18 September 2008

Endive, Fennel, Garlic, Lettuce, Melon, Onions, Peppers, Jalapeno or Cherry Bomb hot pepper, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes, Dill or thyme

I understand that some of you mistook last week’s update for a letter of resignation.  A Letter of Resignation of the formal sort, that is.  Most of my newsletters express a certain degree of informal resignation—of rueful despair, fatalistic anguish, gloomy acceptance of the imperfect nature of things.  But I have yet to send out a note saying I quit.

I confess I thought of quitting on several occasions this season.  Particularly, early on when it seemed I might never find any workers.  For a number of years now I have found workers—and mostly remarkably good ones—by posting a listing on a national database run by the USDA.  This year the listing elicited a single enquiry about the job—from a guy in his 50s who has been on something of a search for himself the past few decades.  It seemed unlikely to me he would find himself here among the weeds so he didn’t. 

The national listing having failed, I posted the job locally everywhere I could think of and did get responses. I arranged an interview with a guy from Glens Falls who e-mailed that morning to say he was running 45 minutes late.  It has been a long 45 minutes.  I got an e-mail from a woman in Albany who was very interested until she remembered that she didn’t have any way of getting here.  An RPI graduate student almost came for an interview, but got tired on the way to the car and canceled (I’m serious).  I got an e-mail from a man who needed farming experience for his upcoming Peace Corps stint, which sounded promising until he got around to mentioning that he works nights so he would not want to get to the farm before 4 pm.  I interviewed a woman who had worked on farms before and wants to grow her own food.  She was so promising I hired her, and I bet she would have been great.  But a week later she discovered, to her surprise that she was pregnant with twins and could not farm.  I hired a Skidmore student who had done landscaping and seemed pleasantly enthusiastic about farm work.  She would probably have been good too, but she took another job—a small detail I had to coax from her the day she was supposed to start.  She really did mean to tell me, but she had been so busy.

I took out an ad in the local Free Press, which resulted almost immediately in lots of messages from potential workers.  I got the feeling most of them had called from a pay phone in a bar.  I set up interviews with the ones who displayed some level competence—such as remembering to leave their names on the answering machine.  The first six never showed up.  I was so grateful to the seventh for actually making it to the farm I almost hired him.  He seemed like a nice guy.  A nice round guy.  Spherical, actually. It was not clear that he would survive farm work.  

It was not clear that I would survive farm work—not if I failed to find workers.  I was just looking for a few able bodied people with an interest in agriculture and some sense of responsibility.  I was getting an extended lesson in the rate of incompetence.  I get the feeling it is rising.  I am not which depressed me more: the applicants who lacked all job seeking (let alone job holding) skills or the ones who had every reason to know better and still could not be bothered to do the simplest of tasks correctly.  

Not that I was going to give up on the season just because we have a permanent underclass or an unsatisfactory notion of how to behave.  The fact that a lot of necessary tasks were not getting done had more to do with.  I knew that at some point I would fall so far behind I could never catch up.  But the thought that I would have, every year, to look for workers from amongst this pool of unsatisfactory candidates did not encourage me. 

However, I did not quit then and I did not quit last week.  It has been, for me, a notably unsatisfactory season, and not simply because I spent much of July on my back waiting for the pain to subside.  We had more rain in the middle of the summer than this farm, with its heavy soil and high water table, can bear.  We lost a lot of vegetables to that weather, including at least half the winter squash and untold numbers of carrots.  Most of the workers I finally found never seemed particularly engaged by the work and did it in almost total silence.  A good conversation can make nearly any farm task easier; the mute company of people counting the minutes until quitting time does not.   

But here we are in September, with decent weather, three happy workers (though one will leave, regretfully, this Friday for a job with benefits; when will we get national health care?) and some pretty well weeded fall crops (just avert your gaze from the parsnip beds).  We have piles of onions drying in the barn, 22 more rows of potatoes to dig and three rows of greenhouse tomatoes that show no sign of giving up yet (almost all of this week’s tomatoes came off those rows).  It is hardly the moment to give up.  Finishing up the season will require a lot of work (such as digging those 22 rows of potatoes), more work, given the beginning of the season and the nature of things, than I would have hoped.  But after fourteen years of farming I am, not too unhappily, resigned to that.