57. The Farmer's Investment
Planting season is upon us in zone 7a. Last week, summer squash and tomatoes got plopped into the soil after starting their lives in the backyard nursery. Carrot and chard seeds are breaking the soils surface as I write these words. Next week I’ll do peppers and cucumbers, and every week there’s lettuce. Never can plant too much lettuce!
This season tends to give me a lot of solo time on my knees with my hands clutching young seedlings and gently packing their roots into the ground. That action, repeated thousands of times throughout the spring, stirs feelings of nurturing and hope for what those plant babes can grow up to be. So the other day as I was planting zucchini and listening to a podcast about the Gamestop stock debacle, I got to thinking about what investments I am making as an urban market gardener.
It won’t come as a surprise that I do not have a 401K at Garden Variety Harvests. But that is one of my explicit company goals: to provide stable employment to myself and a small farm team which accounts for the retirement income so many farmers are never able to save or use or even imagine. I think farmers and farm workers deserve that sort of dignity and stability late in life just as much as any other cog in the global economic machine.
But the investments I am making at this 1.2-man show stage of the farming game tend to be short-term and edible. It occurs to me that every planting of a 30-foot-long garden bed in the farm network represents an investment in the near future. I am putting time and resources into the pot about 150 times a year hoping each sowing will yield a few hundred bucks to keep the farm going and growing. And the thing I like most about this scale of investing is the fact that I have influence on how it all plays out. It’s almost like I’m insider trading, knowing that I’ll do all the weeding, feeding, treating, shading and covering necessary to successfully get those veggies to market. It’s much more my speed than the Dow Jones.
I look forward to longer-term investments in my farming future. Things like permanent washing infrastructure, high tunnels, perennials that will last decades into the future and feed families in perpetuity. We could call those sorts of wagers “FarmCoin” and launch a new cryptocurrency, perhaps. And with any luck and a bit of diligence, we’ll find our forever farm and start stacking the FarmCoin investments in the near future with our allies at the Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons.
I encourage you to make some investments in your own garden this planting season! You ought to strike while the iron is hot (or the soil temperature is above 50 degrees)! And with a little water, patience and sunshine your investment is likely to pay off!
