Farmer Philosophy CornerMore than likely if you asked us about our trip to Puebla, we mentioned playing Chinese checkers at a tiny cafe in Tlatlauquitepec called Chipi Chipi (the namesake of the late Chipi Chipi the cat). Well, we have continued to play Chinese checkers frequently, sometimes right before bed and sometimes right before we go to the farm, which is a really nice way to start the day off having fun… And since it is only for fun, it only made sense to start watching Youtube videos on Chinese checkers strategy. I have never been particularly good at finding what I want on the internet, and this was no different- there is a real scarcity of Chinese checkers strategy information. Which is how I found myself watching an (11 minute) obscure video of a man and his wife playing Chinese checkers. They were playing with different rules so I wasn’t really sure why I was watching, but then while he was talking about getting blocked, he said this: “If you find yourself getting angry when you get blocked try to ask your opponent to block you more and more just so you can get used to the idea that you’re being blocked” To be honest, I don’t really get angry when I get blocked in the game, so I didn’t consider applying this strategy. But a few days later we were opening a few beds of turnips and bokchoy, and found severe damage from what we think is a flea beetle. It’s so disappointing to open beds of vegetables to find them destroyed beyond recovery- it’s the work you put in advance (composting, broad forking, shaping, seeding, transplanting, watering) all to find you weren’t checking in enough to catch the pest before it destroyed your crop. Immediately this advice “try to ask your opponent to block you more and more” came to my mind. It is such a different mindset, to say ‘come at me one more time’. It puts you in a place where you are preparing yourself in multiple ways for the attack, the block, the infestation. Come again, flea beetle, (I said in my head- I am not ready to speak that kind of wish), but this time we will be prepared. As farmers we are not strangers to preparing for loss- seeding extras of everything, planting more than our expected harvest, and budgeting for projects that we have no idea what they’ll be but can almost guarantee will be necessary. But as much as these are practices we have developed, I would never have considered welcoming the pests as a means to develop alternative paths of growing food. When I think about it, through our various pests and set backs at the farm we’ve been pushed down paths that just seem a given to us now. When we were filling 5 gallon buckets of snails off the crops, we were forced to find a way to deal with them, which lead us down the path of Korean Natural Farming techniques where we brew our own pesticide and make our own soap (which is how we now have soap at the farmstand). When the Begrada beetle attacked all of San Diego County’s brassicas (kale, broccoli, bok choy), we learned about insect netting which has been a great investment over the coverings we used to use that were cheaper but only lasted a season. Now that we have permeable insect netting we are able to use overhead irrigation, which is much more even and prevents a lot of the crop loss we used to see. I’m not sure I am ready to ask for nature to block our potentially bountiful harvests via pest infestations. But I do think hearing this little nugget of advice from Landry the youtuber, who shared his Chinese checkers strategies, has hit a chord that makes us check in, confront our obstacles and feel a little gratitude that it’s not only our successes that move us forward.
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