If I had to pinpoint a start for the latest battle, I guess I’d have to say it was the plum pudding.  I sent an email last week to Mom, going over the menu for Christmas day, specifically asking her to make my Holiday Pudding recipe that doesn’t call for any grains.  She called me an hour later.

“So I’m going to do my mother’s Christmas Pudding recipe.  It only calls for a 1/2 cup of flour.”

“Flour is the problem, no matter how little you use!  It makes Bob’s blood sugar levels go nuts!  Please use my recipe.  We’ve used it for the last three years.  Everyone loves it!”

“Well, I don’t have that recipe.”

“It’s on page 47 of Long Way on a Little.  Remember?  The last book I wrote?  I gave you a copy.”

“I didn’t know there was a pudding recipe in there.”

“Well, if you read the books your daughter wrote, you might be aware of it.”

“Ok, well, never mind.  What did you think of that email I sent you?”

“What email?”

“Well, if you read your mother’s emails, you might know what I’m talking about.”

I clicked open my inbox and scanned through the last few days’ messages until I saw the one from her with “Internship” in the subject line.  I do seem to have a blind eye toward such messages.  I sighed heavily.  “What about it?”

“What do you think?”  I read the email she had forwarded me from some potential intern applicants.

“I don’t think anything.  Didn’t we agree to stop accepting interns?”

“But this proposal is different.”

“They’re all different.”

“Well, we could really use the help.”

“What’s wrong with the help you’re getting now?”  In addition to Bob’s full-time presence down there during the growing season, we have a hired man, Dave, who comes in a few days each week.

“Why are you getting so defensive?  We don’t know what’s going to happen with Bob next season.”

“He’s having a hernia operation!  He isn’t dying!”

“You know, every time I bring up the idea of an internship, you just get so defensive!”

“Of course I get defensive!  You think every new intern is going to be a silver bullet, and then six weeks later, I have to listen to you whine about all the problems you’re having with them.  I thought we agreed we were done with this?!”

“See, there you go getting defensive again.  Next thing, you’re going to hang up on me.  You can’t be defensive about these things, Shannon.  Your father and I are not getting any younger.  We need the help.”

“Can you name one thing that isn’t getting done?”

“This is about your father’s back, and Bob’s hernia.  We’re all aging.”

“How is having an intern going to stop Dad from having back trouble?  Do you think he’s going to lie around on his back for the rest of his life?  You’ve had two capable men assisting you on the farm all year.    You’ve got them for next year, and they know what’s going on.  Why would you want to fool around with trying to train someone who is going to leave after 15 weeks?”

“You don’t know what kind of complications may arise  from your husband’s surgery!  And you are just being SO defensive!”

“Ok, I’ve heard enough.  I don’t have to listen to this anymore.”  I did hang up on her.

Round two began when she sent me another email.  She had looked up the holiday pudding recipe in my cookbook.  She agreed to make it.  I accepted the peace offering, and wrote back:

Sorry to bite your head off about the internships, but I feel like we’d be dumping our best efforts at a permanent labor solution in favor of a temporary one.  Bob and Dave enjoy the work and they count on it.  Dad hates managing employees, and neither Bob nor Dave require hands-on management.   We went through a big learning curve this year, figuring out how to make the farm work without interns, and now that we are in the swing of things, it seems like we’d be moving ourselves backwards.

Then Dad entered the discussion.  He wrote back this time, arguing that bringing on interns would make the farm more resilient, more sustainable.  We could let them develop their own enterprises, he suggested, as a way to subsidize their salaries. Meanwhile, Bob and Dave would still be handling day-to-day farm work.

Well, I had a lot to say to that one.  After going over my arguments with Bob, I sat down and drafted a three page letter, outlining my concerns about our farm’s payroll expenses, about our less-than-perfect employee management skills, about my worries that we had not yet transferred all needed knowledge about managing the business to the next generation.  I wrote that we shouldn’t be focusing on other’s educational goals until we’d met our own.  I wrote more about my worries that this would only increase our on-farm stress, that it would not help Dad to heal, much less prevent him from further injury.

I didn’t send it.  I decided to sleep on it.   I got up early the next morning and wrote simply, “I still don’t agree we need interns.  But you are right.  There is no harm in exploring further.”  Maybe the new applicants could be a silver bullet.   Was it my right to shoot down all possibilities before exploring further? 

Round Three:  Mom and Dad called again.  This time, I got on the phone with my father.  

“Dad, I agree with you about resilience and sustainability.  And I agree we should talk to the interns.  But the problem I see with bringing on employees lies with you.  You are a doer. You assign people to do things.  And then, instead of  resting, you try to be efficient and go off on your own to get something else done.  Then you get hurt.  If you are going to hire people to replace your physical labor, then you have to apply yourself to something else to engage your mind and rest your body.  You can only sit on the porch doing nothing for so long before you get restless and feel the need to be productive.”

Dad was quiet.  After a second he said, “You’re right.  I’ve always done that.  I guess that’s something we need to figure out.”

There is a lot we need to figure out.  

The next day, Bob and I go down to the farm.  He slices bacon while I pull meat boxes to be ready for our holiday open house the next day.  I have to do it myself this time.  Right now, for the next three months, I am the only person in the family who can physically lift any substantial weight.  And as I go back and forth between the freezers and the house, my mind turns.  “Are we sustainable?  If we are down to one little woman doing all the lifting, am I overlooking something?  What is the key to our sustainability?  Where the heck is the dang silver bulllet?”

This quest to have a “sustainable farm” is never-ending.  We look to others, hoping to find models to replicate, recipes for success.  But there is nothing.  Because farm sustainability is a messy equation that gets worked out between the ecosystem, the individual people who are within it, and the gritty economics.  I think about the silver bullet.  This time, my family wondered if it could be found in interns.  Other times, we have wondered if it can be found in a new enterprise, a specialty breed, a heritage variety, or in a labor-saving device.  We have considered all of them.  Heck, we don’t just consider them.  I begin laughing to myself as I load a bin of ground beef to take into the house.    We fight over them.  We email, we call, we hang up on each other, we storm off, we slam doors.  We make accusations, we use invectives, we say hurtful things.

And then we come back and try again.

And again.

And again.

And as I think about this, I realize something.  Maybe that is the silver bullet, the key that will keep a family farm running.   We fight.  But we never give up on each other.  And then we keep trying.

I finish loading the meat into bins.  We are ready to open for business for our Christmas meat sale.  I wonder quietly when Round Four will begin.  Hopefully, it will be after I’ve had a chance to enjoy my holiday pudding.

p style=”text-align: center;”>This post was written by Shannon Hayes, whose blog, RadicalHomemakers.com and GrassfedCooking.com, is supported by the sale of her books, farm products and handcrafts. If you like the writing and want to support this creative work, please consider visiting the blog’s farm and book store.

To view Ula’s Greeting Cards and support Saoirse and Ula’s (Shannon and Bob’s kids) entrepreneurial ventures, click here. 

Feel free to click on any of the links below to learn about Shannon’s other book titles: