Staffing the farm

As the winter draws to its inevitable conclusion (really!) my mind goes wandering through all the things necessary to get the farm running.  And as I jumped from one thought to another, I got stuck on employees.  I know I've written about staff before and I could go see what I said so as to not repeat myself, but I'm not going to because I'm kind of on a roll here.

We've had a very interesting time staffing the farm.  Farmer Bill's first employee was our son, who was finishing a gap year.  If you've ever started a business from scratch you know how difficult the first year can be.  You've put a lot - in our case all of Farmer Bill's retirement savings - on the line.  Some things work as planned, many others do not.  Throw in whatever weather issues the spring brings - there are always weather issues for a farm - and let's just say that it wasn't the best situation for the father-son relationship.  But the years have softened the memories and the two men have forgiven each other & get along very well now.

The next employee was a man about 10 years older than Farmer Bill.  Farmer Bill had hoped, from their early conversations, that the man would be helpful working with machinery since Bill has never felt really comfortable as a mechanic.   Stan (not his real name) had been a farmer himself.  He had raised grain crops, thought raising strawberries was a crazy idea and, as it turns out, wasn't really interested in learning anything new, and wasn't really that good at troubleshooting machinery.  He was, however, pretty good at complaining when things didn't work right (often that first year), the weather didn't cooperate (when does it ever?), or he was asked to make yet another run to town for parts.  Because of his unrelenting negativity Farmer Bill finally had to let him go.

One year early on Farmer Bill advertised for pickers.  Other growers we know said "Local kids are a great labor source."  And, "Farm wives love the chance to work for a few weeks and make extra money; we've had the same women back year after year."  So we advertised in the local paper and with the local job service office.  And waited.  And waited.  And nobody called.  Well, that's not entirely true.  One man called, asked what we were paying, and hung up.  I think it was about $0.50/pound then.  Which meant that during the mid-season a good picker could make between $15 and $20 an hour.  When the picking is not so good, our best pickers still make close to $10 an hour & the rate is never allowed to drop below minimum wage.  But it is part time and it is seasonal - a couple to several hours a day for 3 weeks.

Over the years we've had a lot of people come to pick strawberries.  A few kids, but mostly adults.  Women are generally better pickers than men.  Men tend not to pay attention to details, picking berries with bad spots on them.  And they tend to pick less gently, crushing the soft tops of the ripe berries.  It's hard to convince new pickers to leave berries with one little bad spot on them behind.  Yes, that spot could be cut out and most of the berry usable, but they're picking for resale & we have to get good money and repeat business for our picked berries, so we can't afford to sell berries with soft spots.

One year two girls showed up to pick in shorts and halter tops - assuming this was going to be a sunbathing opportunity I think.  I remember two boys who picked one season - they were 15 - and incredibly slow - and picked every little nubbin off the plants no matter what we said to them.  So while not the best pickers, they were tenacious, which is a quality Farmer Bill truly admires.  He thought he might like to have them do other work for him the next year.  Unfortunately, their tenacity meant that they were able to got 'real' jobs the next summer when they were 16.  

And one of my favorite memories is the woman who met Farmer Bill at a market, or maybe she came to pick her own and got to talking to him there.  There was some crisis - I think it was really hot and we had a lot of berries ready to pick so we were doing a big push.  She probably said she enjoyed picking, he probably said would she like to get paid for it.  At any rate, I was there one morning before work, greeting pickers while Bill finished getting the irrigation started on another field, when she arrived.  I went to greet her - and she looked right past me looking for Farmer Bill.  When I explained that things were running a little behind and it would be a while before he was available so I was getting pickers started, she ignored me, saying she had made arrangements to meet Farmer Bill there.  Two customers were picking for themselves in an adjacent field & she looked over, said 'Oh, there he is.' and started walking towards them.  I told her that wasn't Bill, she said it looked like him.  I said no, it wasn't him & I should know since I'd been married to him more than 20 years.  That stopped her in her tracks.  She looked at me for the first time & it dawned on me that she hadn't known Farmer Bill was married.  She didn't stay and work.

So every year has it employee challenges & we don't know yet what they will be for this year.  But it's pretty certain there will be some!

