Tyler Kern

Author: Tyler Kern

  • Wandering in Place

    Wandering in Place

    For most of the last decade, I assumed the direction of my life had a natural progression. I am a farmer, and although the details were sometimes hazy, having my own farm one day seemed like the ideal destination. I spent years building the skills I thought I would need: vegetable production, irrigation, hoophouses, equipment, crop planning, organic certification, recordkeeping, marketing, grants, and all the less glamorous systems that keep a small farm functioning.

    There is a line from Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America that has stuck with me for years:

    “No farther. This is the place.”

    I’ve always found that idea deeply appealing: to stop looking perpetually over the horizon, choose a place, learn it deeply, take responsibility for it, and build a life there.

    And right now I’m doing almost exactly the opposite.

    After spending months moving between farms in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, I’m less certain than I’ve ever been that owning one farm is what I actually want. That creates some conflict for me, because I haven’t fallen out of love with farming. I haven’t even stopped farming. If anything, I’m more certain that agriculture needs to remain a major part of my life. I’m just becoming less certain that owning one farm is the only way to build a life around it.

    The Appeal of “This Is the Place”

    For most of the last decade, I assumed the direction of my life had a natural progression. I am a farmer, and although the details were sometimes hazy, having my own farm one day seemed like the ideal destination. I spent years building the skills I thought I would need: vegetable production, irrigation, hoophouses, equipment, crop planning, organic certification, recordkeeping, marketing, grants, and all the less glamorous systems that keep a small farm functioning.

    There is a line from Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America that has stuck with me for years:

    “No farther. This is the place.”

    I’ve always found that idea deeply appealing: to stop looking perpetually over the horizon, choose a place, learn it deeply, take responsibility for it, and build a life there.

    And right now I’m doing almost exactly the opposite.

    After spending months moving between farms in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, I’m less certain than I’ve ever been that owning one farm is what I actually want. That creates some conflict for me, because I haven’t fallen out of love with farming. I haven’t even stopped farming. If anything, I’m more certain that agriculture needs to remain a major part of my life. I’m just becoming less certain that owning one farm is the only way to build a life around it.

    WWOOFing Has Shown Me Another Version of Agricultural Life

    One of the unexpected pleasures of WWOOFing has been entering a farm, becoming useful relatively quickly, learning how the operation works, contributing something, and eventually moving on. That is obviously very different from building a relationship with one piece of land over twenty years, but it has its own appeal.

    Over the last several months I’ve been able to:

    • Work with different crops
    • See different tools and production systems
    • Live with farm families
    • Compare how similar problems are solved in different countries
    • Teach techniques I already know
    • Learn practices I had never encountered
    • Work within different climates and landscapes
    • Move between agriculture, cultural exchange, language study, and travel

    I like being experienced enough to contribute while still being new enough to pay attention. There is something energizing about walking onto a new farm and figuring out how it works: Where does the water come from? What is the limiting factor? What breaks repeatedly? Which jobs consume too much labor? What does this farmer care about? What are they unusually good at?

    I find myself constantly asking what I can learn and where I can help. That curiosity may be telling me something about the kind of agricultural life that suits me.

    I Like Being Useful More Than I Like Being in Charge

    I’ve always valued autonomy, and part of wanting my own farm was wanting control over my work. I still want that, but I’m realizing that autonomy doesn’t necessarily require controlling an entire operation. What I seem to enjoy most is having enough independence and experience to solve meaningful problems.

    Sometimes that means:

    • Improving a workflow
    • Helping design irrigation
    • Building a hoophouse
    • Troubleshooting equipment
    • Helping a beginning farmer think through a production problem
    • Writing a grant that makes an infrastructure project possible
    • Building a spreadsheet or website that saves somebody time
    • Showing someone a tool or technique that changes the labor equation

    Those can be relatively small interventions, but they can have a large effect. I can also do them without carrying every responsibility that comes with owning the farm myself.

    Maybe Consulting Isn’t Separate From Farming

    For a while, I thought of consulting and technical work as things I might do to support farming financially. I’m beginning to think that may be backwards. Perhaps consulting can itself be one of the ways I participate in agriculture.

    I have an unusual combination of experience:

    • More than a decade of farming
    • A background in software development
    • Hands-on infrastructure experience
    • Organic certification experience
    • Grant writing and research
    • Websites and digital systems
    • Beginning-farmer mentoring
    • International farm experience

    None of those things individually defines what I want to do. Together, though, they suggest a role I find increasingly interesting: the person farmers call when there is a messy problem that doesn’t fit neatly into one category.

    That still feels like agricultural work to me. Maybe even more so than spending every winter trying to sell next year’s CSA shares.

