Getting down to business and the art of "manning up" on the farm

Things have been going amazingly for me lately. I just graduated from the California Farm Academy, finished my job at Food Bank Farmers as the Farm manager and have really moved into forming my own farm business. I am working on all the official paperwork of declaring a fictitious name, getting insurance and working out details of my joint ventures with the two farmers on the Pacific Star Gardens' property. I am finding myself happy to get up in the morning and go to work and really excited about the future. I absolutely love that I am never "late" to work and I can break when I want/need to. There is such a wonderful (albeit dangerous and terrifying) freedom to being self-employed. Nothing bad has happened yet, so we'll stay with wonderful...and cross our fingers.

I've been busy harvesting our fall plot for the Food Bank and School District we're working with. We've sent off turnips, cabbage, lettuce,  and radishes. The harvesting is on quite a large scale to do by hand with only a few people, it's a bit new to all of us so there's a lot of learning happening. I'll share some pictures below to give you a sense of what we've been up to.

This nice crate of Romaine is headed to the packing tables

A sea of lettuce in crates- about 30 minutes of work.

Wooly Bear! Supposed to be a sign of an early winter...

Sorry Mister Toad, but you'll have to hibernate elsewhere...

Rain or shine, the veggies need to get picked (those are my snazzy rain/mud boots)

These beautiful heads of cabbage are off to some hungry bellies!

Turnips at the washing station

All packed up for the Food Bank!

This whole process will probably be a learning curve for quite a while longer. And, I expected that. I think the thing I didn't expect, well, no, I expected it but maybe didn't think it through...is the physical challenges I would face. I mean, obviously farming is hard. I joke all the time we should make a P-90 FARM gym and have people pay for a workout. But, to be honest, physical labor is only about 1/2 of farming. Marketing is usually the hardest on people. Most everyone can work out and get stronger, but if you're not a people person and not good at selling yourself, you're kind of screwed as a farmer.

Considering this, I figured I would have a long time to get farm buff. I mean, I already have biceps that I never did before! That's great! I was always that archetype fat kid that was picked last in sports and couldn't run a mile without throwing up. So, being fit and keeping up is a badge of honor for me. I think what I didn't expect is that it would all happen so fast and I would be challenged so often. One of my latest challenges was pulling drip. Here are some pictures to help you imagine what that looks like:

We use this rake first to clear any crop residue left after mowing. We then set this so it scratches the top few inches up of the soil so we can pull up the buried drip tape.

Here is the tape coming up from the ground. You pull roughly 5ft. of it at a time: walking forward, lifting, walking, lifting. There are usually 3 lines of drip per 200 foot bed. We did maybe 40 beds that day, about 5 hours in all.

A sea of tape from just a few of the beds we pulled. 

 We bury the drip many times as we transplant. It is really helpful in the summer to have water at the root zone of the plants. This also keeps the top layer very dry and helps some with weeds, kind of a dust mulch. It needs to be pulled so we can till the soil and prepare it for a new crop. I am sure there are fancy machines to do this...but as a small farming operation, it doesn't make sense often to buy such specialized equipment, so doing it by hand is the most economic.

So, after 5 hours of  an intense upper body workout, my tiny girly arms hurt. Robert (the farmer who owns the land) said he and the volunteer would finish up and I could "take a break" and help Debbie (his wife). I was so relieved! I was keeping up for most of the time, and that felt great...but I could feel that I was just done and didn't want to re-hurt my back. So I go off to help Debbie. Lo and behold, she is picking up the crates of winter squash from the field and loading them onto the tractor...I guess lifting 70lb crates was using different muscles? I sucked it up, I had chosen this job after all and I wasn't about to be a wuss about it.

This seems to be a common theme recently for me: manning up. I was told when griping about working in the rain and cold and mud and 40mph wind that it would help me grow my "farm cajones". In a mad dash to move things under cover for the rain, we had to move a saw table that was easily 3-400lbs. I lifted it with Adam, the farmer's son, and looked alarmed at the weight. He yelled, "BE STRONG!", and heaved and moved it where it needed to go. I was asked another time to get something out of the bed of the truck. I couldn't open the back end, so I had to climb in on the tire. I am 5'3" and mostly torso, so the truck tire comes about to my hips. I hesitated to consider how to get in, decided on standing on the tire, and struggling to lift my weight with one leg. "You're failing bootcamp!" came a shout in my direction as I hefted myself into the truck. Ugh, I was. All of this was said to me in jest, mind you, no one was trying to hurt my feelings, just give me a hard time.

My soft, squishy intellectual identity that I formed in college was not going to get heavy things lifted, crops picked in the rain, and trucks jumped into. This is a new way of being that I am going to have to get used to living in: where my body is a tool to be honed, trained, and trusted.

 I wish there was another word for it, but it seems that in our vernacular, rising to the physical challenges that are presented to us is talked about in terms of masculinity. It is hard for me to hold this idea in my head as a feminist, but I am no linguist and am not armed to fight this battle so I will take the tiny victory of "manning-up" as a woman to be enough of a triumph.

My new identity is tricky for me to live in. I still dress up on the weekend (when I do get a weekend, sometimes it's just a day) paint my nails, do my hair and makeup, and even wear clean clothes and perfume. By no means am I a fashionista, but I really do enjoy dressing up every now and again. I have had to settle for looking, and smelling, like an Ork most days though. It is interesting to embody those two things: the lady and the Ork. Is it strange for other people to meet me as a lady and believe that I crawl in the mud, jump into trucks, and heave 100lbs tubs of produce? I can never tell as I think most people are too polite to call BS if they think it.

It's who I am though, the soft, squishy intellectual learning to man-up on the farm and loving every minute of it.