Perseverance

I’ve been thinking about this word the past month because I think this personality trait is required for any of us to be a farmer. The definition of perseverance according to Cdictionary.com, “steady persistence in a course of action, a purpose, a state, etc., especially in spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement.”

And the definition from Merriam-Webster… “continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition : the action or condition or an instance of persevering : steadfastness”

Why do I think this personality trait is required for a farmer? A farmer, particularly on the small highly diversified farm, continually encounters challenges when dealing with nature. The challenges of the season will impact production to where it never goes PERFECTLY and ACCORDING to plan, or for that matter, sometimes not even CLOSE to one’s plan. So that in and of itself requires perseverance.  Not to mention, most farmers I know work long hours during the season and I don’t know any farmers that work under a 40 hour week.  Keep in mind, many farmers do have fewer hours in the winter, which makes up for many of the long hours worked in the summer.

I am wondering if one is born with this character trait? Does one learn this from their surroundings and life experiences? Can this character trait be taught by our parents, family and friends, and if so how does one teach it?  At what age should this trait be learned and how do you know if one has this personality trait and to what degree?

Carl’s quote is “Any strength taken to excess can be a weakness.”. In our case, perseverance might just be a weakness because we think we can farm, harvest trees for a farm vacation cabin rental, saw the trees for the farm vacation rental cabin and finally build the cabin using timber framing. If we didn’t have such a strong “perseverance” in our personality trait we would simply stick build the cabin with purchased lumber and we would probably already be earning additional income from farm vacations.

This season alone I can think of several instances where this personality trait became a weakness. One case is when I harvested and processed cilantro for the CSA early in the season. It wasn’t good quality and was very labor intensive to make bunches but I thought the CSA should have cilantro. And… Just a few weeks ago Carl and I spent an hour picking green beans, that were mostly eaten by the bean beetles, just so the CSA could enjoy a few beans. (Beans haven’t been growing well this season.) We should have mowed down the beans and included winter squash in the share. Another example was when a critter ate the beets, but I wanted to include these in the CSA share so I harvested as many as possible that were not eaten by the critter and included those in the CSA share. I am certain there are more instances, too numerous to mention, where this personality trait has been taken to a weakness.  Just last week we spent an hour hoeing beans, with many already eaten by a ground hog, so the possibility of harvesting any is slim.

I can think of a couple situations this year where perseverance paid off…. Our winter squash plants didn’t have good roots and the fungus gnat larva were beginning to overtake the plants. We had contemplated just composting the plants and starting again. Making that decision would have probably set the squash so far out on the production schedule that the squash wouldn’t have set fruit and matured before downy mildew or frost killed the plants. So we decided to transplant the unhealthy plants, even though it took a lot of labor to put down the plastic and mulch to crop, but our yield was GREAT.  It probably would have been better with healthy plants but we have enough yield for the CSA and market customers. In addition, our summer squash plants had the same issue so we hand transplanted a bed and we harvested squash from that for both our CSA and market customers. The yield wasn’t as high compared to healthy plants but at least we had summer squash.

What have we been up to? We’ve been pulling up landscape fabric from the fields where the Strawberries and Winter Squash were planted, rolling up drip tape, pulling out our overhead irrigation pipe, mowing down spent crops, disking the fields to break down spent crops and weeds, hoeing crops, transplanting additional crops, placing row cover to protect our fall crops from the flea beetles,  hand pulling crab grass that has been taking over our fall fields, harvesting and packing CSA shares, delivering CSA shares and selling produce at market. I guess that is enough for a month!