    The Part Berry Makes Difficult

    This is where I can’t completely dismiss that line: “No farther. This is the place.” There are things movement simply cannot give me.

    I can arrive at a farm and understand a lot fairly quickly, but I don’t know that place the way somebody knows it after twenty seasons. I didn’t build the soil. I don’t remember when that tree was planted or what happened in that field ten years ago. I won’t necessarily be there to find out whether a decision that looks good today still looks good five years from now.

    There is a depth of knowledge—and responsibility—that only comes from staying. That matters to me.

    I also don’t want to turn mobility into another version of constantly believing that whatever is over the next hill must be better. There will always be another country, another farm, another language, another interesting person, and another possibility. At some point, choosing one thing means giving up the others.

    That is the part of Berry’s argument that still bothers me in a productive way.


    But I’m Not Ready to Stop Moving Yet

    At the same time, I like what movement is giving me right now. More specifically, I like living temporarily in rural places.

    I like:

    • Staying long enough to develop routines
    • Working with people instead of only visiting them
    • Learning languages
    • Eating with families
    • Hearing people’s stories
    • Seeing how agriculture changes with climate and cuisine
    • Comparing tools and production systems
    • Being pointed toward places tourists rarely visit
    • Becoming useful somewhere unfamiliar

    Importantly, I’m not sacrificing farming to do those things. The farming is what makes much of it possible.

    A farm of my own would give me roots. This life gives me something else: the ability to keep farming while moving between places, people, cultures, and agricultural systems. Right now, I’m not sure I’m ready to trade that for permanence.

    There may also be a version of my life that doesn’t require permanently choosing between rootedness and movement. Maybe it looks something like:

    • A season working intensively on a farm
    • A period of consulting
    • Time abroad
    • Writing
    • Technical projects
    • Another growing season somewhere else

    That would have sounded unfocused to me a few years ago. Now it sounds increasingly coherent.


    There Are Things This Life Cannot Give Me

    I don’t want to romanticize the alternative either. Moving between farms has obvious limitations. I don’t get the same long-term feedback, see soil improve over ten years because of my management, plant an orchard and watch it mature, or build the same depth of knowledge about one piece of land. I also don’t experience the satisfaction of creating an operation whose culture and systems are truly my own.

    Ultimately, there is a difference between advising someone and being the person who has to live with the outcome. That responsibility has value, and there may still come a point when I want it. I’m just less interested in forcing myself toward ownership because it seems like the proper conclusion to a farming career.

    I Haven’t Given Up on the Farm

    This isn’t an announcement that I will never own land. I still imagine it sometimes: a small place with good soil, enough infrastructure to work efficiently, a greenhouse, a workshop, and maybe an acre or two of serious production.

    But the image has become less rigid. I no longer need that farm to prove that I became a “real” farmer. I already am one. If my future involves helping ten farms instead of owning one, I’m starting to think that could be just as legitimate—and maybe more interesting, at least for me.

    The Dream Changed Shape

    For a while, I thought owning a farm was the destination. Now I’m starting to think farming may be the constant while the form around it changes.

    I want agriculture and rural communities in my life. I want physical work and problems worth solving. I want enough independence to choose work I believe matters, and I want to keep learning from people who farm differently than I do. At least for now, I also want enough freedom to keep moving.

    Maybe those things eventually lead me back to a farm of my own. Maybe someday I reach a place and know: No farther. This is the place.

    Or maybe they lead to a life that moves between farms, countries, seasons, consulting projects, and writing.

    I don’t know yet. A few years ago, that uncertainty would have bothered me.

    Now I think it might be the interesting part.

  • Why I WWOOF as a Farmer

    Why I WWOOF as a Farmer

    I have spent more than a decade farming, so when I tell people that I’m traveling through Asia by volunteering on farms, there is an obvious question: Why?

    I’m not WWOOFing because I need someone to teach me how to weed a row, transplant seedlings, run irrigation, harvest vegetables, or survive a long day outside. I already know how to farm. That turns out not to be the point.

    What keeps me WWOOFing is that farming gives me access to something I care about even more than agricultural technique: rural life.

    I’d Rather Live Somewhere Than Visit It

    Despite my Las Vegas urban roots, I prefer the country. Cities can be interesting, but when I travel I don’t really want to spend months moving from landmark to landmark, eating in restaurants, sleeping in hotels, and observing a place from the outside. I want to know what ordinary life feels like.

    WWOOFing gives me a way into that. I get to:

    • Live where my hosts live
    • Eat what they eat
    • Work beside them
    • Hear how they actually speak
    • Meet their families, friends, neighbors, and other workers
    • Ask locals where I should go instead of relying entirely on travel guides
    • Spend enough time somewhere to develop routines instead of constantly moving on

    That has taken me to temples, mountains, streams, markets, festivals, neighborhood restaurants, small towns, and other places I probably never would have found following a normal tourist itinerary. Some of my favorite experiences have started with someone simply saying, “You should go here.”

