Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mendocino Voice. If you’d like to write your own column for The Mendocino Voice, send your idea to info@mendovoice.com.
Urgency creates extra energy to deal with the challenge at hand. Emergency and stress offer a manic power that gets things done, but there is a cost to this type of effort. The sense of urgency becomes addictive, and there evolves a tendency to manufacture urgency to experience the manic high. It’s especially true in farming, where things often are urgent, yet we often do it to ourselves with poor planning and biting off too much.
Manufactured urgency comes in many forms, and I’ve been trying to differentiate it from actual urgency to adjust my planning and preparation, and thus the way I live my life as a farmer. Water for animals and plants on hot days is urgent, a life-or-death matter. Sowing too many seeds and not having a place to plant them all is manufactured urgency that I use to push harder near the end of a long day.
It gets tricky when I look at a more meta perspective, and I start to wonder about how much of modern life is based on manufactured urgency. Bills and monetary issues feel urgent by design, as does regulatory stress from government. When I step back and reflect, I see that the urgency is made up, a systemic construct, yet the consequences are real; if I don’t pay the bills, we can’t farm. I wonder about the ways in which capitalism is designed to keep us in a sense of manufactured urgency, worried and working too hard, running on frenetic stress energy.
I’ve been paying attention to the difference in how I farm when I feel like I’m working on the task I’m supposed to be working on, versus when there is something else I feel like I should be doing. That feeling of needing to be in two places at once is detrimental to my mental health, so I’m striving to get better about scheduling, delegating and setting reasonable expectations so that I can focus on my task and do it without cutting corners or rushing through it to get to the next thing on the list.
Part of the difficulty is that we have so many facets to our operation, so there are more chances for something to come up that needs immediate attention. Water lines break, livestock get out or need to be moved, deferred maintenance always catches up at the most inopportune times. Then there are the human aspects, meetings, gatherings, joyful occasions that I am striving to build into my expectations so that I enjoy them instead of feeling stressed about the work I’m not getting done.
This year is one for broadening my perspective so that I’m not so laser-focused on work, striving to craft a sense of self that remembers to take time for the many important things in life beyond farming. It feels good to be supported in this goal by a great team of people as we work towards a cooperative and thriving community.
I love the work we do, and I love the ways in which we keep it fun, laughing and joking through the inevitable difficulty of the efforts we make to grow food, flowers, herb and raise animals. The difference between joy and drudgery is all in the mind, so we remind ourselves that Grandpa always said, “Let us be happy in our work.” The joy comes naturally because we love working with plants and animals, but I’ve begun to pay more and more attention to that sense of manufactured urgency.
It’s a weird feeling to find myself missing that sense of urgency, feeling low energy because I don’t have the manic drive of too-much-on-the-plate pushing me to excel. It’s a paradox that the work can feel harder because it’s going so well that everything is smooth and the stress levels are down. Task lists that would have once been insurmountable are getting checked off each week with increasing ease, and I look back over the years and realize how far we’ve come, that we’re getting good at what we do.
Being adaptable and able to make changes on the fly is a key part of farming well. Knowing that the picture for the week is a puzzle of interlocking pieces and jobs that can fit together in multiple ways keeps me excited and enjoying the challenge. As July begins we’ll plant the last of the outdoor cannabis, the last summer squash, and the next round of ever-constant salad mixes, greens and root crops.
This week we’ll slaughter birds, leaving only one batch of chickens and the turkeys still on pasture. I moved the laying hens to summer quarters, and the sheep and pigs shift onto fresh sections every ten days or so. Things that once seemed daunting become easier, and the work always gets done, so I try to be mindful of that sense of urgency, asking myself if it’s real or if I’m creating it. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!