Heading in to 2020

Posted on 30 December 2019 by dlhitzeman

The past few years have been tumultuous ones for me here at Innisfree for a variety of reasons. I got really sick and am just now at the point where I am recovering. In the meantime, we ended our Angus cattle operation, invested in wool sheep and meat goats, got our crop ground certified organic, and took on a new crop farmer.

All of that said, 2020 looks to be the first year in quite a while where things have reached something of a steady state. Most of our big input projects are done, and now we can focus on making the things we’re doing better. Our hope is that effort will be less expensive and less time and labor intensive than the past few years.

Not to worry, though, because I’m sure I will dream up some new, wild scheme. Stay tuned. More will come.

DLH

Easy

Posted on 30 December 2019 by dlhitzeman

One of the things I struggle with as a creator is the notion of wanting it to be easy. I know creating is work, but as a creator, I long for those moments of sheer inspiration when everything just flows. I also know that, the vast majority of the time, it’s just work and the inspiration is hard to come by. This feeling is not unique, but it is an impediment to getting things done and far too often functions as a foil to doing the work.

I am discovering the method to overcoming this obstacle is force. The more I force myself to work, the easier the work becomes, in a way end running the problem and creating the circumstance I long for.

Then again, force comes with its own set of problems. It can be violent, even if just mentally and emotionally, and can breed resentment. To overcome those obstacles, I find it is important to focus on the goals rather than the process. When I can remember why I am forcing myself, the process begins to flow.

I tend not to make resolutions because I’m notorious for not following through on them, but this time of year can’t help but elicit reflection, and reflection can’t help but make me think about how to go about fixing things I see wrong, especially with myself.

My ongoing goal is to continue to force myself and to embrace the flow it creates. I’m a long way from easy, if such a thing even exists, but I know I can build up the endurance and the ethic necessary to get what I am trying to do done.

DLH

Reintroducing this blog

Posted on 11 June 2019 by dlhitzeman

As you can see from the history, this blog has languished for a while. Well, it will no more.

What prompted the absence and the change?

It started with the fact that I got really sick two and a half years ago–in fact, so sick I almost died–and I’ve spent the time since recovering. I’m now recovered enough that I am am able to get back into what my wife, Keba, and I set out to do with our farm, Innisfree on the Stillwater.

Further, beyond my work on the farm, I am also working to develop myself as a freelance writer, and it turns out having a solid portfolio is an important part of that process. It seems to me that writing about what I am doing is a great way to populate that portfolio, so here we are.

My goal is to post here at least once a week, or more often if some subject spurs me to write more. I hope you’ll join me for the journey.

DLH

The Rambling Road: Work or work out?

Posted on 25 March 2019 by dlhitzeman

Ages ago, I developed a hypothesis that I wanted my work to be my work out. At the time, it was a wrongheaded attempt to ignore the fact I was doing neither, but it turns out I also wasn’t completely wrong about the notion.

As part of my effort to improve my health, I have been researching, learning about, and engaging in the idea of natural movement, especially as it pertains to the fact that, even when we work out, we’re often incredibly sedentary in the intervening time, effectively undermining some of the best benefits of our work outs.

Now, I grant, it’s nearly impossible for us moderns to return to our hunter-gatherer roots, but I think we can make specific changes to how we approach physical activity that allow us to utilize some of their genetics we inevitably carry.

One of the biggest changes I’ve made pursuing that goal is to make sure I eat after I engage in physical activity. In short, I work out first, then I eat. It turns out, that’s the pattern our bodies are designed to follow rather than the bell schedule three meals a day. In fact, that’s where exercise “hangry” comes from, and we would do well to listen to it.

The second thing I have changed is how I exercise. I walk a lot, but I have made my walking less structured and more free-form. I sometimes carry awkward things. I have the benefit of having a 185 acre farm with few dedicated paths, so I force myself to walk in the unimproved areas to get the benefit of climbing and having to work my way through.

The result of these changes is that I am working my body more the way it expects to be worked, thereby increasing my overall fitness.