    Agriculture Is Close to the Root

    Part of my attraction to rural life is that agriculture sits very close to the root of most settled societies. Human culture obviously existed long before agriculture, but large, specialized societies depend on someone producing enough food that everyone else doesn’t have to spend all of their time producing it.

    Agricultural surplus makes possible things like:

    • Specialized trades
    • Cities
    • Large religious and political institutions
    • Scholarship
    • Art and craftsmanship
    • Large-scale commerce
    • Eventually, all the modern industries that seem very far removed from a farm

    So when I’m trying to understand a place, I’m naturally interested in the people producing its food. A farm tells you a surprising amount about the culture around it:

    • The crops tell you what people eat.
    • The food tells you something about climate, preservation, history, and taste.
    • The machinery tells you something about labor.
    • The size of farms tells you something about land.
    • The age of the farmers tells you something about demographics.
    • The meals tell you what people have valued enough to keep making generation after generation.

    Agriculture isn’t the whole culture, but it’s a solid doorway into it.

    Being Useful Changes the Relationship

    There is a big difference between visiting someone and working beside them. As a tourist, I’m mostly a customer. As a WWOOFer, I have a role. It may be temporary, and I’m still a guest, but I can contribute.

    Depending on the farm, that might mean:

    • Harvesting peppers or corn
    • Weeding
    • Seeding trays
    • Packing produce
    • Fixing something
    • Washing vegetables
    • Moving materials
    • Cleaning up after a job

    Because I already have a lot of farming experience, I can usually become useful pretty quickly. That changes the relationship.

    Conversations happen naturally while working. People explain why they do things a certain way. They complain about things that aren’t working. They joke, give advice, and tell stories that probably never would have come up during a formal farm visit. After enough days of working and eating together, you stop feeling quite so much like an outsider.

    I Get to Experience the Place, Not Just See It

    Language has been another big part of the experience. When you stay with people, you hear the same words and expressions over and over—not just formal language, but instructions, jokes, complaints, filler words, family conversations, local pronunciation, and all the little expressions that rarely make it into textbooks.

    In Japan, this was especially valuable because I had already spent a lot of time studying Japanese. Farm work gave the language context. Words stopped being vocabulary cards and became attached to tools, vegetables, meals, weather, mistakes, and people.

    Even in places where I know far less of the language, living around ordinary conversation changes my sense of how it actually sounds and how people use it. A good host also becomes an informal cultural guide. I can ask:

    • What should I eat here?
    • Where should I go on my day off?
    • Is this place actually worth visiting?
    • What does that expression mean?
    • Is this normal here?
    • What’s the best local restaurant?
    • Why do people do things this way?

    Google Maps has never told me, “My childhood friends are going to the stream this weekend. Come with us.”

    The Best Places Usually Aren’t on a Top Ten List

    One thing I don’t love about conventional travel is how easily everyone gets funneled toward the same places. Search for what to do somewhere and you often get the same temples, viewpoints, restaurants, shopping streets, and photo spots repeated across hundreds of websites.

    There’s nothing wrong with famous places. They’re often famous for a reason. But some of my favorite experiences abroad have been much smaller:

    • A meal someone wanted me to try
    • A local hike
    • A tiny temple
    • A neighborhood market
    • A place to swim
    • A festival
    • A restaurant with no reason to appear in an English-language guide
    • A friend of a host inviting me along somewhere

    Those experiences feel less like consuming a destination and more like temporarily participating in it. That’s much closer to what I want from travel.

    It Makes Long-Term Travel Affordable

    There is also a much less philosophical reason I keep WWOOFing: it’s cheap.

    Long-term travel gets expensive quickly if every night requires paid accommodation and every meal comes from a restaurant. WWOOFing changes the economics. In exchange for work, I typically receive:

    • A place to sleep
    • Meals
    • Access to a kitchen and ordinary household life
    • Local knowledge
    • A built-in social connection
    • Something productive to do

    That makes it possible for me to spend months in a country instead of rushing through it in a couple of weeks, and I think that extra time matters. A place looks different after a month than it does after three days.

    Eventually you have bad weather and boring days. You develop routines, find the grocery store, learn the transportation system, get sick of one food and obsessed with another, and stop trying to maximize every day. You begin recognizing people, and sometimes they begin recognizing you. At some point, the place starts feeling less like a destination and a little more like a temporary home.

    Cheap Does Not Mean Predictable

    WWOOFing also keeps travel adventurous because you never quite know what you’re walking into.

