Your Starting Place as a Farmer

We don’t often think about how, long ago, the towering and strong trees we see around us in communities and the rows of Christmas trees on farms began as tiny seeds. Much less often, do we think about the people who dedicate their lives to planting and caring for these tress. The first important step in entering the world of farming is understanding and appreciating the basics.

The following is an excerpt from Carving Out a Living on the Land by Emmet Van Driesche. It has been adapted for the web.

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The Basics

The five-minute version of how to prune trees, for instance, is to cut back the top leader and the four branches just below it by about a third or half, which redirects the growth hormone down the stem for that year, causing the trunk to bud out more and produce more branches, leading to a fuller tree. You also need to trim any branches in the top half that extend past the desired shape.

However, individual trees display wildly different growth characteristics, and some need to be pruned aggressively while others almost not at all. How much to prune is also affected by the demand for trees in a given year, and whether you are trying to stall production with heavy pruning (low demand) or speed it up by pruning as little as possible (high demand). Sometimes a tree has two leaders and you need to decide which should stay and which should be cut. Often, pruning is much more about reducing the number of trees and sprouts coming out of each stump so that everything is nicely staggered in size and has enough room to grow evenly. But to do this well you need to anticipate years in advance how much space things will need as they grow and how much space will be freed up by harvesting.

The five-minute version of harvesting greens (most of which are balsam from the same stumps that produce the trees) is to only cut up to half of the growth on a given stump, and to cut branches at a junction to avoid leaving a sharp stub that might poke someone in the eye. Yet how much to cut very much depends on the vigor of the stump in general (basically all branches on weak stumps should be left, while strong stumps with a young tree can be cut back quite hard). If you are carving out a path, it is important to compensate for removing all the branches on one side by leaving all the branches on the opposite side. It is also important to cut long enough branches, as these are more efficient both in the harvesting process and when breaking branches down into smaller pieces to make wreaths. Two- to 4-foot (0.6 to 1.2 m) branches with multiple stems are ideal. How you harvest has a big impact on efficiency as well. You need to choose an area with strong growth (step 1), gather stems into your hand until you can’t hold any more (step 2), and then shift everything to your arm and continue cutting handfuls until your arm is stacked full of branches (step 3), before bringing the armful to the central pile. You need to be able to build a bundle that won’t fall apart when you pick it up and put it down multiple times; to judge, by eye and without a scale, that a bale weighs 50 pounds (pressing down on the pile to feel its spring and thickness); and you need to be able to tie it tightly enough (without breaking the baling twine!) so that it is solid and carries easily. A loose bale feels much heavier than a tight one.

One year’s growth on the trees. These particular balsam tend to grow about a foot a year, but this amount varies with location and from tree to tree. These are ready to be pruned.

Greens also differ tremendously in quality. There is a scale insect that colonizes some trees in the grove, particularly those that are large and overgrown, that you need to be on guard against. Some trees are also simply not as green as others, and this color difference becomes more pronounced during the harvest period of November and December. Certain trees will become more yellow or bronze due to wet soil, making their greens unsuitable for harvest. However these same greens, if harvested before they change (which usually happens mid-November), will remain a perfectly suitable shade of green. So there is a larger strategy of which areas to harvest first that takes into account this change in color of certain trees; the changing needs of different areas of the grove to have the stump skirts pushed back or oversized trees removed to free up smaller, better trees; along with the need for greater efficiency earlier on in the season when there are more demands on my time (meaning areas with easy truck access get harvested first, all else being equal). I also try to maintain a reserve of unharvested greens close to the cabin down at the You-Cut grove so I can always go and harvest a little more if I need it. Some of these factors shift over the years as things change and improve and go through cycles, while some do not, and how I keep track of it all is mostly instinctual at this point.

With harvesting trees, the five-minute version involves using a thin, tall stick to judge if a tree is tall enough, then cutting it down and hauling it out to the staging area. But as with the greens, certain areas need to get cut first before the color changes, while other areas have truck access that deteriorates if the weather remains warm, and without an accurate count of the number of trees that are ready for harvest, I need to judge whether or not I can say yes to wholesale requests that come in by just following my gut sense.

