One of those days. Those. Days.

Something died today. Those are the hardest days. I can work straight through lunch and long after dark…no problem. Come inside, grab a bite to eat and a shower and fall asleep within seconds then bounce up to do it all again the next day.

But when something dies…well…then I don’t sleep.

I lay awake and wonder about it. Will it happen again tomorrow? Or tonight even? What can I teach the children from this?

Am I to blame? Certainly.

I should have been more attentive. But I was busy doing 10 other things, all of which were important and one thing slipped.

One chore got missed.

One routine got skipped. One job that I never do…but should ensure gets done. My oldest has his own little enterprise. Well, not anymore.

And it really is my fault. It’s not like a raccoon broke through the perimeter and went on a frenzied murderous rampage. No. This is worse.

And it really hurts.

Today I got eaten by the bar. And I’m feeling pretty low.

I have to help my son learn from this experience without letting it defeat him. He made a mistake. I made a mistake. It was a costly mistake but …well, it can happen. It does happen.

You can’t lose them if you don’t have them. We do our best. Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes, well, sometimes the bar eats you.

…learnin’ in the evening, learnin’ at supper time.

Julie is only so strong. Incredibly hot, hard-working, brilliant but not a weight lifter. Remember that line in Rocky, “Sports make you grunt and smell. Be a thinker, not a stinker.” She took that to heart.

The chicken tractors are fairly heavy and you have to use slow, controlled movements to keep from hurting a bird. I move the chicken tractors every morning before I go to work then she feeds and waters the birds and keeps them fed throughout the day. She used to try to move the tractors herself but she just isn’t strong enough. We had to learn that lesson.

The lead tractor pasture pen is slightly downhill from the others. Any rainwater that runs downhill and into/under a chicken tractor will be clean water, not carrying a river of chicken poop. That’s a big deal if you are a chicken, sitting on the ground. We work hard to make sure our chicken tractors run on contour with the hill…that means as we pull them along they move neither up or down hill. This paints a stripe of fertility across the top of the slope all in a line – a keyline, depositing fertility to benefit the entire slope and easing our burden pulling the tractors around. We had to learn this lesson.

In years past we have been up on the flat in places that don’t drain well. April showers bring April big puddles of water. There is nothing worse than checking the birds in the morning only to find them all standing and shivering in a shallow pond…a poopy water pond. It’s bad for the birds and the mud pie they create smothers all of the forage. The chickens are here to boost the forage, not to kill it and our job is to keep both livestock and forage healthy. As of this morning we had in excess of 4″ of rain in 48 hours. It has all soaked into the pasture or run off gently. It is not standing here. That’s why we chose this spot for this time. But we had to learn this lesson.

These are things I learned by doing. Because you have read this, you won’t have to stub your toe like I did. All the doing in the world is important but so is reading. And it all has to be in balance. I wrote a post some time ago making fun of myself for thinking I had the world on a string after reading a couple of farming books. There is more to farming than you can learn in a book. At some point you will be kneeling in a manure pile in the middle of a thunderstorm trying desperately to protect your livestock from something unknown, unplanned and unexpected that nobody has ever written about. That’s when school really starts. I have some acquaintances who consider themselves to be “intellectuals”. They read “important” books. Some of them wear fake glasses so they look smarter. But when it comes down to it many of them haven’t done anything…and aren’t doing anything. But work alone doesn’t fill the void either. I have read many of the “classics” too. There has to be a balance. You can lean on the experiences of others as you grow, but you will never be a farmer until you become a farmer. I hope that makes sense.

There are good ways of doing things and there are better ways of doing things. George Henderson wrote about better ways of doing things 80 years ago in England. Even though I live 4,000 miles away in a different climate in a different century I can still glean information from his lessons. So I write to share what I have learned. I read your blogs to see what you have learned. I hope I am doing a good job. I hope my sharing enables you to do a better job. If things go as planned, my kids will take our accumulated knowledge and launch further that we even aimed. But there has to be time in your day to learn. To read. To grow. And to experience.

Not all of my reading time bears fruit. Not all of my work bears fruit. But, by keeping it in balance, I feel I am giving myself the best advantage. By sharing it with you I feel I am repaying a small portion of the debt I owe to the many who stopped to give me a little information.

What have you done today? What have you read today? Have you written about it?

I am continuing to read and reflect on The Farming Ladder.