On vacation

Some years Farmer Bill & I have taken traditional vacations - actually leaving town for days at a time.  This winter finances don't allow for travel.  However, I needed time off from my paid work, so I have taken a long week off.  We were able to come up with plenty of small things to do and will spend a couple of days away from home at the end of the week.  Thursday I dropped off a quilt top to be quilted, did a bit of shopping, and then met a friend for supper followed by a visit to a local quilt show.  A lovely first day off.  On Saturday Farmer Bill & I went to the Guthrie with Bill's Aunt Pat.  Pat has season tickets to the Guthrie and generally invites us to attend a show with her once each year.  [Farmer Bill generally reciprocates by inviting her to attend a baseball game with him.]  On Sunday our daughter & son-in-law came and had dinner with us - Farmer Bill helped them do their income taxes.  I spent about an hour transplanting tomatoes and will do some more over the next couple of days.  Tonight we're going to Minneapolis for a program on climate change.  Tuesday and Wednesday I plan to work on quilting and hope to go snowshoeing both afternoons - the weather should be wonderful for being outdoors.  Thursday I'm dragging FB to Red Wing to wander through  antique stores.  We'll spend the night somewhere between Red Wing and Wabasha so that on Friday we can go to the National Eagle Center and Lark Toys.  Saturday and Sunday I plan to work on quilting again & get in a couple more snowshoe walks.  See, even when one doesn't go 'away' a vacation just flies by, the days full of possibilities.  I hope to have a better frame of mind for going back to work (but secretly fear that I'd need something like a 6- or 12-month sabbatical for that).

The tomatoes look very good and are well on track to be transplanted in the hoop house on April 1.  The orchard pruning is probably a bit behind schedule, but can be done well into May if need be.  The newest trees have all been pruned & since we hadn't gotten to all of them last year they were really in need of attention.  The recent snow (and any more that comes) was very welcome.  Snow cover will help keep the trees and strawberries dormant longer into the spring.  Cold and snow also help kill off insect and disease pests.  Plants and seeds for this year's crops are all ordered and will start to arrive soon (obviously the tomato seeds have already arrived since they have to be started February 1).  I'll help FB transplant in between other projects.  The greenhouse we've been using for starting seeds wasn't available, so I  allowed FB to use the back bedroom again this year.  He'd like to build a small greenhouse - it really wouldn't need to be very large - but of course it would cost money & require money to heat it so it wasn't in the plans for this year.

Right now I need to go read a couple of chapters of one of the books I brought home to read this week (I've finished 2 of them so far) before I have to get ready to go to out.  More later, perhaps.

Thank goodness for great colleagues

The librarian part of my life is often a struggle these days.  Librarians everywhere face it, whether they're in a public library, an academic library, or a K-12 school library.  There's a segment of the population who believes libraries are irrelevant, that reading and the book are dead.  Given that we have over 150,000 visits a year, I feel that I could argue we are relevant to a lot of people in our community.  It is true that the number of books we send home with people has gone down, but the number of people coming through the door has gone up.  Many of them are using the free Internet access we provide.  An ever-growing number are using electronic books.  Others are coming in asking for print materials and going away with resources accessed electronically. The circulation statistics don't directly include these items.  And circulation statistics really don't tell you how many people come through the door who don't know how to use a mouse, find the address bar on an Internet browser, or read enough English to follow the instructions on how to print their document.

Several years ago the library system I work for went through a major staff reduction.  Incentives were given to those willing to retire.  After the retirees were sent off, the remaining staff was re-allocated across all 9 locations, based on a formula that was kept secret.  My branch lost 60% of our librarian hours.  We went from having 3.75 FTE Adult Services Librarians to having 1.6 Adult Services Librarians.  I am now responsible for the work that 3 librarians used to do.  [Our 0.6 FTE Librarian kept most of her previous responsibilities, but didn't take on anything additional at our branch; she now splits her time between 2 branches and has some responsibilities at each.]  When I first started working at this branch in 2000, 4 librarians did the job for which I am now primarily responsible.

I'm here to tell you: one person can't do the work of three or four - and do it well.  I can't go through my collections the way I used to.  I have to call or email my community contacts rather than going out to meet with them.  And I pile stuff on my desk to deal with later as I race from task to task, putting out whichever fire is blazing the highest at that moment; it looks like I live in a hoarder's cube...

The people I work with help to make this craziness bearable.  For the most part, they are hard working, smart, funny, and believe in the mission.  They help me in myriad ways, as simple as coming up with new ideas when I feel tapped out and as in depth as weeding a collection that I don't have time to get to.  I hope that I help them in return.

