working and for our grit, to be obsessive about our work. It’s easy to push ourselves to utter exhaustion, to neglect our spouses and our children and our friends and community, and to assume moral superiority while we drive them away in favor of labor.
It’s easy to be angry and outraged about the injustices of our food system: the high costs we face, the low pay.
It’s easy to be distraught as life hands us illness and injury and loss.
These are all true inevitabilities we face.
But it’s only a part of the story.
Bob and I have learned that when we practice joy, mindfully making time for the pleasures that our very unique lives allow – by sitting down to a good meal with friends and loved ones, by making time for the things that we relish – whether knitting, or lingering with Mom and Dad over a cuppa, or laughing uproariously with friends at a potluck, or reading or making something with our hands, or playing music, or camping, or swimming or resting beside the wood stove in the stillness of winter, we recognize the full wealth portfolio of our vocation.
Farmers still make up only 2 percent of the population. And those of us who make it our vocations will never live like the richest one percent.
And who’d want to, when we can be the richest two percent?
There is very little that the richest one percent can buy that will give them more joy than we get to experience in our lives — from the birth of a new creature, to feasting, to the opportunities to love and play, to the rich friendships we enjoy with our customers, and the deep pleasure that comes from sitting down to quietly celebrate the ecstasy that follows a day’s hard and worthwhile work.
And that joy, like the grit and the foolishness, has brought us back to this work, day in and day out.
It has done more than that.
It is something that Bob and I have passed along to our daughters. And they share the work, and the pleasures, with us.
And thankfully, quite astoundingly, through the grit, the foolishness and the joy, something miraculous happened.
Mom and Dad’s aptitude skipped a generation.
These girls love their music and they love sewing and fashion…
But they also vaccinate the sheep and perform the FAMACHA check for parasites. They protect me from the menacing worms. They handle the lambing, castrate the pigs, load animals on the truck and pack the orders.
And Dad, well, he eventually got used to my lack of aptitude when it came to livestock husbandry. Soon after that interview in the newspaper was published, he became an ardent fan of my sheep costumes at the fair each August. He remembers all of them – the year I dressed the sheep as Olympic track athletes, as George Bush, as Bill Clinton, as army infantrymen and, of course, the bikini-clad bathing beauties (they were spokes models for the BAAAAhamas). And when it came to showmanship, he came to accept that I would pretty much always lose. “Someone needs to bring up the bottom, Shannon,” he used to say to me. “And no one does it quite like you.”
Until one August morning, when there was a new judge at the fair. He made every kid in the show ring swap sheep.
And that year, coddled sheep were handed off to strangers and they started running wild. Nearly every kid lost control of their animal.
I said nearly every kid.
That’s the year I was presented with the trophy as grand champion showman.
My whites were still dirty.
I was still a sweaty mess. But dang if I didn’t know how to handle a sheep that wanted to bolt.
“If I had to choose one person here who might have a future in farming,” the judge said that August, “It would be this young lady. She just doesn’t let go.”
So that’s how I’ll leave you this season. My family has some tough stuff ahead of us. This last episode is as much for me as it is for you, a reminder of the things that got us through the last quarter century, and that will see us through the next quarter century:: go forward with beginners mind. Learn all you can and don’t let the way that it has always been done be what defines your future. Remember to be joyful.
And no matter what, don’t let go.
Sources
Grit
Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016).
Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginners Mind: 50th Anniversary Edition (Boulder: Shambhala, 2020).
Soojung-Kim, Alex. Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
If you enjoyed this, please share this podcast with friends & family to get the ideas to spread. Better still, you can thank me for the season’s recordings and help make the magic happen again next year for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes. Or, if it’s easier, you can also donate to support the podcast by sending a check to Shannon Hayes, ℅ Sap Bush Hollow Farm, 832 W. Fulton Rd, West Fulton, NY 12194.
And that’s a really important thing to do, because all of this— the podcast, the blog, the books and the creative recharging that happens over fall and winter— are a result of the support of my patrons on Patreon. This podcast operates much like public radio. It is freely available to all, made possible by the gifts from our patrons. And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Sarah from Strigidae Farm in Australia and Carla Clark. Thank you, folks! I couldn’t do it without you!
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