My goal from here is to increase the amount of manual labor I do on the farm, meaning that I intend to forgo the use of labor saving tools when it is possible and safe in favor of doing the work by hand. This labor follows the same pattern as the rest, and I expect it to magnify the results I am already achieving.

In the end, the answer of work or work out is yes, do both. Do as much as you can. Get up and move around often. Lift and carry heavy things. Eat when your body says it’s hungry. Sleep when it says it’s tired. The benefit is there. Pursue it.

DLH

The Rambling Road: Five million steps

Posted on 25 January 2019 by dlhitzeman

Yes, 5 million steps. That’s the number of steps–at least a rough estimate anyway–that stand between me and cutting my current body fat measurement in half.

Granted, it’s always dangerous to reduce human biology to a simplistic math equation, but the correlation between high percentages of body fat and health problems is pretty strong. It turns out that, when measured as simple calories, half my current body fat adds up to about 3.5 million steps worth of walking. Add in another 1.5 million steps that account for my current rate of walking, and you get 5 million.

At first, that number seems daunting. It is also, far less simplistically, a moving target influenced by all sorts of sometimes inscrutable variables. Yet, it’s also a concrete point; a goal to focus on that helps manage everything else.

If I were to somehow manage to walk that many steps in a year, that’s only about 13,700 a day. Granted, I’m only at 8,000ish a day now, but doubling the number doesn’t seem all that bad, though I’ll have to do more than double if I want that number to be my average.

The point is that we can’t do what we don’t know we’re trying to do. Now I know how many calories 5 million steps will burn. Now I understand what it will take for me to get to that number. I’m just at the beginning, but I can get there.

Now, to do it.

DLH

The Rambling Road: It’s been a while

Posted on 28 September 2017 by dlhitzeman

I figure it’s about time for an update if anyone is still paying attention. This year has been a roller coaster health-wise, but in general things are improving, so there’s that.

Recently, I started to re-engage myself with something I haven’t done in a long time: active accountability. In general, that means making a minimalist list of what I want to accomplish over a given period of time so as to be able to check against that list whether I am doing what I said I was going to do.

Some people will probably nod sagely at that confession, but my style of active accountability isn’t quite what most people do (is anything I do quite what most people do? But that’s a different conversation…). For example, rather than having a notebook or a calendar, I have a private blog. I use that blog as much as a checklist as I do a project management system. I tend to limit myself to five tasks a day, even if I know I have time for more because I realize that the stress of over-expectation is the second biggest reason I don’t get what I plan to done (the first being physical incapacity to do it).

The moral of the story is that I use this system to keep the things I am working on fresh in my mind and focused. I can tend to wander off if I don’t only to discover long periods of time have passed without getting anything demonstrable done. Active accountability helps me stay focused when I won’t otherwise be.

Updating this blog is now part of that accountability. I hope to make at least monthly updates, as much because I promised myself and others I would as because the act of writing is both invigorating and cathartic for me.

More will follow.

DLH

The Rambling Road: Discipline

Posted on 28 February 2017 by dlhitzeman

Yesterday, I wrote about being discontented and how that state drives me in so many areas, now including health. Today, I want to write about my bane: discipline.

It’s surprising that discipline is a shortcoming of mine given my natural inclination to plan, but having lived with that reality for a long time, I can tell you without any doubt that I am inclined to be easily distracted and to be lazy when it comes to executing those plans.

Yet, most things in life require some degree of discipline to get done. Even stuff I really enjoy doing has parts to them that I don’t, and that’s where the discipline comes in.

I’m learning that notion now in spades. I’m not in a position anymore to get distracted or get lazy or give up. I have to see this through.

And in realizing that fact, I’m also realizing discipline can be learned in ways I’d never given consideration to. Learning discipline, I’m discovering, is like learning to ride a bike. It takes time and practice, but the more I do it and the longer I do it, the easier it becomes.

