For many years and many times, both personally and professionally, I’ve given the offhand advice, “Hire the farm kid.” Sometimes it has been meant as a literal instruction, but at least as often it has been given as a more general recommendation to hire the person who has a history of family work. It could be the woman who as a child cleared tables, placed orders, and ran the register every evening and weekend at her family’s restaurant. Or the man who grew up cleaning boats at his father’s marina. The advice either way remains the same: Look for the person who learned a work ethic early and applied it often. The person who growing up wasn’t given the choice of whether to pull his or her weight is the one you want.
Incoming storm over the barn
Many have been the paid youth and volunteers to have worked on the farm. (Oh, Good Lord! springs most readily to mind.) The current Kid lives on a nearby farm and reports here every Saturday at 8:30 sharp. As part of our routine I always ask him how his week has been, how his morning has been. The latter is something that isn’t typically relevant except to the farm kid. On any given Saturday, this Kid has already been out weeding in the family garden, feeding the livestock, helping his older brother load a hog for market, all before showing up here to work some more.
Countless are the tasks that make it onto the average farm’s daily to-do list —a list, I should add, that isn’t constrained by hours in an eight-hour workday. Likewise, I ask as the Kid is leaving, what does he have on tap for the rest of the day? More often than not, his post-work chores includes mowing the yard, cleaning the barn stalls, inspecting his bee colonies….
The ethic of the farm-raised youth came to mind recently as I waited for the Kid to show up to work. Historically, you would have grown up in a farm community and most of your peers would have had a similar work background. But today, when kids are coddled at home well into and past adulthood, what is it like for our Kid to get on the school bus and find common ground? When his list of chores to complete morning and evening run up against the latest video game or Tik Tok distraction of his peers, what goes through his mind?
So, I asked him what his friends thought of his farm life. He had at first little to say (not unusual: we were in the midst of tearing out overgrown brambles from a fence line). But after lunch, as we cleaned and put away our tools, he replied by relating a story from when he was much younger than his current age of 15:
When I was 8 a neighbor offered my dad half shares on his square bales if we’d pick them up in the field and store them in his barn. I couldn’t pick them up [They can weigh 50-75 pounds], so I rolled them down the hill to my brothers. It took us all day. The neighbor had two sons who were 16 and 18, and they never came out of the house to help. He said he couldn’t ever get them to work. I thought that was odd. But I felt pretty good to be able to do something they couldn’t.
Clearly, there is a difference between “a farm kid” and “a kid raised on a farm.” And so, my readers, my advice remains the same, “Hire the farm kid.” And if you have the opportunity, raise a farm kid.
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Reading this weekend: The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, mapping the collapse of globalization (P. Zeihan)
Well Brian, your financial guy was certainly “the farm kid” I just told a client this week that the problem with everything started when they transitioned from square bales to the big round bales. Good post!— Jim
I think you may be onto something, Jim. Enjoy the holiday. And if you ever get the yen to do some farm work, let me know.
Really nice piece!
Work ethic….how do we teach this to our kids? I have four siblings. Two of us learned to work while we were young. Two didn’t learn until much later in life. One has never accepted the concept. I don’t know if I can say where and when I learned that work had it’s own reward. Perhaps it was when I realized that being paid to work and saving the money allowed me to buy something I wanted. Why some of my siblings never learned this, or never chose to save money…I don’t know.
I will say this, those who have learned to work will do much better than those who don’t. And I agree with you that hiring the ‘farm kid’ is a good idea. Next on my list of valued work traits is ‘caring about the details’. I often am frustrated by delegating a job and finding the person doesn’t care about the job they do. I frequently have found that, if I want a job done right I have to do it myself. Perhaps it’s why my husband and I get along so well. He is the only other person I know who is pickier than me.
Jody,
There is so much to pick over when discussing work ethics. But I’m glad you brought up your husband and that he shares your outlook. That really is crucial, isn’t it? You would not have accomplished so much or built your soil business without that.
Thanks for the comment.
Brian