Stages of Learning in Farming - Building Your Legacy

Lots of things to think about, and it can be a little overwhelming at the beginning. Farming is running a very challenging small business and that can be complex. But when done well, farming can be a multi-generational business, who's skills can be translated to future generations. Farming involves passion to keep us going when the days are long.

Willing to be Weird...No Fear, Only Wonder

I have talked about being weird in our previous posts. A worldview of principled non-conformity is essential to advancing the leading edge of any field.

Agriculture is replete with farmers that conform to the status quo. They never achieve any more than their farmer buddies that drink coffee at the "round table" in the town cafe every morning. There is nothing wrong about that, except you will not stand out, you will never leave the boundaries of the tribe, you will not be weird!

Here are 10 principles for being weird, whether you are a farmer or not.

The Vegetable Freak Playbook

The Vegetable Freak playbook has developed over many years of trying new ideas, following our passions and bringing value to our customers. You see the end product when you come to our market stand at the Rochester, Minnesota, Downtown Farmers Market.

But behind each item we bring to market there is a philosophy of implementation developed over nearly two decades of passion, commitment and hard work by our family.

There are six core elements to our playbook, which permeate everything we do...

May I Be Excused My Brain is Full

Garry Larson in his insightful Far Side cartoon has a picture of a student in a classroom saying, "Please may I be excused as my brain is full."  As a farmer in a fast changing world, I often feel this way. The increased complexity of today's farm environment means that effective and timely learning is essential to support successful farm businesses.

Dr. Lila Davachi and Tobias Kiefer, with Booz & Company have studied the adult learning environment and their findings have led to the acronym AGES, which stands for:

• Attention
• Generation
• Emotion
• Spacing

Let's talk about the implications of their research on learning for farmers and other training environments.

Attention 

People pride themselves on their ability to multi-task. Dr. Amy Arnsten at Yale has studied the impact on divided attention and concluded that multi-tasking minimises the effectiveness for the current task and also diminishes ability for other tasks. So multi-tasking can lead to the "my brain is full" mental bottleneck. Being able to focus is one of the keys to learning. Excellent vehicles for focused learning are reading books, listening to on-line content and seminars in areas of interest.

Generation

Farms are a great laboratory for trial of new ideas and learning. We pick some new and sometimes "weird ideas" to try every season. These new ideas help to consolidate our learning process and generate our own unique ideas from the original base of learned material. This is the idea of generation. If the learning moves from head knowledge to practice and then to specific application in our unique situation. Then generation has taken place. This is my personal favorite of the AGES framework. (As you probably guessed, the weird ideas are my own interpretation.)

Emotion

Emotional links to learning will support a strong memory of the subject material. Dr, Evian Gordon talks about the brain organizing principle as "minimizing threat and maximizing reward", in that order. Maximum learning occurs when associations are positive and negative associations are minimized. So strong emotion can effect the learning process. The more positive the emotion the more likely learning will be retained.

Spacing

The research also shows that timing and spacing between learning events enhances learning. The brain takes time to hard-wire the the new knowledge. So a weekly seminar to learn a farm topic would more strongly reinforce the subject material than a weekend seminar in which all the information is shared at once. The research shows that the best way to ensure long-term encoding and retrieval was to have breaks between learning sessions and then to test recall at the start of the next learning session. The effort involved in recall at the later time increased the retention of learning. Testing was key to the retention.

Weird Farming Ideas

I like to introduce at least one wierd new thing at the Rochester Minnesota Farmers Market every season. I define weird as something not currently available at our market today and sometimes this may mean it is not available anywhere (that I know of). I will probably do a blog post on each of these over time so watch this space.

Some recent examples are:

10 Reasons We Are Weird

10 reasons why we are weird.

1) We work hard. We like to work.
2) We read books. Yes paper. We often highlight and underline
3) We don't watch TV. It improves our peace of mind.
4) We save. It improves our present and future. We give. It is the best investment.
5) We invest in ourselves and others. We are building a legacy.
6) Our teenagers are respectful, hardworking, good students and good citizens
7) We pay cash for our cars and our farm equipment. We don't borrow money.
8) We attend church every weekend and are actively involved.
9) We value relationships. God, Family and Friends.
10) We like good music, plays and movies.

We are living our dream. The way I see it weird is good.

Beware the Cat with the Deaf Eye

If we are honest we all know a house cat or barn cat that just wasn't quite the same as the other cats. Well Louie was one of those weird cats a few years ago. We raised him from a kitten, but somewhere along the way he took ill and was never quite the same. He had a cataract in one eye and walked kinda sideways and his feet would cross over some like he was about ready to trip himself. He was sort of yellow and had a crook in his tail. You know how cats kinda vibrate their tail when they get excited. Well this cat did too and it always seemed like he was pointing at you when he did that, because of the kink in his tail.

Reed was  in first or second grade and he kinda liked this old cat.

The Lavendar People

Photo Credit: Reed Petersen

There are some unspoken rules in farming, like you don't sneak up on someone while they are running noisy farm equipment and you don't drive all over in the field looking for them. It is customary to catch their attention from the road or gate into the field and "get their permission" to enter or have them come to you.

It was about this time last year, when in their excitement the "Lavender People" broke all the rules. This is the story about how these  folks got to be called the "Lavender People" by the our teens and me.

Red Wigglers

"Dad, I think the worms are worth immensely more than the compost", said Reed our high school freshman.

We had an amazing amount of Red Wrigglers in the compost pile this spring. As we were making our potting mix we would sort out hand fulls and hand fulls of red worms.

We don't do much fishing so what to do with our abundance?

A Farm For The Child In All of Us

Black Garlic

One of the weird things I have made is Black Garlic

I found Black Garlic on the internet and started asking some of the local chefs about it. They had been using it in a few cases. Mostly as a condiment, since it was very expensive.

Black Garlic is made by ...