…convered a couple of acres, with old rotten straw, dumps of thatch, old implements, thistles and other rubbish. This is still far too common on many farms indicating that the farmers have more land than they deserve; they ought to be able to put it to better use than as a site for the rotting down of good straw, which should have been long since returned to the land…

SO. Yeah. I have a several places that are covered with rotting refrigerators and discarded equipment. Apparently, in George Henderson’s estimation, I have more land than I deserve.

Way to put the spurs to me, George.

Word is out. We are farmers. Yup. That’s what we are. We raise animals in a humane way and without the use of hormones or sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics. But we also grow really, really good food…getting better every year.

Do you see that those two ideas are the same…but different? Let me illustrate with two statements we hear from new customers regularly.

Chris, we just watched Food, Inc. I didn’t realize animals were treated so badly by farmers and farmers were treated so badly by Monsanto. My daughter has stopped eating. So, do you sell eggs? Are your chickens outside? How much are the eggs?

Chris, my friend X was just telling me about your eggs. He says the whites whip up like nothing he has ever seen! Can you put me on your list for a dozen? I can’t wait to try them!

From my experience (and experiences vary) the Food, Inc. viewer feels guilty. The second customer is probably more of a “foodie”. Guilt wears off quickly. The love of good food endures.

Leaving off nutrient density, everybody wants food to taste good and there’s a certain amount of that you can cover by just learning how to cook. Any mix of fresh ingredients is going to taste better than any similar mix of boxed, frozen or canned. But the next step is to find better ingredients. I promise you, pork from a hog floor and pork from a pasture smell different both when butchering and when cooking…and maybe that’s why you think you don’t like pork. There are worlds of difference drinking and making ice cream with freshly squeezed raw milk vs. pasteurized milk from the store. So when a foodie finds us for the first time they buy a dozen eggs and I usually get a text message or email or Facebook posting comparing my egg (orange, firm and tall) in a skillet next to a store bought, free range, organic, cage-free brown egg (pale yellow, limp and flat) along with a lengthy list of the merits my eggs and all the different things they cooked. The best was when a pastry chef friend took two-dozen of my eggs to an event where several chefs were working. After the event she said they all hung around to “play” with my eggs. Or when a group of sisters and old friends all came to together one weekend to bake cookies and the cookies were, apparently, the best ever. How cool is that?

These people enjoy food. Compare that to customers who arrive out of guilt. The customer who was lectured by their teen daughter about what they “should” do and, because the daughter is starving herself and the father is desperate, he buys a dozen eggs. “But a chicken is a dang chicken. It can’t be all that different.”

Obviously I am concerned about animal welfare. Remember what I said above about sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics? That is done to help animals in confinement deal with the stress of being in confinement. Allow me to illustrate. Imagine being packed into a small airport terminal with hundreds of people you don’t know…people you don’t want to know…people you don’t want to smell or touch or – GEEZ! – feel rubbing against your leg. Add to that, you are eating strange food. You can’t find a place to sit down. You need to go to the bathroom but it is closed. You are, yourself, wondering if you’ll make your connecting flight as you wait to be inspected, sorted and led down the loading chute. It is stressful. Now, imagine your flight never leaves and you are stuck in the terminal for months. In time, your health may decline. To help avoid that, you are given small doses of antibiotics in your food on a daily basis. This will help keep you on top of stress-related diseases. Does the discomfort of travel prevent you from traveling? Does this illustration keep you from eating feedlot beef? Probably not.

How about public school. You know, a 12 year sentence with people who are paid to keep the inmates from killing each other. Children who can’t perform in the gulag will be medicated into submission. I am working to evoke emotional response here, not debate the morality of compulsory education. Did you feel you angry as you read what I wrote? What do you do with that emotional response? Go ahead. Imagine yourself angry after reading that or after watching Food, Inc. Now what? How long will that feeling last? What is it you are angry about? Are you angry that I said it? Are you angry that people feel that way? Are you angry that there is some truth to Food, Inc.? Are you angry that you can’t do much about it? At some point your anger will wane. That’s just the way it is. There is little you can do about it and the kids are late for soccer.

Isn’t it better to appeal to something positive? To say, “Wow, I love to eat and those eggs are worth eating!” than to say, “Well, these eggs don’t suck as much as those.” Isn’t it better to think about what you like instead of dwelling on what you do not like?

