The Importance of Fun

Being a farmer is a 24/7/365 job. It doesn’t matter if it’s livestock, produce, fruit, flowers, mushroom or bees, the responsibilities rest squarely upon our shoulders at all times. As many gear up for a three-day weekend over the Memorial Day holiday, market vendors are preparing for a busy sunny weekend. Customers often ask when we take time for ourselves or what we do in our “off” time. Our concepts of clocking out are a bit different, sometimes coming only at the end of a season lasting several months.Burnout is a very real issue in this line of work. Stress is a routine part of our lives. The weather, pests, parasites, sales, broken equipment, increasing regulations, finding and retaining help—just about everything that keeps a farmer awake at night is out of our control.There’s no one-stop solution to alleviating stress and avoiding burnout for farmers. In researching this topic, it was easy to see that many of the suggestions for reducing stress were obviously written by non-farmers. Taking deep breaths and meditating don’t go far when hail is decimating the blossom set for summer fruits. Exercise is an often-touted panacea for stress, but when your days are endless manual labor the idea of more physical exertion can be daunting. And just how do you get off the farm to do something you enjoy with others or socialize when the issue that is creating added stress in the first place ties you to the farm? Planting. Harvesting. Birthing. Milking. Markets. There is no putting off until we feel better, even to the point of working while sick, injured and mourning. {I’ll admit to being guilty of all three}How do we cope? We build fun into our routines.The inspiration for this week’s Dishing the Dirt came from Rob at Young Harvests as I watched him cruise around the parking lot after market a few weeks ago on his OneWheel, an electric motorized skateboard with a single fat tire in the center. The smile on his face said it all.“I don’t normally spoil myself with toys like this, but it is so darn fun,” he said, going on to explain how he can move about the farm and his daily chores when he uses it, “I couldn’t believe I put eight miles on it in one day while working!”Last winter customers noticed my felted hats and scarves. “You should sell those,” they urged, but my reply was always the same, “This is my fun.” Yes, I raise sheep and have an abundance of wool, but there needs to be a distinction between production and peace-of-mind.As a computer geek sitting in an air-conditioned cube farm with a white-knuckle hour-long commute, my daily decompression was building a farm. Self-care was milking, moving electric netting, collecting the eggs, planting vegetables. My livelihood was not dependent upon the farm until I traded my carpeted cubicle for a tent on the black top. That shift required a retooling of my version of fun. Shoveling manure for a dozen animals was fun; a few hundred, that’s work. I had to find new fun.The issue of burnout in agrarian communities is a constant subject as we live with the all-too-real statistic of farmers dying by suicide at twice the rate of veterans. Resiliency has become a buzzword for not just the soil and environment, but for the farmers themselves. How do we emotionally bounce back when we hit a rough patch? By doing something fun.We play instruments, go biking, have horses, paint, sculpt, write, knit, swim, run, build, cook, play volleyball, fish, hunt, boat, volunteer, make jewelry, read, weave. Ask your farmer what makes them happy. Pay attention and you just might catch them doing it.