TL;DR

As the season comes to a close, there are many projects around the fields and in the greenhouses, but we harvested tatsoi hearts and florets of kale before calling it a day.

No Apologies, Please

It’s a common saying in the Western world that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. This simply means that rather than asking if you can do something, just do it first, and if anyone objects you can apologize later.

I’ve never felt comfortable with this approach. It’s often used to justify deceit, opacity, and green. There are too many systemic dysfunctions in the world that blatantly ignore the value of permission, particularly of those most often who simply don’t have the opportunity or authority to have a say. Most of the time, people who didn’t ask permission in the first place also don’t ask for forgiveness. These are are autocrats, executives, carnival barkers, karens, bullies, dictators, and thieves.

Rawls put it well with a thought experiment called the “Veil of Ignorance” (or also often referred as “Original position”), and while not explicitly stated as a problem of permission, the hypothesis infers that individuals grant permission via their choices:

Imagine a hypothetical state where rational people are about to design their society’s rules. A “veil of ignorance” covers everyone, hiding personal details like race, gender, ethnicity, religion, social class, wealth, intelligence, talents, personal goals or beliefs about the “good life”. Because they don’t know their future status, individuals behind the veil would choose principles that protect everyone, lest they end up in the worst possible position.

To choose “principles that protect everyone” is not selfless…it’s one of the very best examples of selfishness that exists, to play it safe when you don’t know which end of the stick you’d be on. So not building permission in, designing forgiveness in even if it must exist to go afterwards, or simply never asking for it at all…these are choices of people who know for sure that they will never have to worry about being behind a veil of ignorance. Authority that does not give a choice also takes away the need for permission entirely.

This is why I say, don’t wait for an apology, something that is not ever likely to come. Even if it does, most of the time it’s false or at the very least permission for a behavior was not agreed to in the first place. Time is your most precious resource so trust the instinct to move on when it’s likely to be wasted.

Well Warranting the Wage

During just about every harvesting task I performed this year, I thought about how we might estimate the value of it compared to other tasks. Jamie has said that it’s been interesting to see how my analytical mind works while on the farm, and I’ve gained a greater appreciation around timing communication of the more notable insights. At least part of my mind is very analytical, for instance in the case of harvesting the last of the tatsoi hearts today:

We got about 15 plastic clamshell container’s worth of tatsoi hearts out of this and these will sell for $5 each, which means we created ~$65-75 of value in total and ~ $35-40 profit if we sell them all. Not counting the cost of the clamshells, the time cost of sowing this row originally, or the opportunity cost of harvesting something else, all of which are negligible anyway, each unit cost us about $2 to produce today. Now, it is very late season and summer harvesting is much more profitable, but it was only a small amount of time in total spent on this bed, some of the last remaining produce this year.

For Tatsoi hearts:

• Cost per unit: $2.00
• Sale price per unit: $5.00
• Estimated “shrink” (otherwise not sold): 2 units of 15
• Likely revenue: $65
• Likely profit: $35

Boiling this down to a monetary figure is nice, but it’s a number that doesn’t really capture the reasons for the work, specifically the worsening weather conditions and dwindling sellable produce moving into the winter. We did it because other tasks will wait and this last bit of produce won’t. So with all that in mind, I ventured an unsolicited suggestion that since the stalks of kale are mostly done but there are still sweet and tender florets on the growing tips, we speed through a harvest of those as “loose leaf petite kale”…and so we did:

This resulted in around 15 units as well. We will likely sell this at $5 per unit, but even if we sold it at $4, the profit breakdown would be:

For Petite kale:

• Cost per unit: $0.67
• Sale price per unit: $4.00
• Estimated “shrink” (otherwise not sold): 3 units of 15
• Likely revenue: $48
• Likely profit: $38-60 (depending on the sale price per unit)

The fact is that all these numbers are estimates and you never know for certain how it will go until you try, and the petite kale packs are just an experiment. If people really like them, this may add “baby kale” to the farm’s repertoire of products and planting schedule, maybe not.

