Farm Flooding: It Takes a Village

The wet summer continues.

I read a book this winter called The Stoic Challenge by William B. Irvine. The book, while brief, gives pointers on how to deal with adversity. To boil it down to a central idea The Stoic Challenge challenges readers to take every problem or setback they face and frame it as a challenge by “the stoic gods.” The goal, is to not let setbacks ruin your mood or your day. The way we choose to frame setbacks determines our reality.

I’m glad I read that book because two summers in a row of intense rainfall, difficult farming conditions, and high disease pressure put my basic stoicism skills to the test. I can’t say I’ve dealt with everything this summer perfectly - the way The Stoic Challenge advises - but I think I’m doing better than last season.

One last bit of context before we get to the flooding: I left on a vacation for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) last Friday, July 18th. In the BWCA there’s no internet, no cell service, and no way to communicate back home. It’s a perfect way for me to stop fretting about the weather, emails, product inventory and everything else technology related. On Tuesday, July 22nd I got back to civilization and promptly checked my messages, email and the weather. Not good.

On Friday evening I saw a huge spot on the radar right over our farm. I knew it was raining hard but I didn’t know how much. I later found out we got about 3.5” of rain in about 2 hours. Our farm is already overly saturated from the frequent heavy rains this season has brought so that wasn’t welcome news. On top of that, I had just planted our fall storage carrots - one of our most important winter crops. Carrots do not like heavy rainfall just after planting.

Then, on Wednesday evening we got a second round of nearly 4” of rain in about 2 hours. Over 7” of rain in less than one week. Not good. Both rainfalls prompted a community response here on the farm. One of our tunnels flooded and it holds one of our most important summer crops: lettuce. With how saturated everything is we knew that we needed to remove that water as fast as possible.

The lettuce tunnel on Thursday morning. So. Much. Water.

Lara - who did an amazing job while I was away - arranged with our neighbors to borrow a pump on Sunday. Huge thanks to the Millers who not only loaned the pump but also helped get it set up and more. The pump worked beautifully removing all the standing water from the tunnel in just a few hours - likely saving our summer lettuce. Of course, the tunnel flooded again on Wednesday evening so Thursday we did the same thing.

We still don’t know if we saved all of the lettuce yet. Time will tell if our lettuce succumbs to disease before it reaches maturity. We do know we vastly improved our odds.

Here’s hoping for a dry August!