Farmers fret a lot, whether we’re sitting in the diner or standing up at a public meeting. It’s just the way we’re built. We will never admit that things are basically okay and there’s a chance we’ll get by. Just saying a thing like that out loud would invite a funnel cloud onto the property.
We’ve had an exceptionally cold wet spring in our part of the world and now it looks like the hay will never come off. I called my dairy farmer friend in Australia to wish him a happy birthday and found him grappling with world milk prices in the tank, the worst drought in living memory and a five foot very poisonous black snake in his shop. He was incredibly stressed and there was nothing I could do to help.
“I’ve never had a year like this,” he moaned. “My dad farmed for 50 years and he dealt with low prices, crop failures, drought, grassfires and snakes but never all in the same year. How can this be happening?”
It’s fine for my wife to scold me and say, “Quit worrying! You always find enough hay to get through the winter.” Always means nothing to a farmer. Just because you got away with it for 30 years doesn’t mean you’re going to get away with it this season. After all, this year could be the Black Swan.
That’s an expression that came out of Europe. For thousands of years people believed there was no such thing as a black swan because no one had ever seen one. Black swans did not exist. Then a Dutchman sailed around to the west side of Australia for the first time and guess what he found? Black swan. He brought it home and showed it to the bird experts and they had to say, “Wow! Who knew?” So the expression means something you thought would never happen is happening right now; you are totally unprepared for it and you could be crushed like a bug. Black Swan moments happen to farmers all the time.
The term has come back into use in our time since a book came out written by an academic, Nassim Taleb, who predicted the financial meltdown of 2008. He noticed that humans have an incredibly bad record of predicting significant events. Nobody imagined the financial system would collapse in 2008. Nobody thought the tech bubble would burst or saw the Internet coming, or the light bulb or the printing press. Every one of those things was not only possible, it turned the world upside down.
Taleb said the best defence against this uncertainty is ‘robust preparedness’ and an understanding that our best trait is our ability to cope with change when it comes.
History also gives us a good example of robust preparedness. There was an ancient Roman named Seneca, who was a very powerful man, successful in business, close friend to the emperor but . . . he must have had a farm background because he was always terrified that something out there was going to sneak up on him and ruin everything he had built. He knew he was pretty good at adapting to whatever the world threw at him, but he also knew he was terrible at predicting what might happen. He decided the answer was to prepare himself mentally for disaster.
So he learned this little trick. Every night before he went to sleep he would pretend he had been shipwrecked and lost everything. He knew how to do this because he had survived a shipwreck once in real life. So he re-lived that shipwreck every night before he went to sleep and persuaded himself that he was destitute. Next morning he would wake up rich again and he always felt great.
That’s what a farmer has to learn to do. Think of the worst and be surprised or even relieved when it doesn’t happen. It’s a form of robust preparedness and it worked for Seneca.
Actually it didn’t.
Seneca got on the wrong side of a palace plot, was arrested for treason and the emperor sentenced him to death. He went home, ran a warm bath and slit his wrists. His last words were, “Holy flinging particles, I didn’t see that one coming . . . ”
Only it was in Latin. But you get the idea.