pace

A number of people have commented to me about how the new pace of my life, being a farmer, must be very relaxed, if not bordering on downright dull. So I want to leap right in here to disabuse that notion: things can go very, very fast on the farm.
When you're trying to make a living at farming, while being sustainable, as my boss is trying to do, every minute of the day counts. Spending a couple hours leisurely hoeing in the sunlight, walking around the field admiring the crops, trimming up the ends of beds to look beautiful - these are not things we do. (As much as we'd rather, sometimes.)
On harvest mornings, which are 2x a week, we're trying to calculate our rate: how many dollars per hour are we picking and packing? How can we make our work more efficient? When we plan the day, taking into account what we know of the weather and which volunteers might drop by, we're trying our best to map out priorities for the work - what really needs to happen? What's most pressing? As much as we'd like to kill every single weed in the field, some are more crucial than others and in the interest of time and efficiency, we try to figure out the best and fastest method and do what we can.
It's certainly different than time pressures in the work I was doing before - deadlines for writing or research, email and phone pressing in, legislative deadlines or other external stuff. And we take lots of breaks, and because I'm outside all day I have plenty of moments where I'm admiring how things are growing, or listening to the birds sing, or doing all the things you slow-pace-assumers have thought of me doing. But generally those things happen while I'm working hard, and aiming to work fast.