In a Procrastination Rut

Within my available memory, I cannot remember not being a procrastinator. As far as deadlines and responsibilities are concerned, my life is one of constantly self-imposed anxious rushing about. Whether it is work, school, farming, paying bills, or whatever, I wait until the last minute, putting off for tomorrow or the next day what would have best been done today. Once when I was still a grad student, I complained about my habit of putting off grading papers until the very last minute so that I had to stay up all night grading forty-five of them all at once rather than doing six or seven of them a night for a week. The professor that I was complaining to told me that for the forty years he had been teaching every time he got a batch of papers or exams to grade he said the same thing, and for forty years he had ended up staying up all night grading them all at once.

The weather lately has been beautiful, much warmer and sunnier than it usually is this time of year. My list of projects is huge. I have acres of pig fencing to put up. I need to prepare an area behind the barn for the walk-in freezer that I bought. I need to finish putting the grain bin together and stand it up. I need to build shelters. I need to service the tractor and grease the manure spreader. I need to advertise the mulch hay in the barn and finish cleaning out the chaff. I’ve got to build chick brooders — not to mention order chicks!

However, I am in a serious procrastination rut. I just keep putting it all off. The grass is already growing! I’ve got to get moving, and yet I can’t get myself to. It is as if my feet are cemented to the ground. Sometime within the next couple of weeks, this is all going to come to a head and I am going to have no choice but to do it all at once. I will have forced myself into a position of needing to work myself half to death when all of this time I could have just been picking projects off a bit at a time at a nice leisurely pace. Why, oh why, do I do this to myself every spring; why do I have to suffer from this stupid, infernal procrastination?

 

Michael Pollan, Author, CA (CORRECTION)

NOTE: On a whim, I decided to e-mail the blog post below to Michael Pollan, and it is a good thing that I did. His assistant replied to me and told me that he does not live in Connecticut and California. He lives only in California. I replied to her and told her that she should have the people over at the Food Declaration correct Pollan’s entry on the endorsements page. Please note that I would like my critique of the movement, especially its “leadership” to stand. The Michael Pollan thing was just a spring board for the critique. What I should do is rewrite it using Alice Waters’ recent comment in response to the high prices of sustainably produced food that basically, and I am paraphrasing here, poor people should stop complaining and just give up their “third pair of Nikes” and their IPods if they want to eat sustainably produced food.

This morning I was introduced to the Food Declaration by one of the blogs I was reading. I am subscribed to a pretty extensive list of blogs, and the link to the Food Declaration opened in another window, which I didn’t look at until I was finished reading the blogs, so I don’t know which blog referred me to it. Sorry.

Anyway, as I was looking over the list of people who have endorsed the Food Declaration, I came across this entry: “Michael Pollan, Author, CT/CA.” For those of you who do not know, Michael Pollan is an author and professor of journalism. His most famous book to date is The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an excellent book that everybody should read. Pollan is not only an endorser of the declaration; he is one of the thirteen “original framers” of the declaration.

I do not doubt Michael Pollan’s commitment to the principles of the declaration. Nor do I seek to undermine the value of his extremely important, timely, and necessary contributions to the ongoing conversation about our farming and food systems. However, what I would like to point out is the degree to which there is for the movement a potentially deadly blind spot on the part of many of its “leaders” and adherents, and that blind spot appears in stark relief at the end of Pollan’s endorsement entry: “Michael Pollan, Author, CT/CA.” That is Connecticut and California. Michael Pollan lives in Connecticut and California, two states separated by 3,000 miles.

How can it be possible for a movement for just, humane, and ecological farming and food systems to be successful if some of its most visible advocates are mired in a culture in which it is not just acceptable, but ordinary to “live” in two places, separated by a distance of 3,000 miles? This is a culture that cannot see through its blind spot to the reality of the ways in which such behavior in fact makes the acquisition of the goals of the movement impossible. The social, political, economic, and ecological relations that underpin such a thing are relations that militate against the success of the movement. Such a thing requires social inequality. Such a thing requires political inequality. Such a thing requires economic inequality. Such a thing requires the subjugation of ecology.

The blind spot, then, is the ways in which the question of farming and food systems cannot be disentangled from the infinity of our social, political, economic, and ecological relations. It is impossible to change our farming and food systems to bring them in line with the principles of the declaration without at the same time recognizing the infinite interconnections between those systems and the total horizon of our individual and collective experiences.

If it is possible, not just possible, but more or less ordinary, for a person to live in Connecticut and California, then it can only be ordinary for a pepper to be grown in California and sold in Connecticut; it can only be ordinary for urban slums to be devoid of fresh produce; it can only be ordinary for inequality in our schools; it can only be ordinary to have huge numbers of poor people and tiny numbers of rich people; it can only be ordinary for the continued rampant mining of the planet’s resources; it can only be ordinary that we have nothing but lip-service masquerading as a movement.

Michael Pollan and the rest of us must choose between paying lip service and making change.

 

Overwhelmed

Between off-farm work and farm work, I am totally overwhelmed. I just can’t get caught up. Now to top it off, pasture mowing season is here. Ugh. The only “other way” I would have it is to be free of the off-farm work. Anybody want to be my patron?

To do:

• Build a portable coop for the broiler chicks (by next week when they are ready to go out on pasture)
• Prepare the area to receive the grain bin, which involves dismantling part of the barn (by this weekend when I pick the grain bin up)
• Pick up the grain bin this weekend
• Mow fourteen acres of pasture (I am mowing every few weeks this year to control weeds — we really need to lime)
• Build a new shelter for the sheep, and one that the lambs won’t destroy by climbing all over
• Finish the laying hens’ coop
• Build a permanent chick brooder room onto the back of the barn large enough to brood 100 (200?) chicks
• Move the pigs’ shelter into the newly opened pasture paddock; install a back fence to keep them out of the old paddock
• Move the laying hens to the paddock the pigs vacated
• Do the 300-hour service on the tractor
• Get the old lawn mower started so the guy who wants to buy it will buy it
• Garden — at least a little