Buena Vista Farm update - process and people

10 months ago

I love what I do, and am doing, often I wish I had more time to do all of it. I have two main techniques, since I haven't yet figured out how to squeeze more than 24 hours out of my days, pruning and delegation. I've talked about pruning in the past, eliminating non-priority tasks, but today is a post about delegation.

This is don German, nicknamed 'Amarillo', so we sometimes call him don Yellow. He's been working with us four days a week around the farm, and we are really thrilled to be working with him.

We have, over the years, had quite a lot of trouble figuring out how to work with people and who to work with. This has been a big challenge, for several reasons. First, if I can spare the time to be the foreman, most anybody who is reasonably laborious works fine. But its precisely that I don't have the time to spend all day doing these tasks that I want to hire people. After all, when I have the time, I love this work!

So we need people that can be self-motivated to do what we tell them, without me being there. Which brings us to the next issue - what we do isn't normal!

Anyone with experience, when left to their own devices, will naturally start doing what they know, and not what we tell them. This has been a huge issue for the last ten years. But now with don Yellow, we are happy, because he has never worked on a farm before!

He has many happy memories of farm living from when he was a child, but don Yellow has been a barista for almost 40 years, of a popular local coffeeshop. His shop was shut down recently by the owner of the building, and he is currently working through a legal case against the owner. I'm not sure all the details, just that don Yellow is pretty confident that the owner owes him some money.

In the meantime, he is enjoying working with us around the farm. And we enjoy working with him in our contour system.

It takes special care to clean a contour that has many things planted in it. After several months, it can appear to the untrained eye to be simply 'monte', but there are patterns and designs there that must be respected, or years of work can easily be lost.

Don Yellow has picked this up, and not only that, he really seems impressed by what we are doing! This makes me feel good, not just someone who can do what we say, but someone who 'gets it'!

Imagine walking into a foresty area, speckled by patches of trees, overgrown with undergrowth, and dozens if not hundreds of different species of plants. Your tools are a machete in one hand, and a hooked 'garabato' in the other, made from guava or guamo wood most likely.

Its not hard to find a person who will chop the forest down (tumbar monte), but to find someone who will identify a group of guamo seedlings, that can be transplanted and sold through our nursury, this is rare indeed!

If that was the only thing to look out for, maybe its easy, but training someone to watch for many things of varying sizes - some planted and some emergent - its a challenge! We have had more success developing heuristical models than explaining the specifics of ever step.

In fact, this is the backbone of @ecoinstante's masters thesis.

In the end, there is no end, its a process that never stops. But it is beautiful, and much of the beauty comes from figuring out the right ways to communicate to other humans the ideas, dreams and conceptsnin our heads. Finding the right person can help a lot in that process.

And the results are often spectacularly beautiful as well.

We've come a long way over almost 10 years on our farm, centro de investigación Finca Buena Vista. And we have a lot to share including lessons learned, communication methods developed, techniques and strategies, and plenty of beautiful pictures.