The PHurrowed Brow

After teaching for 25 years, I left the Latin classroom in May of 2021 to step into work managing farmland for a family enterprise. I had a lot to learn, and I was not the only one asking questions. Family, friends, and acquaintances did, too. In the lead-up to my retirement and even today, I receive(d) tons of questions about the farm, about what we grow, and about just what it is that I do in my new role. Answering them is a challenge, as some component of each response usually generates another worthy question.

Take the matter of what we grow on the farm:
Person A-   “What do you grow?”
Me-   “We primarily grow wheat, sorghum, and corn….”
Person A-   “Sorghum??? What is that? I’ve never heard of it.”
Person B-   “That sounds bad. Should you talk to your dentist about your sore gums?”
That last bit is a fabrication made as I ginger-vitis-ly attempt to massage some humor into this post. But the other parts of that conversation are real and oft-repeated. Even you, excellent and admirable reader may not yet know of sorghum and its uses.

I firmly believe that people’s curiosity is natural, especially as most of us live lives far separated from those of agricultural producers. And such curiosity is important to satisfy. We who grew so alarmed at 2020’s empty supermarket shelves (and/or who hoarded items in our freezers, larders, and pantries) will be better off knowing what it takes to grow, refine, and bring to market food and other products upon which we collectively depend for both nourishment and enjoyment. For these reasons, I believe that providing information and answering questions about the little corner of agriculture in which I toil are challenges worth undertaking, because so many of us (myself included!) are largely ignorant of the natural processes and human-actuated mechanisms by which we sustain ourselves and our families with food.

Before leaving teaching, I’d become familiar with very limited dimensions of farming and farm management. Since then, I have taken trainings, attended seminars, conferences, and workshops, read articles, listened to podcasts, conversed with experts, and done the on-the-job learning that gives me some foundational knowledge to share. It also gives me the sense of just enough accomplishment to balance the ache of knowing how much I still need to learn. I feel like one of the befuddled halflings who attended Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy-first birthday party and heard him say, ”…eleventy-one years is too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable hobbits. I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” Two and a half years into this role, I’ve learned a smidgen of agronomy (the science of fostering plant growth), a smattering of economics (the dismal science of not losing money in a business enterprise), a dash of ag law and federal ag policy (ah, bureaucracy, familiar from my work in schools), a soupçon of accounting terminology and practice (needed to measure business stability and stay on the good side of Revenue Service agents), plus a dab of the business and negotiating practices that build and preserve successful relationships with our partners. But for all that, I am still a half-fast learner: I don’t know half of those matters half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of those matters half as well as they deserve. If you’re a whiz (or is it wiz?) at explaining IRS Schedule F, if you have ready spells to undo escape and resistance in chemical weed control, or if you have a magic wand to remove the harmful effects on grain exports of the strong U.S. Dollar and can do so without harming other sectors of the economy and the people who work in them, let me know. You will become my own personal Gandalf!

All joking aside, to accomplish the twin ends of sharing knowledge and inciting curiosity, I here begin a series of weekly posts offering focused, comprehensible response to a question that I’ve been asked, or that I myself have asked in the course of learning to do my new job. In my next post, I will describe the farm organization which I am helping to manage as a family enterprise. After that, we’ll get into the land and what it’s possible to grow on it, with linked topics (soil conservation, marketing grain, climate change, etc.) to follow.

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I will certainly respond and possibly give an extended answer in a future post.

And now for your enjoyment, the whole passage narrating Bilbo’s birthday party as read by the great Andy Serkis.