Does this experiment profit me personally? Not financially, and certainly not on this side of the aforementioned veil, but in terms of non-monetary returns:

• Time-spend on two different tasks to develop intuition
• Successfully suggesting a low-risk activity and producing a product
• Discussion with a farm owner about prioritization and experimentation
• Future research on ‘baby kale’ varieties available from Johnny’s Selected Seeds

All Efforts Are Portfolio Items

What one spends their time on can be thought of as an investment portfolio. The payoff isn’t always monetary…coaches invest time in their players, and farmers invest time in their crops. But everyone invests in things that involve other people in some way, even if it’s transactional and not directly through face-to-face interactions. Time is the most valuable resource we have, but it’s not always clear what the most useful expenditures of time are, so finding an approach to this challenge is something each of us must do for ourselves.

I mentioned this to Jamie while working together today, not because I don’t think he already knows this, but because I wanted him to know that I think like this. I also think it’s important to paint a picture of something and let other people respond and react to it in order to learn from their perspectives. As analytical as all this thinking is, it’s not how many other people think through the same problem, and I value understanding different approaches too.

Similarly, the time spent with particular team members can be thought of as investments, both in their growth and your own. A coach must spend more time with players who actually put the time and effort in, follow instructions, and earn their next learnings over those who fail to do these things. We talked about this too and I hope that next year, however my career path bends, I still have the luxury of investing my time in this crew and my farming community.

Prioritizing Even After Harvest Season

Throughout the season, I’ve been exercising my growing knowledge and experiences by anticipating what we should do on any given day. This has helped me intentionally develop my own intuition and mental map of how to prioritize tasks around the farm given the conditions, resources and time constraints. The most interesting moments come when what I anticipate isn’t what happens, giving rise to reconsideration over what I didn’t know or what I haven’t experienced before.

One thing that seems to occur regardless of season is to be set on a task, such as harvesting or weeding or project work where there’s either a time and/or volume target, then we stop before we reach that target. At first I thought we might just be going too slow or that there was another priority that arose because of weather conditions or needs elsewhere, which does sometimes happen. Over the past few months though I realize that sometimes Jamie needs the crew to spend some time doing something to know precisely how hard that thing is given weed pressure or other factors before we can make a decision to do more or move to another task.

Sometimes you have to spend a little of your resources to know if spending more is worth it or not.

An example from today is that we took up some of the landscaping fabric both in the field and in the new greenhouse. The particular beds in the field that have fabric already three years old are sometimes easy and sometimes not, depending on how many staples were used, how degraded the fabric is, and how compacted or frozen the soil beneath it is at the end of its season. We simply don’t know enough to decide to estimate the whole task until we try a little bit, even if it’s something that’s been done many times before.

We also took up one row of the fabric on the walkways between tomato growing rows in the new greenhouse. One of them took two people about 15 minutes, same with taking up the 12 lines of drip tubing, so this was a fast and relatively weather condition free project that could be finished at a later time. This informs a later decision as the weather shifts outside quickly on some days, like this one where it was 40 degrees fahrenheit at 8am but the cold winds brought it down to 20 degrees by 11am even with full sun.

Prioritizing My Own Experiments

I’ve been developing this plan for a few months now, starting a business in town that helps farms with their excess produce and myself make a living without having to go back to a single employer salary-dependent job market. Even though the fields are frozen, I still have work to do. I’ve been collecting feedback from people about my home goods and which ones are the winners. I’m getting certifications and hunting down conversations around licensing and permits required to operate.

Each of these tasks are important in the road to launching the business, but some more than others take time and the right timing. I just scheduled an early meeting with the local health inspector to discuss the business plan and get their input on the proposed operations. There’s a lot I don’t know, but in this case I’d rather ask permission rather than forgiveness.

I need this early feedback to understand what to focus on next…do I need to do retail or is my wholesale model the way to go? Do I even need a commercial kitchen or can my home kitchen suffice? Though I have done much of the online research to have a sense for answers to these questions, I won’t know for sure until I sit down with someone in local authority to get definitive answers and thoughts about how to proceed.

AI Summary from Field Notes

Okay, apparently just because I mentioned that the future plan for the greenhouse was to till it, today the LLM-driven results clearly missed the time-dependent nature of the comments, a trend in many of these posts. This winter I will take a few days to figure out how best to overcome this issue because it is very likely I’ll be blogging again next year about this farm stuff and the automation-augmented process to churn these posts out in less than 24 hours is second-important only to my own determination to do so.

Summary