    Sometimes:

    • The room is nicer than expected.
    • There barely is a room.
    • The work is fascinating.
    • The work is incredibly repetitive.
    • You immediately connect with your host.
    • Communication is difficult.
    • You end up on the side of a road with no fuel during a typhoon.
    • You end up at a commercial farm.
    • You end up at a homestead.
    • You end up living at a Buddhist temple.

    The days can also go in directions I never would have planned. I’ve gone from farm work to karate, streams, racetracks, mountain hikes, traditional markets, temples, and even ended up naked in a hot spring with people I had only just met.

    That uncertainty is part of why I like it. I don’t want every part of travel optimized in advance. A little friction creates stories.

    I Still Learn About Farming

    None of this means the farming itself is irrelevant. I’m still paying attention, and because I already have years of experience, I have a lot to compare against.

    I notice:

    • Tools
    • Crop choices
    • Field layouts
    • Labor
    • Irrigation
    • Greenhouses
    • Weed management
    • Harvest practices
    • Marketing
    • Recordkeeping
    • How farms solve recurring problems

    I compare those systems with what I know from the United States and what I’ve now seen in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Sometimes I see something I would copy immediately; sometimes I see something I would never do. Sometimes a practice seems strange until I understand the conditions around it, and occasionally I can contribute something useful from my own experience in return.

    That exchange is more interesting to me than simply collecting techniques. I’m not looking for a secret Asian method of farming that will solve every problem back home. I’m building a larger set of examples of how farmers solve similar problems under very different conditions.

    So Why Keep Doing It?

    WWOOFing lets me travel in a way that matches what I already care about. I like rural places, farm work, eating with people, being useful, hearing how people actually speak, and seeing how ordinary households live. I like getting local recommendations instead of following tourist itineraries. I like traveling slowly, keeping costs low, and not knowing exactly what next week will look like.

    I also like that agriculture gives me a common language even when the spoken language is difficult. I may not know how to say very much, but I understand what it means when rain is coming and something needs to get harvested.

    I already know how to farm, and that may actually be part of why WWOOFing works so well for me. I don’t need every host to teach me the basics. Farming gives me something useful to contribute and a reason to become part of daily life for a little while.

    The farm is the doorway. What I’m really there to learn is the place.

  • What Three Months on Korean Farms Changed for Me

    What Three Months on Korean Farms Changed for Me

    By the time I arrived in Korea, I had already spent more than a decade farming in the United States and three months working on farms in Japan.

    I wasn’t coming to Korea looking for someone to teach me how farming works. I was interested in comparison.

    Which problems are universal? Which solutions only make sense because of local conditions? Which practices would I take home with me, and which ones would I leave exactly where I found them?

    Over the next three months I harvested peppers and corn in Gangwon-do, worked on Korea’s first organic farm in Pocheon, where I learned how gochugaru was processed, and helped make tomato juice, and finally, I arrived at Gucheungam Hermitage at Hwaomsa Temple, where I harvested tea seeds, cut down invasive bamboo between tea trees that were hundreds of years old, and weeded around the hermitage and temples.

    Korea didn’t overturn the way I think about farming – it sharpened some of my existing instincts, complicated others, and gave me a much larger set of examples to compare against what I already knew from Utah and Japan.

    The Work Changes Less Than the Systems Around It

    One of the interesting things about farming abroad is how familiar the work can feel.

    • Seeds still need to be planted
    • Weeds still get ahead of you
    • Something always breaks
    • Weather changes the plan
    • Too much produce becomes ready at exactly the wrong time

    At Yosebi Farm in Inje, we harvested and packed peppers and corn, worked in greenhouses, prepared large orders, cleaned fields, and seeded trays for kimchi cabbage.

    The crops were different from what I was used to in Utah, and the systems around the work were different, but the basic pressures were familiar.

    • There is only so much labor
    • There is only so much time
    • The weather doesn’t care about your plans

    That was also true in Japan.

    After six months of farm work across the two countries, I became more interested in where the differences actually appeared: tools, markets, food culture, land use, labor, infrastructure, and the way farms fit into households and communities.

    The work itself was often the easy part to recognize – the reasons behind it were more interesting.

    Context Matters, but That Doesn’t Mean Everything Is Equally Good

    I have a habit of evaluating work almost automatically.

    • Could this be faster?
    • Is this the right tool?
    • Why are we doing this by hand?
    • Why is this planted here?
    • Is there a simpler way to accomplish the same thing?

    Part of that comes from spending years on a small vegetable farm where labor is always limited. Part of it probably comes from my background in software and systems.

    Korea did not convince me to stop thinking that way.

