Telling Your Story
To quote famous former Beatle and solo artist, Ringo Starr, "It don't come easy."
No Ringo, it does not come easy.
Just when you think you've got it figured out, here comes a curve ball you never saw coming.
Have you ever had a growing season where there wasn't a new plot twist? Maybe a new obstacle like a disease, insect or weed. Along comes the solution/technology/ battle plan to overcome it and figuring out how to implement it is just as baffling as the problem itself.
Maybe the curve ball came flying through the barn window. Oh, the possibilities! Feed, disease, infrastructure, ventilation, animal comfort. Pile on technology to manage each and every detail to make it work for and not against you.
Next, you try to chronicle every reality of farm life for the world on social media. Tell your farm's story, the experts say! The world needs to hear the story of real-life agriculture. Yes, the world does, but again, it doesn't come easy when the anti ag-cyber bullies show up and tear you limb from online limb. Salute to the real people who find time, take the perfect photo and write catchy lines for the online world to appreciate. (Please don't cheat and use AI!)
When you think you've seen or experienced everything about your life, surroundings, farm, and physical stuff you may think you can control, in marches a new situation to work in, through, over and around. Shouldn't things get easier with time? Didn't your parents tell you that practice makes perfect whenever you had to do something over and over again like spelling words, memory verses and learning to play the musical instrument? Naturally we think our farms, lives, surroundings and the things we do every day will become more perfect the longer we practice. I was pretty sure that was the natural order of things for a long time.
But now that I've been at life a long time and lately pretending it hasn't really been all that long, (my social media profile photo is at least 15 years younger than my real age). Ecclesiastes 1:9—"There is nothing new under the sun"—just seems more real. Just because I haven't seen, experienced or heard of something before, it has happened somewhere, somehow, to someone at some time.
OK, maybe a computer virus didn't wipe out the data saved on my hard drive during the Dark Ages. They wouldn't understand that kind of virus. They had their own viruses like Bubonic Plague or Black Death and it wiped out entire villages and changed Europe's entire economic system. Viruses; they've been lurking for ages. Sometimes they simply show up in different packaging.
It doesn't matter—in the house, the barn, the garden, the community, society and the world. Just when the sailing seems smooth, look for the switch up because something or someone is about to change and you'll be left trying to figure out how to manage. Again.
When it happens, and like you already know—it will-—my recommendation is to try not to fret, freak out, and have an emotional explosion. This—whatever this is, is not new. It is the pattern and sometimes burden of life we live here on earth. It might leave a wake of surprise, sorrow, contemplation about the purpose of life, or simply sitting in the dust and wondering what just happened. But it is not new. Keep rerouting and putting the pieces back together.
No, Ringo. It definitely does not come easy. But there is also nothing new to look at under the sun. Carry on, friends.
Bev Berens is a freelance writer and empty nester from Vestaburg, Mich. She can be contacted at uphillfarm494@yahoo.com.