I work to find passionate customers. I find that customers who are inspired to act out of gilt peter out quickly. They buy that first dozen eggs with a bewildered look on their face and one comment on their lips: “You get $4 for eggs?” and rarely return for seconds. The foodies have the opposite reaction. They are shocked the price is so low and return to me with a story. Then they buy a chicken. Then they buy a hog. Now they are partnering in our farm. The guilty buyer goes back to cheap food, not seeking an experience, not seeking quality. Just doing what he has always done.

I don’t really know how to end this other than to say I think this applies far beyond food and to caution that this is not a more carrot/less stick talk. Appeal to people’s passions if you want to motivate them to action. Saying, “I can help you fulfill your dreams!” is far more powerful, long term, than, “Give me money because you feel guilty!” Don’t just run around like Chicken Little claiming the world is ending and we’re all going to die. You are going to die. It is going to happen. But a few of us choose to live while we are alive. And those are the customers I seek.

In the comments section of our recent post on 5,000 cows a reader (Eumaeus) drew a response out of me that really should have been part of that post. 5,000 cows sounds like a huge number of animals but it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the annual beef consumption of our local metropolitan area. You can do the math to estimate how many drops are needed to fill the bucket but I don’t feel like doing story problems today.

But that makes me want to explore an idea. An idea about ideas. Here’s the idea: you don’t need a great idea. You need a great amount of work.

The goal is to produce something. An idea is not a something. It’s an idea. Let’s face it, most ideas are no good. (I particularly like the patent for a device to help deliver babies by centrifugal force. Notice the baby-catching basked between the expectant mother’s legs. Where is the barf bag?)

I hate to quote myself quoting someone else but I’m feeling lazy today. So here I am talking about what someone else was talking about. (This very action kind of proves the point of this post anyway).

Bonner talks about the need to follow a well-worn path in business…doing something that others have already succeeded at.  We read and follow the examples of leaders in alternative ag.  He talks about how important it is that I not try to go it alone, that I work hard and take one bite at a time until I “find something that works before you run out of time, money and confidence” (p. 126).

There are many other works available on this same topic (Edison said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration) and yet, here I am adding to the pile. In fact, I doubt if I have written anything on my blog that hasn’t been written elsewhere and said better. But here I am. Writing similar thoughts about old ideas with my own personal style and here you are reading it. Not that I’m terribly clever or novel. Just that I’m willing and able.

So if success is found in work, not in ideas, does it matter what you work on? Only a little. That’s good news! That means you can do what others have already done successfully. Are there already cleaning services in the world? Yes. Is that an old idea? Yes. Is there still demand for cleaning services? Yes? Good. Go find some houses to clean.

It’s the intersection of quality and price that matters in that market, not the web site you build. Not the clever name you come up with. It matters that you are able to meet a need. Results matter…especially when you are trailing far behind the pioneers (many of whom had great ideas and never found success).

Look, I know all about the path less traveled. It sounds nice. But it can be a lonely, dangerous place. Farmers are not gamblers…at least, not successful, multi-generational farmers. I’m looking to provide something of value to positively impact the world with minimal risk. Others have raised and retailed cattle before me. I stand on the shoulders of giants. I don’t have a precise formula for success but enough ground has been mapped that I’m not lost in the wilderness. Before Frost could take the path less traveled he had to learn to walk. And don’t overlook the fact that Frost is walking on a path, not cutting a new path!

So now, rather than hope some crazy idea will work I can just grab on to something that we know has worked and work for effective execution. Instead of wondering if a project will work I can focus on making it work. It’s the difference between trying to make a bicycle out of rubber, steel and aluminum and deciding to make a bicycle out of bicycle parts. You dig? I’m much more likely to succeed if I take advantage of work already done by others.

There are still new frontiers to explore in alternative agriculture. No doubt. But there are already well-worn (even if lightly grassy) paths that will help you meet  immediate needs. People like maple syrup. People like to cook with farm-fresh eggs. Land still benefits from the application or composted manures. Nothing earth shattering in that. Then, once you establish a beachhead, you can begin to dabble with the unknown. Or encourage the next generation (those bullet-proof, immortal youngsters) to take a calculated risk. But somebody has to pay the dues. And that falls to you. That falls to me.

Like any other business, successful farming has little to do with dreaming up some unique new idea you can call your own. It has everything to do with putting in the work every stinking day even when you don’t feel like it. Not paying yourself for years as you build the business. Going to bed late, getting up early. Showing up late for dinner so you can get that one project behind you. Keeping your day job while your business gets established. Using vacation time to work for yourself! It’s easy to find things to do with your time. It’s the execution that will kill you.

Don’t worry about the idea. Worry about the work.