    At Gucheungam Hermitage, for example, much of the weeding was being done with short hand hoes while sitting on small stools. I eventually found an old long-handled hoe, sharpened it, and started working standing up. I could cover dramatically more ground.

    The result wasn’t as meticulous, but I could kill roughly 80 percent of the weeds in perhaps 20 percent of the time, rake up the larger ones, and move on.

    Other people noticed, wanted to try it, and more long-handled hoes started appearing. At one point I overheard someone call it the “Tyler method,” which was funny considering I had not, in fact, invented hoeing.

    I still think the long-handled hoe was the better tool for much of that work. But traveling has made me more conscious of a useful distinction: Understanding why someone works a certain way and deciding whether there is a better way are two separate questions.

    Context matters.

    That doesn’t mean every existing practice is optimal – sometimes there really is a better tool literally leaning against the wall.

    I Came Away Even More Convinced That Simple Tools Matter

    Korea reinforced something I already believed strongly from farming in Utah Small improvements in tools and workflow can have an outsized effect.

    They also tend to be less exciting than people expect.

    • A sharpened hoe
    • A repair instead of a replacement
    • Doing tasks in a different order
    • Using the right piece of equipment for the scale of the job
    • Keeping a simple system simple

    At Pocheon, I replaced an electrical breaker when the shed lights stopped working. At Gucheungam, the long-handled hoe changed how quickly an entire category of work could be done.

    None of this was innovative technology and is partly the point.

    I have a computer science background and I like technology, but agriculture is very good at reminding me that many of the highest-value improvements are boring.

    • A better tool
    • A clearer process
    • A repair
    • A task eliminated rather than automated

    That was true in Utah. It was true in Japan. Korea gave me more examples.

    Food Explains a Lot About Farming

    I already knew that crop choices are connected to markets and food culture. Living around Korean farms made that relationship harder to treat as an abstraction.

    Peppers are the easiest example.

    I harvested them repeatedly. I saw them dried and milled into gochugaru. I saw jars of doenjang and ganjang aging on farms. Kimchi cabbage went into seedling trays because there was a very specific use waiting for it on the other end. The crops make more sense when you understand the food.

    That becomes especially obvious when comparing Korea with Japan and the United States.

    The same farmer could have the same soil, the same tractor, and the same technical ability, but completely different markets because people expect to eat different things.

    A crop plan reflects agronomy, but it also reflects cuisine, preservation, household habits, and history.

    That’s one reason I became less interested in collecting “Asian farming techniques” as if they could simply be packed into a suitcase and brought home. Techniques live inside larger systems.

    Some Context Is Much Bigger Than the Farm

    One of the more striking experiences I had in Korea wasn’t on a farm where I was staying.

    While at Peace Tree Farm, Won and Kim-seonsaengnim took me to the White Horse Highland battleground near the DMZ.

    Through binoculars I could see North Korean flags in the distance. There were barbed-wire areas marking land that might still contain land mines from the Korean War – and people were farming there.

    Farmers pass through checkpoints to work their fields. I was told that farmers had been injured or killed while reclaiming land after the war.

    It is difficult to look at agricultural land in quite the same way after that.

    A field can be soil, irrigation, yield, labor, and profit – it can also sit inside history.

    That experience was an extreme example, but the broader point showed up repeatedly: farms are shaped by things far outside the field boundary.

    • Land policy
    • War
    • Urbanization
    • Family history
    • Government programs
    • Labor availability
    • Market demands

    A farm is always responding to more than agronomy.

    The People Are What I’ll Remember Most

    For all the agricultural comparisons I made, many of my strongest memories from Korea are still people.

    • Working with Sang-yeong, Eric, and Martin at Yosebi.
    • Spending a weekend with Seong-hyeon and his childhood friends, all now in their 50s – and jumping into the stream together.
    • Being absorbed into multigenerational daily life at Peace Tree Farm with Won and Kim-seonsaengnim, and their children and grandchildren
    • Deep conversations about heavy metal with Sunim (Monk) over tea, learning the fierce affection of Korean grandmothers from Bosalnim, working and eating with the other WWOOFers at Hwaomsa.

    Making new and lasting connections wasn’t entirely new. I had already experienced something similar during three months living with a host family in Japan.

    But Korea reinforced how different this kind of travel is from simply visiting places.

    Work gives you a role. You aren’t only observing someone’s life. For a little while, you are helping with it.

    • You harvest what needs harvesting
    • You carry something
    • You fix something
    • You wash dishes
    • You eat together

    Eventually the relationship stops feeling entirely transactional.

    At Peace Tree especially, leaving felt much less like checking out of accommodation than leaving a household I had temporarily become part of.

    That may have mattered to me more than any particular farming technique I learned.

