How Parenting Made Us Better Cannabis Farmers
When we became parents, we were prepared for our lives to change precipitously, but one transformation we didn’t expect was up-leveling as farmers and small business owners. Here’s what we learned:
Efficiency
Time is our most precious resource as parents and small business owners, respectively and it diminishes exponentially together. Our priorities of maximizing time with our little one and running our business are coequal. Farming and parenthood both involve the complicated coordination of a dynamic set of sequential and repetitive tasks. Things to cut and consolidate become apparent quickly when you constantly recalibrate your daily to-do lists. However, our biggest time saver has been the evisceration of procrastination. It's amazing how little you procrastinate when you don’t have a choice. When you’re not on your schedule, you must make the most of every minute you have.
Finding enjoyment in cyclical and required tasks
Pulling tarps for light dep twice a day; Rocking your overtired, teething baby back to sleep in the middle of the night: there’s no way around it, so find something to enjoy about it. What's on the plus side of pulling a 100-pound tarp over a 96-foot-long hoop back and forth every day? It's a killer arm and core workout—a cannabis farm boot camp, if you will. It also allows us a modicum of control over our yearly harvest so that not all our eggs are in one basket. Our little one isn’t going to be little forever: while these moments are tiresome, they are fleeting. At the end of the day, we are still living our hippie dreams raising our baby on an organic farm.
Rediscovering joy and wonder in the world
A baby sees the world with the wonder and fascination of first exposure. Seeing the world reflected in their eyes, actions, and enthusiasm reminds you how trippy the world is. After 6 years of weathering the tides of Washington’s Cannabis industry, our little one reminded us how lucky we are to be doing this and sharing it with him. Babies don’t see play and work as different things so it’s a reminder that the line isn’t so clear for adults either.
Increasing the urgency with which we care for the planet
While the desire to pass on living on this planet to the next generation is applicable regardless of your procreative status, it becomes more actualized and urgent when you have a little personified being whom you are crazy about. Climate change is real and urgent; doing what we can with the time we are given to mitigate that is the only conceivable legacy we could leave. We spent the winter deepening our vermicompost practice and exploring regenerative methods of propagation. Our goats and turkeys overwintered on our cannabis field, adding tons of regenerative organic fertilizer and microbes back into our soil. They’re also an herbicide-free method of controlling weeds and the other pests that come with overgrowth. We aren’t as carbon negative as we want to be yet, but we are making the incremental changes to make that happen.
No more powering through 16-hour days
When things got tough, we just worked harder. 100-hour weeks; no days off. We couldn’t go anywhere during lockdown, so we just worked more, thinking we were taking care of ourselves by spending more time outside, receiving the mental health benefits of gardening, and working off our anxiety. We became workaholics. Adults are great at ignoring their needs and powering through, but babies aren’t. Our first-year farming with baby changed our work habits for the better. We took frequent breaks for naps and feedings and playing. And guess what? The line between work and play blurred for us, too.