New Years Reset, The Comfort Crisis
A slower pace to end 2024. Amy and the kids have enjoyed a pause on homeschooling through the holidays. While pushing pause with farming through the holidays is not an option, I did tap the breaks and slow down the pace, accomplishing little more than necessary. Now it’s time to get back in gear.
On Monday we had a big cattle round up, herding over 100 head into the barn to sort out some of the bigger end that will be harvested later this spring. We also sorted out 16 of the nicest heifers to breed and keep as momma cows. After the sorting was done, we turned them back out in their different groups, hauling the replacement heifers down the road to go with the momma cows and calves.
Later in the week we borrowed a bull from my dad to turn out with our fall calving cows and the heifers to breed.
We still have some stockpiled pasture to graze, but it requires a lot of fence work. The hurricane destroyed patches of fences all over the farm. Rotational grazing our cattle means that our pastures are not all being grazed at once. While some fields are being grazed, other fields are not, allowing the pasture to rest in between grazings. So when fences were damaged with Helene, our primary focus was to fix the fences wherever the cattle were at the time. Having a lot of fields without cows in them meant that fixing those fences wasn’t super high priority. Until now. Before moving the herds through the remaining stockpiled pastures, fence fixing must be done. In some cases the fences are too far gone to repair, resorting to running a temporary electric wire to define boundaries.
I welcome the New Year. Some folks aren’t big on New Year’s resolutions, but I am. I need a reset. Not just individually but as a family and a farm. It’s a good chance to evaluate how we did with last year’s goals. And then make adjustments. Some things we did pretty good at. Some things not so good. The changes we desire to make in our lives won’t magically happen if we don’t intentionally resolve to make them. I’m sure we will fail at meeting many of this year’s goals and resolutions. But we are still going to pursue them. I’d rather try and fail than not try at all.
Some of my personal resolutions have to do with making myself uncomfortable. I don’t want to grow weak and complacent, taking the comforts of the world for granted. While feeding cows on the tractor, I started listening to The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. Here’s a couple quotes from what I’ve listened to so far:
“Most people today rarely step outside their comfort zones. We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature controlled, overfed, under challenged, safety netted lives. And it’s limiting the degree to which we experience our ‘one wild and precious life.’”
“A radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best, physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder, after experiencing the same discomforts that our early ancestors were exposed to everyday. Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems…”
“Constant comfort is a radically new thing for us humans…. Our ancestors lives were intimately intertwined with discomfort. These people were constantly exposed to the elements… Today most of us live at 72 degrees, experiencing weather only during the two minutes it takes us to walk across the parking lot or from the subway station to our offices. Americans now spend about 93% of our time indoors in climate control.”
Have a good week.
Will