New Year's resolutions

The first year I started this blog, I wrote quite a bit.  Last year not so much.  It was a hard year for farming and a hard year to work in the public library and that made it a hard year to write.  I spent December and January being pretty lazy about the house and farm.  Farmer Bill would suggest that he's been lazy too, but it's all relative.  He and his right-hand man have done a lot of maintenance work on the machinery and tools, and worked outside when the weather allowed, even though they haven't put in the kind of hours they will during the growing season.

Speaking of weather... We were really hoping for more snow this winter.  We had very little snow last winter, and not much rain over the summer, leaving us in a net deficit.  The lack of snow cover during the recent cold spells means that the ground is deeply frozen.  After it thaws, we're going to need a pretty rainy spring to get things back on track.

One of the things Farmer Bill does in the off months is go to conferences.  It's a great way to get to talk to other growers and learn about new things.  The big talk this year is a new insect that's arrived and is starting to cause problems in fruit crops.  It's the Spotted Wing Drosophila (SWD) and it came from Asia, probably via international trade routes.  It prefers soft fruits such as blueberries, cherries and raspberries and was found in those crops in Minnesota in 2012.  Fruit specialists are looking at IPM methods of controlling this new pest, as well as various chemical (including organic) methods.  Apparently SWD can inflict a lot of damage in a short time.  Other fruit flies wait until there is overripe or damaged fruit to do their stuff.  This fruit fly has a little serrated knife on its butt that lets it cut a slit in good fruit to lay eggs. Isn't nature amazing?  We'll be adding monitoring traps for SWD in our raspberries, and maybe in the blueberries too, just in case (they won't be producing any fruit this year since they're only 2 years old).  What we'll do if we discover this pest depends on research being done at universities across the country.  Right now Farmer Bill is out pruning the apple trees.  Generally, pruning should start about February 1.  But if temperatures are above 20 degrees F. one can start pruning earlier.  Since the goal is to prune and shape every tree every year, the earlier he can start the better.

One of the things I've been doing this winter is trying to improve my quilting skills, without a lot of real success.  I continue to really enjoy the designing and piecing parts of quilting, and I think my skills there have improved over the years.  But I can't get my quilting skills to a point where I am satisfied.  I know I'm a bit of  a perfectionist about it, and for some quilts it just shouldn't matter so much, but I'd still like my feathers to look like feathers rather than spikes.  I've pretty much decided that hiring someone who IS good at quilting and has one of those really cool long arm machines is worth the expense for the quilts I really care about.  I've contacted a long-arm quilter in the area and will meet with her soon to see if we're compatible.  For 'lesser' quilts, I'll do the straight-line quilting that I'm reasonably good at and call it a day.

And for this post, I'd better call it a day, too.

Thanksgiving

This was a hard year for strawberry and apple farmers.  The warm weather early in March meant that both the berries and the apples started growing too early.  When the inevitable cold weather returned, the apple blossoms were frozen.  Most of the strawberry blossoms were protected by watering - starting somewhere between 11:00 pm and 2:00 am and watering until the temperatures rose above freezing well after sunrise.  But excessive watering encourages fungal growth and a leafspot problem developed that cut the strawberry crop about in half.  The apple crop was about 5% of last year's crop when all was picked and done.  The raspberries suffered damage from the frosts and an invasive pest newly arrived from the south.  The blueberries came through pretty well and are a better stand than we first thought.  They take a loooonngg time to 'green up' in the spring.  We'll be better prepared for the wait next year and less prone to panic.

On the bright side, the tomatoes raised in the hoop houses did very well and because we had some of the first tomatoes, both grape and slicers, they sold for a very good price.  Once the field-raised tomatoes came in, the prices dropped significantly and Farmer Bill will think this winter about whether to bother with field tomatoes.  The cantaloupe also did well this year and customers continued to be amazed at the size of our melons.  I have my doubts as to whether sweet corn makes any money, but it does create cash flow... and farmers always need cash.

All in all, a mixed bag of crop results; but Farmer Bill was able to make the mortgage payments and pay the property taxes and the help (less help needed, of course).  So that's a positive.  And of course, there's always next year.  [This year we've used the phrase 'wait until next year' about both the farm and Farmer Bill's baseball team.]

We do have many things to be thankful for.  Our daughter was married this year, and the couple bought a house and are settling into married life.  Our son & d-i-l moved to Maine and her new job is proving to be a good one, with possibilities for future growth - and we actually talk somewhat more often than we did when they were just an hour away.  Both Farmer Bill & I remain healthy.  My job has never been in danger and I continue to enjoy most aspects of the work.  I hope to be able to find more time for writing over the winter and into the next year.  I get a lot of great ideas during my long drive to and from work, but rarely do they make it to print.  Maybe next year...

