RESILIENCE!

We all remember Celine Aluspato and her tomato project from earlier this year.

She started in March from zero, growing and selling seedlings, building up the business to a one-hectare of tomatoes.  In August, she had her first harvest.  Her harvest was badly damaged from a Tuta attack.  Tuta absolute or leafminers is a moth whose larva attacks tomatoes and can destroy the whole harvest.  

Not having confronted the leafminers before, Celine’s harvest suffered greatly from the attack.  Many would have given up farming, changed crops, or otherwise altered their course.  Not Celine.  While she never stopped producing and selling seedlings, and therefore reduced her risk by keeping an additional income stream open, she was able to reset and start again only two months later.  

Now, more experienced and, as she said, wiser, she is planting an acre of storm tomatoes.  The ground is already prepared, drip irrigation is in place and planting has started.  The harvest will be three months from now, or in the middle of March.  Then we will check in with her again.

There are so many things we can take away from Celine’s story.

1. Education.  Educate yourself on the crops you are cultivating, irrigation, care of the land, and everything else you can regarding farming.  Even if you studied and got your degree in agriculture, don’t stop studying.  Live by the motto of the late Roman Statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “As long as you live, keep learning how to live” and apply it to farming.
2. Risk management.  Don’t put all the eggs in the same basket.  Whatever your business is, always try to minimize risk and when possible, cultivate alternative income sources.  Risk is everywhere, your business, finances, health, and basically in every choice you make.  Minimizing this risk is vital for your success.
3. Resilience.  Don’t give up when the first storm hits.  Farming is not on-time activity.  Farming is every day all the time.  If you don’t have the temperament for farming you have two choices, change or find something else to do.  Remember, this is not a sprint, but a looped marathon.  That is, behind each finish line awaits another marathon.
4. Prioritizing.  If Celine would not have had prioritized her seedlings and put all her focus on the field, things would look very different for her now.  The question is always what do I have to do today, to maximize my business? 
5. Planning.  Without planning, we have no direction.  Celine started planning for the next harvest while planting for the first one.  While our daily actions are today, in the present, planning is in the future.  It addresses what we will do next and what we will do after that.  We should have our goals clear and plans ready for next year and beyond.  

We can see Celine takes prioritization and planning, seriously, she is already preparing the next generation of farmers. 

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