This week, our scale stopped working.
It would turn on when it was plugged in, but it wouldn’t hold a charge. So I got out a multimeter, figured out which setting I needed, tested the battery, tested the wiring, found a break, spliced the wire back together—and fixed the scale.
I am not an electrician.
But this is one of the stranger parts of farming:
Whatever breaks becomes your job.
People talk a lot about farmers “wearing many hats,” and it’s true. On a small diversified farm, you might be a grower, mechanic, plumber, refrigeration technician, irrigation designer, bookkeeper, buyer, marketer, photographer, delivery driver, customer-service representative, food-safety manager, IT support, HR department, and more.
And somewhere in there, you grow vegetables.
The longer I farm, though, the less convinced I am that this particular problem is unique to farming.
I suspect a lot of small business owners would recognize it immediately. A restaurant owner, contractor, independent shop owner, or anyone running a small organization probably spends plenty of time doing work that has very little to do with the thing they originally set out to do.
At a certain scale, there simply aren’t enough people—or enough margin—to have an expert for every function of the business.
There is no maintenance man. No marketing department. No HR department. Maybe no bookkeeper on staff, or IT person, or operations manager. There are just a few people—in our case this year, two—and collectively they have to make the whole thing work.
Of course, there are plenty of times when hiring an expert is the right answer. But figuring out when to call one and when it makes more sense to learn enough to do something yourself is a skill in and of itself.
So when the scale is broken and you have Google in your pocket, you sit down for an hour on a hot afternoon, happy for an excuse to get out of the sun, and become a scale repair technician.
What is remarkable about diversified vegetable farming is the particular collection of jobs that gets crammed into one very small operation.
Biology. Soil science. Entomology. Mechanics. Plumbing. Refrigeration. Logistics. Retail. Accounting. Marketing. Food safety. Weather. Customer service. Purchasing. Crop Planning.
Very few of us went to school for all of those things.
The work rewards people who can move between very different kinds of thinking, often very quickly.
In the same afternoon you might diagnose a crop problem, calculate a wholesale price, answer a sensitive customer email, troubleshoot a cooler, harvest peppers, update the website, and remember that one section still needs to be irrigated before you leave.
That constant switching may be one of the more invisible skills involved in diversified farming.
And I sometimes wonder if that is part of why so many women are drawn to diversified vegetable farming—and why so many seem to thrive in it.
Not because women are inherently better farmers, or because there is some biological female talent for multitasking. But women are often expected, from pretty early on, to keep track of many simultaneous needs: notice what needs doing, anticipate problems, remember details, coordinate people, switch contexts quickly, and carry a lot of the invisible work.
Those are extremely transferable skills on a diversified farm.
The farm rewards the person who remembers that the lettuce needs harvesting, the cooler temperature has been creeping up, a customer needs an email back, the delivery route changed, the tomato tunnel needs irrigating, there are only three rolls of labels left, and something is making a weird noise.
This week, the weird thing was the scale.
Now it works.
And apparently, for one afternoon at least, fixing a broken wire was farming too.
