Why You Should Take a Long View of Your Writing Career
Or: How your business is like a farm. Really.
Photo by Chase Clark on Unsplash
I watched a documentary last night. The Biggest Little Farm. It’s all about John and Molly Chester and their adorable dog Todd and how they moved from an apartment in Los Angeles with a couple of sad little porch tomato plants to a legit farm.
The documentary follows the Chesters as they buy this old 200-acre citrus and avocado farm with it’s dead, dry soil and then through eight years of turning it into a regenerative farm called Apricot Lane.
At the beginning of the movie, the narrator talks about how this farm will be different from the farms around it. Apricot Lane Farms is biodiverse. It has a abundance of varieties of flora and fauna. The other farms focus on producing just a single crop or product.
When the Chesters had a snail problem, they set their ducks loose on it. The ducks ate tens of thousands of snails and saved the orchard. When they had a gopher problem, they set out owl boxes.
At one point the deep California drought is broken with 18 inches of rain. The farms around them lose their top soil as it washes away, but Apricot Lane Farm doesn’t because of all the work they put in years before planting cover crop to build their soil.