The great achievement of modern times is not Elon Musk reversing two rockets back to Earth after launching a Tesla car into deep space, or the marvels of genetic engineering, but rather the fact that farmer in a no-name valley in Canada can order a part for a 1980s era baler and see it delivered in a timely way, and for a reasonable price.
Think about it: the communications to order the part, the corporate heft and infrastructure necessary to manufacture and inventory it, the logistics to retrieve and package it, the financial system to pay for all this, often long after it has been installed and the baler is running again. To make this work requires an amazing web of digital, mechanical and financial resources.
Perhaps most amazing of all is the level of human competence an attentiveness to make it all work. At every step of the process, a person or persons, have to care about what they are doing, and act quickly and accurately. It starts with the often over-worked person in the parts department of the local dealership, who has to take your call (and not let it go to voice mail where it will expire), accurately check its availability and place the order. Somewhere, someone receives the order, tracks the part to a bin in a giant warehouse, packages it, and arranges shipping. The shipper picks it up on a schedule, gets it on a plane, thence to another truck, and probably one or two more trucks. Finally, it arrives at the dealership where the parts person has to remember to call and remind you it has arrived.
If even one of the people involved in the process does not care, or does not believe in their role in the system, the whole thing falls apart; the part arrives late, or is not the right one, or it does not arrive at all.
For the system to work as well as it does, everyone at every step of the way has to have what would seem in some places like a near cult level of obedience. For example, the system won’t work if workers are chronically late, or if they come from a culture of bribery and graft.
When you think of things this way, the origins of our generally well-running parts supply system begin when we are young, and see parents preparing for work, and scheduling activities around the beginning and end of the workday. As students we think it is the subject matter we are learning (history, rivers of South America) but what we are really learning is how to complete tasks in a thorough and timely way.
In our first jobs, we learn that a good worker is one who shows up early for work, and does their job well. All this is a statement of the obvious but that’s my point—our training to do jobs satisfactorily, or better that satisfactorily, is so ingrained in our culture that we rarely think about it. As a society, that’s quite an achievement, even if not as sexy as reversing rockets.
In the 1960s and 1970s the production of newspapers was called the “daily miracle”, a reference to all the factors that went into the collecting of information, writing, layout, printing and delivery to your doorstep of a newspaper by, as one publisher put it, “a 10 year old boy with a frog in his pocket.”
Getting the right part for your baler delivered in short order can seem like a miracle too.
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Though the possible effects of climate change are in the news almost weekly, the randomness of weather extremes here on southern Vancouver Island have been difficult to attribute to any one factor. This year, however, we are seeing in our fields changes that suggest large scale change. In pastures that are not irrigated, the planted grasses (rye, orchard, tall fescue) are being pushed out by a skinny little species that is locally called wire grass. Fine as hair, and poor yielding, it thrives in areas like knolls and the shoulders of fields that have repeatedly baked off in recent droughts.
Wire grass has so little structure that if we don’t cut it when green, the mower has a hard time processing it; it does not have the mass to get pushed out of the back of the mower, and instead winds around the drums.
So far, with haying about half done at the time of writing, it looks like our yields will be down as much as 30%. We are already contemplating what to do next year, but with weather extremes seemingly the new norm, it is hard to know how to proceed. Renovate? Re seed?
Are you seeing the effects of climate change on your farm? If so, drop me a note at: tomhenry@smallfarmcanada.ca
- Tom Henry