Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Mark writes:
We are eagerly anticipating our impending vacation. It has been three years since we’ve been able to travel together for more than a 4-day weekend. With the anticipation comes no small degree of trepidation. Two weeks is a relatively short time. Yet the threat of chaos lurks everywhere on the farm, and we cannot help but worry about it breaking out when we’re not here to beat it back. Even with one highly competent person staying at the house and another coming in to help, I have images of late night calls in Turkey informing us of a sick animal, a raccoon attack, or a great escape. We could eliminate a good part of this concern if we were to travel in January, when there are a lot fewer animals around, but that wouldn’t be a particularly nice time to visit Turkey, which is where we want to go. And if, say, we were in Rajasthan in January, and we learned that a blizzard had prevented someone from getting to the farm and feeding the animals, we’d face the dilemma of knowing that we couldn’t exactly hop a plane and be there ourselves in time to do anything about it. I recall reading at least one article in the 1970s about the difficulties farmers had in taking vacations. This was a time of great general distress in the farm sector, with Midwestern farms going under at a high rate and farmer suicides in the news. Programs were instituted to get farmers off the farm to recharge by bringing in people competent enough that the farmers would feel comfortable leaving and allowing someone else to cover for them.
I googled “farmers taking vacation” to see the current state of things. Were there still the same concerns about agri-holic farmers and, if so, what were the solutions? What came up on the initial pages was one blog post about why farmers don’t take vacations, but dozens of articles about and advertisements for farm stays as vacations. And not just stays, but actually getting to work while you stay. Mucking out barns, stacking hay bales, feeding the critters, harvesting and kitchen duty can all be part of your get-away from the pressures of your workplace. My how times have changed. We knew some people viewed farm work as relaxing. Years ago we worked out a farm-sitting arrangement with a wonderful woman, Becky Ferguson, who seemed to thrive on these getaways. When her work life no longer offered such flexibility, we figured that was the last of a great run. But maybe we’ve been looking at it all the wrong way. For some, farming is vacationing. If working on the farm is, in fact, a vacation, then we don’t really need a break because we are almost always (in Peter’s case) and something less than half the time (in my case) on vacation already. Well, there is an element of truth to this. Farm work is restorative. A certain zen calm overtakes me when I’m weeding the vegetable garden, and if the turkeys all troop in at night without protest, I feel that all is right with the world. Farm work must be a sort of serotonin booster. But after careful consideration, I’ve determined that we do need a vacation from our vacation. Even bliss loses its charm if uninterrupted by something that contrasts. So we are going. If, however, any readers would like to tote a few sacks of grain to the animals or clean the chicken coop in our absence, we’d be happy to give you that vacation opportunity free of charge. —Mark Scherzer
