The pendulum

Some springs, it comes early. The heat. The drought. I look up to the sky, to the sun, to the few fluffs of vapor.

“So, this is the way it’s going to be then”? I ask.

Of course there is no real answer to this question. When farming, you swing from paradise to apocalypse and back again within very short spans of time. You have to be comfortable with both, indifferent almost.

“You do what you need to do”, I say again to the sky, “and I’ll do what I need to do.”

The sun shines hot. I’ll take that as a reply.

We’re not in the apocalypse yet. We are in apocalypse prevention. It’s hard to say if there will be a paradise shift in the 10 day. We pick up the sections of irrigation after a round of watering. We move them 4 beds over. Starting point: the freshly irrigated muddy utopia of salad and arugula. Destination: the sun baked terra cotta hellscape of wilted beets. We will render them utopic, these poor roots. 6 hours under the wobblers will bring them back from the brink.

Pushing back on Momma Nature is made easier as we live, in this particular region, in a world of water; some of the cleanest and most abundant in the country. It’s a rarity, this place. If this farm was located over the Ogallala Aquifer, I would be wracked with guilt. But we are not there. We are here.

As things are now, if the summer decides to bake us mercilessly, we will survive, one little temporary patch of paradise at a time…

One a related note, one more on the apocalyptic side: In the coming weeks, I may ask for you to take some easy actions to help keep us with a little situation. I would like to preserve what we have here, this current reality in which the sun beats down with all the harshness of it’s worse days, and we have the water to feed you still.

As mentioned before, a large hog farrowing operation is being proposed in our area. One that would open the path for others, quite probably putting farms like this out of business due to their pollution and destruction of the waterways.

In the next week or two, I and other farms will be sending out a letter that you can edit, sign and send to officials in the WI area. I know many of you are not WI residents. I don’t care. You eat from here, and it affects you. The applications for this facility have been submitted, and we need them to be rejected. Rejected for the good of local foods and good farmers, for the St. Croix River Valley, and because it’s 2021 and we shouldn’t be doing this crap anymore.

Please look for this letter in the coming weeks. It’s important.

For now, the sun will bake us. Bring it.