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

And it's over...

Amazing.  Farmer Bill will pick the last of his strawberries on Monday - and that's it for this year.  The crop suffered from frost damage & angular leaf spot.  The frost was one that was missed - possibly when we were in Scotland for our daughter's wedding, or possibly shortly after we came back, or maybe even earlier.  We really don't know... which indicates it might be time to think about a different frost alert system.  Food for thought for next winter.  Angular leaf spot was a problem across our area, wherever people used sprinkler irrigation to do frost protection.  The bacterium lives in the soil and spreads to the strawberry leaves via splashing water.  It is hard to control, but there is a spray that seems to get good results - and is labelled for organic use, which is an added bonus. 

[If you haven't read my previous diatribes on whether organic producers spray, they do.  None of us wants to poison the earth, the people eating our produce, or ourselves.  But farmers who are in farming to make a living need to have a crop to sell, and sometimes (often) nature throws us a curve ball that we have to figure out how to hit.  An organically-approved pesticide means that the chemicals in it have been proven to break down rapidly, leaving little or no residue on the produce.]

We started picking the summer raspberries this week and the response has been good - because the crop looks pretty good.

We're seeing splashes of red in the grape tomato hoop house, the melons are blossoming like crazy (get busy, you bees!), and the slicing tomatoes look good to me, but I haven't seen any red yet.  There's a LOT of sweet corn planted - on our place and at a neighbor's place - but Farmer Bill says he's not planting off the farm after this year.  It's too hard to keep up with the additional acreage during strawberry season.  I've been encouraging him (okay, maybe I've been nagging a little bit) not to expand every year.  We're not getting any younger, and the 16-hour days seem harder every summer.  In the middle of strawberry season he usually agrees that he should cut back, but in the middle of the winter when he's rested again, almost anything seems possible.

It looks like the Zestar! might actually be our most plentiful apple variety for this year.  After the April 10 frost, where all the existing blossoms were frozen, the Zestar! put out a few new clusters here and there.  Most trees actually have a few apples on them!

It's still a long slog through the summer.  I'm hoping that the tomatoes, melons, and sweet corn continue to do well.  And that Farmer Bill can find a couple of good marketing staff to help him get them sold.

Strawberry Season

It's officially strawberry season again.  We took our first strawberries to the markets on May 31 and June 2.  Farmer Bill opened his strawberry patch to pickers on June 5.  This is about the earliest we've ever opened.  The strawberry crop looks good this year, mostly.  There is some frost damage in the upper field, and the early variety - Wendy - really isn't working out.  There just doesn't seem to be a really good early strawberry variety.  Farmer Bill used to grow Annapolis as his early variety.  It is good tasting and does well for size, but doesn't get sweet until it's very ripe, so if you let the field get ripe, the mid-season berries are ready to pick... and you've lost your advantage of having an early variety.

The apple crop is mostly non-existent for 2012.  We had incredible, record-setting warm weather in March, which woke the trees up and got them blooming early.  Then April came in with normal April weather and the blossoms froze.  It looks like we'll have 5-10% of the normal crop of apples.  There will be, almost literally, a few of everything, but not very many of anything.

Other crops will have to take up some of the slack - there are an awful lot of cantaloupes and watermelons planted this year.  Both hoop houses are full of tomatoes - grape tomatoes in one and slicers in the other.  The hope is that Farmer Bill will have some of the earliest tomatoes that bring the best prices.  There is also a LOT of sweet corn planted (and more plantings being planned, I'm sure - Farmer Bill knows better than to tell me how much sweet corn he's growing).

The raspberries look really good this year.  They are covered in berry buds now & I expect them to start turning red any time (actually I've eaten a few almost-ripe raspberries).  We'll definitely start picking them early - maybe as much as 2 weeks early.  Farmer Bill is hoping to do well with the raspberries this year - partly to help make up for the apples, partly because it's time for the raspberries to start pulling their weight & producing some income.

It was a busy day today at the strawberry patch.  Our picking crew worked hard for 4 hours picking several hundred pounds of strawberries that were almost all sold by the time we closed at 2:00.  The PYO operation was steadily busy, too.  We're still in the beginning stage of picking, which means that the berries are a bit larger, but further between.  Next week there will be more clusters of berries, and that's when the PYO customers are really happy.  A huge part of Farmer Bill's job is to manage the customers' expectations & keep them happily toiling on their knees through the strawberries.  He's really good at it.