    Korea Also Made Me Think About What Farms Are For

    I remain very interested in efficiency. I notice wasted movement. I care about labor. I like making systems work better – that didn’t change.

    But spending time at Gucheungam at Hwaomsa Temple gave me a useful contrast. Work there still needed to be done, but output per hour was clearly not the only thing organizing the day. There were meals, ceremonies, visitors, relationships, weather, and the rhythm of the place itself.

    I had shaved my beard before going to the temple and, with my shaved head, kept getting mistaken for a monk. A month later I was pretty certain I was still more farmer than monk.

    Put me in front of a weedy patch of ground and eventually I start calculating how quickly we can get through it. But the experience did reinforce a question worth asking occasionally:

    • Faster for what?

    Commercial farms face real economic pressures. Efficiency matters because labor costs money and crops do not wait. But farms are also places where people are trying to build lives. Those two things do not always point in exactly the same direction.

    What Actually Changed

    Three months in Korea didn’t make me abandon the way I farm or think. If anything, some of my instincts became stronger.

    • I still believe good tools matter enormously
    • I still think labor efficiency deserves serious attention
    • I still think simple systems often outperform complicated ones

    And after seeing similar operational problems appear in Utah, Japan, and Korea, I’m more convinced that much of good farm management comes down to noticing small recurring problems and fixing them before everyone accepts them as normal.

    What changed was the size of my comparison set. I now have more examples against which to test what I already thought I knew.

    A technique can work beautifully because of the conditions around it rather than because it is inherently superior. A practice can also persist simply because it is familiar, even when there is a better option nearby. Both can be true.

    Traveling as a farmer has made me more interested in figuring out which is which.

    I came to Korea as an experienced farmer. I’m leaving as an experienced farmer who has now spent six months working inside agricultural systems very different from the one where I learned to farm. I think that is more valuable than coming home with a notebook full of Korean techniques to copy.

    • There are things I’ll borrow
    • Things I’ll reject
    • Things I’ll probably understand differently years from now

    And when I farm again in the United States, I suspect Korea will show up in small decisions rather than dramatic ones: a tool I choose, a crop I look at differently, a process I simplify, or a moment when I wait a little longer before deciding that somebody else is doing it wrong.

  • More Farmer Than Monk

    More Farmer Than Monk

    I spent about a month at Gucheungam Hermitage, a small Buddhist hermitage above Hwaeomsa Temple on the slopes of Jirisan in South Korea.


    Before arriving, I had shaved my beard. Between the shaved head, simple clothes, and the fact that I was living at a Buddhist hermitage, I kept getting mistaken for a monk.


    After a month there, though, one thing became increasingly clear: I am definitely more farmer than monk.

    A Different Pace


    Much of the weeding around the hermitage was done slowly and meticulously. People sat on little stools or crouched close to the ground with short-handled hoes, working through an area one weed at a time. There was something almost appropriately monastic about it: careful, patient, attentive.


    I could appreciate the approach. If anywhere in the world weeding were to be done this way, would not a buddhist hermitage high in the mountains of Asia be the place?


    But after spending most of my adult life growing vegetables, I also couldn’t stop looking at all that ground and thinking about how much other work needed to be done too.


    Eventually, I found an old long-handled hoe somewhere around the hermitage. It didn’t look like it had been used much.
    I sharpened the edge and started working.

    80% Results with 20% of the Effort


    The difference was immediate. Instead of sitting down and removing weeds individually, I could stand upright and sweep the sharpened blade just beneath the surface of the soil.

    • One stroke killed several weeds
    • A few strokes cleared an entire area
    • I could use a rake to gather the larger weeds, and move on


    The result wasn’t perfect – if someone followed behind me with a hand hoe, they could certainly find weeds I had missed. But that wasn’t really the point.


    My rough way of thinking about it was:
    I could kill 80 percent of the weeds in 20 percent of the time – on a production farm, that’s often a very good trade.
    If you have limited labor and a large area to cover, getting five areas mostly clean can be much more useful than getting one area perfectly clean while the other four disappear under weeds.

    Too Much Credit


    People started noticing how quickly I was moving.
    Then they wanted to try it. More long-handled hoes started appearing from wherever old tools were stored around the hermitage, and other people began working the same way. At one point I overheard someone refer to it as the “Tyler method.”
    That made me laugh.


    I would like the historical record to be clear that I did not invent hoeing. Farmers have been standing upright and killing weeds with hoes for quite a while. If anything, the funny part was that the tool and the technique were already there. All I really contributed was finding an old hoe, sharpening it, and using it for the sort of work it was designed to do.