In the end, for me, the biggest motivator for discipline is the goal I am trying to reach. In the case of health, I don’t want to always feel this way, so wanting that goal badly enough becomes its own kind of motivation. Motivation breeds discipline.

So, in the end, for me, it’s a matter of settling on a goal I want and pursuing it. Sure, there will be bumps along the way, but I know I can do it. So can you.

DLH

The Rambling Road: Time calculus

Posted on 20 February 2017 by dlhitzeman

There was a time when I was that person who claimed I didn’t have time to exercise. To me then, exercise was a waste because the other things I was doing with my life seemed far more important. In fact, I was that person not all that long ago. But today, as I was walking, I came to a sudden epiphany that my view was myopic in a specific sort of way.

The fact is, for the year and a half before I ended up in the hospital, my health was deteriorating whether I was willing to admit it or not. I lost some or all of many days to illness and fatigue to the point I was no longer able to do the things I needed and wanted to be doing.

If we imagine that state resulting in a loss of four hours of productivity a day as an average, I lost something along the lines of 2,190 hours of useful time due to bad health. And that was before I ended up in the hospital.

In that hospital, I lost six full days, an additional 144 hours, and since I have been home, my productivity has been minimal to the tune of a couple of hours a day, meaning for the last 30, I’ve easily lost 240 more hours beyond that.

In total, since the true beginnings of this current episode, I’ve easily lost as many as 2,574 hours of productive time, and that’s probably a conservative estimate.

In contrast, since I have returned to walking again, I’ve spent about an hour each day. If I were to simply stick to that amount of time, it would take me more than seven years to “waste” the time I’ve already wasted walking.

And, as anyone exercising knows, fitness is not a waste. Rather, since I have returned to walking, I am getting stronger, my head is clearer, I am less fatigued, and I am more certain of my recovery than I have yet been.

So, even when I reach my eventual goal of two hours of exercise a day, I will really be gaining hours more of productive time rescued from what once had been the time waste of my poor health.

I get the logical explanation isn’t for everyone, but the nature of this realization makes me even more eager to continue. I will improve because of what I am doing, and that can never be a waste.

DLH

The Rambling Road: Moving bull

Posted on 11 February 2017 by dlhitzeman

No really, we moved the bull we share with another farm back to ours today. This is the first significant work I’ve done on the farm since I got out of the hospital. With the much appreciated help of friends, it was a smooth load, but I am amazed at how tired I am after what is usually just a short excursion.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures because I was working, but that’s the price of self employment, I suppose.

DLH

Thoughts from Innisfree on the Stillwater: And so much more…

Posted on 14 January 2015 by dlhitzeman

I’ve discovered over the past five years that people have huge preconceptions about what being a farmer means. I know, coming in, I had all sorts of them, and I know I am surrounded by fellow farmers who have deeply held ideas about their profession. One of my first posts on this site dealt with one of them, and dredged up the almost predictable responses (I’m not linking to it simply because I want to talk about something else).

One of the preconceptions I had coming in was the nature of what farm work meant in the first place. Many people, including my onetime self, have the idea that farming is as simple as growing and harvesting a crop or raising and selling an animal. I’m here to tell you firsthand that, whatever kind of farming one does, that could not be further from the truth.

Even at its most monoculture, farming is a polyculture because it cannot be anything else. Farming demands knowledge of everything from agriculture to zoology and demands the farmer be everything from an accountant to a zoo keeper.

It’s not an accident, then, that history notes the rise of farming intertwined with the rise of what we think of as civilization. Domesticating, planting, raising, harvesting, and slaughtering plants and animals for food in more effective and efficient ways is the necessary mother that gave rise to everything we take for granted today, either by inventing the things we have or by enabling the things we have to be invented.

And so, in the end, I can think of few other undertakings as intensive and broad as that of the farmer. Granted, the hurdles are tall and the valleys are deep, but if anyone wants to fully challenge himself in the pursuit of life, the vocation of farmer is a place to do it.

DLH

Dennis L Hitzeman

Category Archives: work