Occasionally a tree is perfect in every way, but most of the time there is something imperfect about it. How much imperfection is acceptable? How much is actually desirable? Cutting a tree swiftly with a handsaw is a skill in itself that requires mastering to be efficient, and in situations where I need to harvest a tree every two minutes (that includes hauling time), I need to make decisions quickly and get it on the ground fast. This means aggressive, accurate cutting. When a tree falls, its top leader can snap off if you aren’t careful, particularly when the weather is below freezing, so you need to control its fall. I try to cut trees in pairs and then haul the pairs to the nearest large trail, where I leave the cut trees scattered like bread crumbs so I can take a quick tally before hauling them out to the staging area.

Staging and loading trees are also nuanced tasks. When piling up the trees, I take extra care to keep all the cut ends visible so I can accurately count how many I have without needing to move them again. If I fail to do this, I inevitably find one or two extras that got hidden at the bottom. As I stage them, it is useful to roughly sort the trees by length, since they come out of the grove in a random order but should get loaded onto the truck with the tallest trees first and the shorter ones on top. I cut trees as close to the actual delivery day as possible, as it is not good for the longevity of the tree to sit around in a pile in the sun, even if temperatures remain cool. Storing them in the shade is better but not always possible on the farm, so I generally try to cut the day of delivery or the day before. Since a full pickup load is twenty-five to thirty-five trees, it is helpful to stage trees in such a way that I can load all of the trees from a given pile at once, without leaving an orphaned tree here or there that needs to be combined with a different pile later on. Finally, it is important to leave piles uncovered, even though you might think that covering a pile with a tarp would shade it. I did that once and the microclimate created just under the layer of the tarp got hot enough to scorch the tree branches in contact with the tarp, killing the needles and ruining a bunch of trees.

The Mindset

What is the value of learning all of this if you are not and never will be a Christmas tree farmer? The value is in being aware, going into a new venture, that every part of a process is worth scrutiny. Everything matters—every tiny aspect of how something is grown or made, how it is marketed and sold, how you keep the books and pay your taxes.

Two life experiences in particular taught me the importance of paying attention to process. The first was my time working on sailing ships. Over the course of seven years, I periodically volunteered and then worked professionally on sailing ships ranging from historic replicas to oceanographic research vessels. On these ships, there are many wrong ways to do things and only one right way. Very specific habits have been passed down from one generation of sailors to the next, habits that have been honed over centuries of storms and accidents and learning from mistakes. How to handle rope, plot a course, manage sails, scrub the deck, give and repeat commands—all of these things matter. On farms, the right way to perform any given task is rarely as fixed, but the belief from my sailing years that such a way is just waiting to be discovered has fueled much of my approach.

The dogs playing in the snow by our side porch. Al rented the house as two units, each with an upstairs and downstairs. Our half was the portion to the left, which faced up the meadow and across the driveway to the barn.

The second life experience was working on a relatively new farm in western Massachusetts, the one that my wife and I left to move into the blue-gray house. The work culture there was very different from that of sailing ships; because the farm was both young and evolving rapidly (they had recently started a dairy), not every task had a particular prescribed way to do it yet. But the farmers pushed for and expected efficiency in all actions, so during the two years we worked there, it became ingrained in me to constantly, almost subconsciously, analyze processes to make them more streamlined. Some refinements were on a broad time scale, like what crops to plant and where for the most efficient rotation or use of greenhouse space. Others were more minute-to-minute, details of how to milk cows and wash the milking cans and apparatus. When we started, it took me an hour and a half to milk four cows and do all the cleaning up. By the middle of that first season, even as more cows freshened, I could milk twelve cows and clean up in under an hour. Every step was purposeful, but I was not rushing.

This efficiency mindset is one of the most valuable things you can bring to any business you choose to start.

Often, it can be the difference between failure and success. Training yourself to scrutinize every part of a process for ways you can make it better is a habit that will serve you well throughout your life no matter what you do. Most of us do this, whether we know it or not, in some aspect of our lives. Wherever you feel the most confident, whether at your job or playing a video game or a sport, whenever you feel on top of your game it is because you have understood and mastered the details.

Recommended Reads

The Epic Saga of the American Chestnut

Inheriting the Earth