    Precision vs Speed


    The experience highlighted a distinction I think matters well beyond weeding – hand hoes aren’t bad tools.
    In tight spaces, around valuable plants, against stones, or anywhere that demanded precision, they were probably better than what I was doing.


    The long-handled hoe optimized for something different:
    Speed. That changes the question from: Which tool does the best job? to: What result am I trying to achieve?


    If the goal is immaculate ground, meticulous hand weeding makes sense. If the goal is preventing thousands of weeds from reaching maturity while you have a limited number of people and hours, speed becomes much more important.


    Neither approach is inherently right. They solve different problems.

    The Tool Changes the Job


    What interested me most wasn’t that the hoe was faster. That part is obvious. It was how dramatically changing one simple tool changed the scale at which I could think about the work.


    Sitting on a stool, I was looking at the weeds directly in front of me – standing with a long-handled hoe, I was looking at the whole area. The tool changed my posture, my speed, the amount of ground I could cover, and ultimately the standard of “finished” work that made sense.

    • No engine
    • No chemicals
    • No subscriptions
    • No Wifi or bluetooth

    Just a sharpened piece of steel attached to a slightly longer stick.

    Some of the most valuable improvements I’ve seen in agriculture are like that. They aren’t revolutionary inventions. They’re small changes in tools or workflow that make repeated work substantially easier.

    More Farmer Than Monk


    I learned a lot during my month at Gucheungam, much of it from people whose pace and priorities were very different from what I’m accustomed to on a production farm.

    • There’s value in slowing down
    • There’s value in doing things carefully
    • There’s value in work that isn’t measured in output per hour


    But apparently, even after shaving my beard and spending a month getting mistaken for a monk, you can put me in front of a weedy patch of ground and my farmer brain is still going to start calculating how quickly we can get through it.


    I came to Korea partly because I wanted to learn how other people live and work. At Gucheungam I was reminded that exchange goes both ways.

    • Sometimes you bring home a new technique
    • Sometimes you leave one behind
    • Sometimes you accidentally get your name attached to a farming practice that probably several thousand years old.

  • Small Farms Should Use Less Software

    Small Farms Should Use Less Software

    I have a computer science degree, spent several years writing software, and have spent more than a decade working on small organic vegetable farms.

    Those two experiences have left me with a slightly inconvenient opinion:

    • Small farms often need less software, not more.

    That probably sounds strange coming from someone who also helps farms and agricultural organizations with websites, technology, spreadsheets, and digital systems. But the longer I’ve worked in both farming and technology, the more convinced I’ve become that software is rarely the first thing that needs fixing.

    Usually, the system underneath it does.

    A New Tool Won’t Fix an Unclear Process

    Small farms are complicated operations.

    There are crops to plan, seeds to order, employees to coordinate, harvest records to keep, labels to print, customers to communicate with, grants to manage, equipment to maintain, events to organize, and bills to pay.

    When one of those processes becomes messy, it’s tempting to look for an app.

    There probably is one.

    There are farm-management platforms, project-management systems, CRMs, inventory tools, scheduling apps, bookkeeping integrations, form builders, marketing platforms, and software specifically designed for almost every agricultural task imaginable.

    But buying software before understanding the actual problem often just creates a more complicated version of the same problem.

    If three people record information differently, putting that information into an app doesn’t automatically make it consistent.

    If nobody knows who is responsible for updating a crop plan, moving the crop plan into a prettier interface doesn’t solve that.

    If the real problem is that a task has seven unnecessary steps, digitizing all seven steps isn’t much of an improvement.

    Sometimes the most valuable technology decision is deciding not to add another piece of technology.

    Software Has an Ongoing Cost

    The price of software matters more on a small farm than it does in a large organization.

    Ten dollars a month doesn’t sound like much. Neither does twenty or thirty.

    But subscriptions accumulate.

    A website platform, bookkeeping system, email service, farm-management application, scheduling tool, cloud storage account, point-of-sale system, and a few specialized services can quietly become hundreds or thousands of dollars per year.

    And subscription pricing rarely stays fixed forever.

    That doesn’t mean paid software is a bad investment. A tool that saves several hours of labor every month can easily pay for itself.

    But the question should be whether the tool is actually creating enough value to justify becoming another permanent operating expense.

    I’m especially cautious about paying for sophisticated software to solve a problem that could be handled almost as well by a spreadsheet or another tool the organization already pays for.

    I Like Spreadsheets More Than I Probably Should

    I’ve built software professionally, but a surprising amount of useful work on farms can be handled with a spreadsheet.

    That isn’t because spreadsheets are sophisticated. It’s because they’re flexible, understandable, and easy to change.

    A spreadsheet can become a crop plan, harvest record, contact list, event roster, planting schedule, grant budget, seed inventory, or label database without requiring someone to learn an entirely new system.

