Daylight Spending
Anyone in the food business knows how for two weeks out of the year everyone’s circadian rhythms are jumbled about with the misnomer that we’ve either lost or gained an hour. Clock time is purely a human construct, but the true schedules of our lives are ruled by many more aspects that numbers on a dial.
When springing ahead it never fails that market patrons will be sparse for the usual first hour and then all at once the floodgates open. That last half hour that is usually slow, now filled with customers venturing out on their internal clocks. When I was in the deli business years ago I noticed with the clock change, the lunch rush shifted, too.
Searching information for this subject one often finds farmers getting the blame for advancing the clocks forward in spring thus offering more daylight to align with clock time. This is utter hogwash. Farmers are going to farm no matter what the clocks say. You really want to see some cranky critters when the time change comes, just delay feeding or milking time by an hour. Livestock and farmers alike have their routine and it doesn’t matter what clock time it is when we do it, only that it happens at the same circadian or solar time.
What’s the difference? A circadian cycle is based upon 24 hours. When clock time and circadian time align everything runs smoothly until we either turn our clocks forward or back by an hour mucking up everything. Solar time is when our daily rhythms adjust based upon the position of the sun. For instance, a few years ago during the solar eclipse when the sun dimmed in the middle of the afternoon, all the sheep and goats came in from the far pastures just like they normally do at the end of the day to where they bed down for the night. As the daylight changes, so do their schedules.
The reality is Daylight Savings is a practical convenience for modern societies who don’t want to wake up with the sun, preferring their daylight at the end of the day. Farmers have their own schedules which are often determined by factors other than the clock or the sun.
I talked to my groggy fellow farmers on Sunday to get an idea of what the driving factors are in their lives that set their schedules. It’s usually not our clocks, but our thermometers. It can be the soil temperature, humidity, and even the water temperature t hat determines your farmers’ schedules.
Shane Hughes of Liberty Delight Farms and I were both doing the same thing last week—spreading compost on our fields. “The weather is perfect for it right now and the ground is dry,” agreed Hughes as I lamented missing a day of fieldwork while going to market. If fields are too wet, the heavy equipment causes damage. A sunny day with little wind is also preferable. If need be, we’ll work in the dark. Yes, tractors have headlights.
Another aspect of temperature is humidity. The crew at Young Harvests go into overdrive with the rise of both as delicate greens can quickly be ruined by too much of either.
Although we many do not think of our watermen at farmers, they are in every sense of the word—seeding their beds when the temperature is optimal for growth, tending their stock, and bringing in the harvest when ready. However Kellen Williams at Toby Bay Island Oysters pointed out that he must contend with a factor determining his schedule that most would fail to consider—the phase of the moon. “You know how the moon affects the tides?” he asked when we were discussing what external factors influence his farming schedule the most.
Sometimes it’s not the weather conditions or the temperature that determines farm work, but the crops themselves. Planting, cultivating and harvesting is a given for all of us, but the orchard folks like Tommy Evans of Two Story Chimney Ciderworks are alerted to action as soon as the trees begin dropping their leaves. “That’s pruning time for us.”
No matter what’s going on at the farm, we’ll revert to clock time on market days so we’re in our spots and ready to go when the customers begin streaming through the aisles.