Independence Day

We are now deep in another summer.

Our corn ain’t knee-high today.  Our beans have mostly been pruned back by voracious hares, and our zesty greens crops have been blighted in succession by too much heat, too much water and now too many bugs.  Our peas didn’t do so well either–too slow to germinate (those that bothered germinating).  We quit on most of the peas while our time and material losses were minimal.

And yet, despite our ever-growing list of things that aren’t working, this is another great summer.  Today, I am celebrating the independent spirit of other small American farmers.  They are people like us that know what it’s like to fail.  Independence means the freedom to make your own decisions and the freedom to fail, and failure can be a great teacher.

Our failures this season are to be expected–the specific crops, the specific problems are not predictable, but failure is part of the bargain.  We plant everything with the hope and the dream that in so many days a rich and bountiful harvest will come in, but experience has taught us not everything works as planned.  It’s no different than life: if everything worked exactly the way we planned all the time, success would not be worth celebrating.  Sports and games are interesting to play and watch, because the outcome is unknown.  In nearly every part of our lives, it seems, the element of uncertainty adds the spice or zest.

So, we’ve failed at some things already.  Yes, failed.  Failure has such a negative odor.  Nobody wants to associated with failure.  Maybe, it’s actually too soon for me to accurately describe our less-than-desirable outcomes as failures.  Whatever we call it, we’re still optimistic about potatoes and tomatoes, root crops and flowers.  Maggie’s already planning the fall planting schedule.

For the next 4 months of markets, we’ll have more things that don’t work.  More failures.

But today is Independence Day: a day on which we honor the willingness of British subjects to try to start their own country.  They risked failure.  In fact, after the Revolution, they created a government under the Articles of Confederation that they decided they didn’t like.  So they tried again.

Thomas Jefferson hoped for a nation of small farmers, believing that a dispersed population and self-sufficient populace was more likely to reject the authoritarian impulse.  Maybe Jefferson, a tinkerer, a plantsman, and a thinker, knew that trial-and-error, a familiarity with failure, was a humbling force.  When your best-laid plans don’t work out perfectly every summer, maybe Jefferson knew you’d resist the impulse to make plans for other people.

So it’s still early this July 4th, but I’m going to get on the tractor and think of how lucky we are to live in a place in which we are free to try and fail, try and fail, and try, try again.

Justin