    More importantly, people will actually use them.

    That last part matters.

    The technically best system is not always the practically best system.

    A custom database may be capable of doing everything a farm needs, but if only one person understands it, the system becomes dependent on that person.

    A specialized farm-management platform may have dozens of useful features, but if employees avoid entering information because the interface is cumbersome, the data isn’t useful.

    Meanwhile, a boring Google Sheet that everyone understands may quietly run an operation for years.

    That doesn’t mean spreadsheets are always the answer. It means complexity has a cost, and small organizations should have a good reason for taking it on.

    Who Actually Owns Your Data?

    There’s another question I think small organizations should ask before adopting software:

    If I stop using this service tomorrow, what happens to my information?

    Your crop records, customer lists, financial history, planting plans, donor information, event registrations, and production data may represent years of work.

    Ideally, you should be able to export that information in a useful format and move it somewhere else.

    That isn’t always the case.

    Some platforms make exporting easy. Others let you export only part of your data, give it back in an awkward proprietary format, or make leaving sufficiently difficult that switching services becomes a major project.

    The more important the information is to your operation, the more I care about portability.

    Before committing to a platform, I want to know:

    • Can the data be exported?
    • What format does it come in?
    • Can another program actually read it?
    • Will the farm still have access to historical records if it cancels the subscription?
    • How difficult would it be to migrate to something else?

    A system can work perfectly today and still become a liability if your entire operation is trapped inside it five years from now.

    The Boring Systems Often Matter Most

    Some of the most useful systems I’ve worked on have not been impressive.

    Label printing is a good example.

    Printing product or seedling labels doesn’t sound like an important technology project. But if someone has to repeatedly type the same information, manually format labels, correct mistakes, and search for old files every time something needs printing, that small inefficiency gets repeated hundreds or thousands of times.

    Organizing the underlying information and creating a repeatable printing process can save far more time than introducing an elaborate new platform.

    The same is true for forms.

    A well-designed Google Form feeding into a clean spreadsheet can solve a registration, intake, volunteer, or recordkeeping problem with almost no training.

    Everyone already understands how to click a link and fill out a form.

    That simplicity has value.

    Start With the Workflow

    When someone asks me what software they should use, I increasingly want to ask questions first.

    • What are you actually trying to accomplish?
    • Who needs to use the system?
    • What happens before the information gets there?
    • What happens afterward?
    • Where does the current process fail?
    • Which parts are repetitive?
    • Who maintains it?
    • What happens when that person is gone?

    Those questions often reveal that the technology itself isn’t the central problem.

    Imagine a farm struggling to keep track of harvest quantities.

    The first instinct might be to find harvest-tracking software.

    But the real questions are more basic.

    • Who records the harvest?
    • When?
    • By crop, variety, field, or destination?
    • Does someone need that information the same day?
    • Is it being used for crop planning next year, inventory management this afternoon, or simply because someone thinks harvest records are a good idea?

    Until those questions are answered, choosing software is mostly guessing.

    Once they are answered, the solution might be specialized software.

    It might also be a clipboard and a spreadsheet.

    Sometimes Software Really Is the Answer

    I’m not arguing that farms should avoid technology.

    There are plenty of situations where dedicated software earns its complexity.

    A website is obviously better handled by a content management system than by manually editing HTML every week.

    Online payment platforms make accepting donations or payments dramatically easier.

    Email marketing software is useful when an organization has hundreds or thousands of contacts.

    Accounting software exists for good reasons.

    And when a farm grows large enough, crop planning, inventory, employee management, or sales can become complicated enough that purpose-built tools are worth learning.

    The question isn’t whether software is good.

    The question is:

    • Does this tool remove more complexity than it creates?

    For a small farm, I’d add two more questions:

    • Is the value worth the ongoing cost?
    • And can I take my data with me if I leave?

    Technology Should Disappear Into the Work

    The best systems rarely feel impressive once they’re working.

    • Someone fills out a form.
    • A spreadsheet updates.
    • A label prints correctly.
    • A customer gets the information they need.
    • An employee knows what to do next.

    Nobody thinks much about the technology because they’re busy doing the actual work.

    I think that’s a good outcome.

    Farmers already have plenty of things demanding their attention. Technology should reduce that burden rather than becoming another thing that needs to be managed.

    My own rule is becoming increasingly simple:

    • Use the simplest system that reliably solves the problem.
    • Sometimes that means custom code.
    • Sometimes it means WordPress.
    • Sometimes it means specialized farm software.
    • Sometimes it means a spreadsheet.
    • And sometimes it means putting the computer away entirely.

    The goal isn’t to make a farm more technological.

    The goal is to make it work better.