"Perfect" is not a standard

Back in the 70s, well before my time, a neighboring orchardist happened to be a NASA engineer. He packed peaches at night, and by day he dealt with the high precision and tightly controlled NASA tolerances required to build rockets. From time to time he would be called upon to give his engineer's take on a neighbor's idea for some home-built farm hack job construction, and came his reply: “Well, meets farm tolerance.”

Everything in the world has a tolerance, a range of acceptability. The only "perfect" to be had is a concept in one's own mind, and, when executing work in the real world, everyone has to decide their level of tolerance for their own work—decide what is “good enough.” Nearly everything done inevitably could have been done to a higher degree, and, while there is an infinite amount of perfection to refine towards, there is always a finite amount of effort, time, or money. When not warranted, excess perfection is a waste of effort (or money or time)--when trying to produce something, the needlessly superior result is in fact a worse job done.

Last winter, I re-did the tiny kitchen in my wonky old house that has no parallel walls and uneven floors—not a 90-degree angle to be found in the whole building. I needed to build a frame for a new granite countertop, and, although I could operate the tools and design the concept and execute the work, I didn't know how level is level or how true is true enough for an inflexible, brittle slab of granite. Chatting with the plumber I expressed my uncertainty and concern about whether I had built it perfect enough, and he told me that, in the real world, every countertop he'd ever seen used shims to make up for variation in the cabinetry. Well, the installers came with the countertop, I sweat, crossed my fingers. They didn't need to use a single shim. In my inexperience, I built it perfect. I was excited to have reached the precision I had aspired to...but in the end, watching the tradesmen work, I learned that such close tolerances just didn't matter. I hadn't done all that perfect a job after all.

So in farming, especially with its endless supply of work to be done and the limits of daylight and human energy, there is a sweet-spot trade off of perfection and speed. The gardener can spend all the time they want pulling every last weed or carefully tamping down every little transplant, but on the farm... we just don't have time for that. I think of “farm perfect” as about 80% of what the attentive gardener might do, and I describe it that way to prospective employees: How do you feel about leaving some little weeds that don't matter in order to move through the work expeditiously? Or about stuffing lettuce plants into the ground to let them fend for themselves, even though a few won't make it, because we have 1000 plants to move through and it just doesn't matter? I've learned that some people are perfectionists who can't bear to leave anything to a lesser degree than they are capable of, while others are slap-dash speed demons who do sloppy work (albeit quickly). The trick is to develop a close tolerance for what is neither too slow and careful nor too fast and sloppy—to dial in and reliably execute the precision of that perfectly imperfect “farm tolerance.”

The real skill, in doing work, is not knowing how to execute a job as perfectly as it CAN be done, but knowing how good it OUGHT to be done. And, unlike with home carpentry, I have enough experience farming to have a clear perspective on where that standard lies at each point in the season. These last few years it's been a delight to dial it in, to be able to perceive higher tolerances and reliably execute the work to that standard. Whereas a new worker can hardly tell one squash from the next, and so must have a wider tolerance, having picked and sorted thousands of zucchini and cucumbers and handled tons of tomatoes, each one looks different to me. And as the last person who sees the vegetables before you do, it's up to me to keep standards high, assessing which are the small-seeded cucumbers, finding the sufficiently unblemished tomatoes. Most that get packed into the CSA are perfectly good-enough, although I can see their flaws, but it's a true joy to recognize that rare “perfect” specimen, the outlier of form and beauty, or to appreciate picking lettuce in ideal conditions as opposed to the normal lettuce I cut day in and day out. And these standards aren't an absolute, but are assessed in response to a natural system in all its variation over the course of the season, over the life of a plant. Those tomatoes look nice now, but as the season progresses and the plants inevitably decline, they might not look so pretty as these first weeks—but we still want to eat tomatoes, and so a new standard is found, appropriate to the new conditions on the ground. (And, take your lettuce this week—considering it was hotter than 90 degrees all last week, it's all right! ...But there's no way it's as good as what could be grown in the cooler weather of June.)

It's not that everything IS perfect this year—far from it. Surely there are as many mistakes as ever, and just as much that I want to do better next season. But each year, the errors and imprecision come within a smaller and smaller margin. There is still plenty to improve on the farm, even though most everything so far has gone perfectly acceptably this year. Of course, like the workers who can't tell one squash from the next, my work this year is only “acceptable” to what I can see, to where my current standards lie. Perfection being always just out of reach, the new possibility for improvement is only apparent once having reached a certain level—and the “acceptable” standard rises accordingly. I can work on a level of precision of execution of the farm season that I couldn't even perceive in the past, and for those of you with a long-term perspective on the CSA (and a good memory) I think that might come through for you as well. In any case, the farm and CSA this year is leaps and bounds beyond what I could imagine even five years ago. Five years from now, the CSA will have evolved even further and I will have reached a new, and different level of perfection. The inevitability of adaptation towards that perfect season we can conceive of yet never will reach keeps us working towards that illusive perfection, and also satisfied in the limitations of our current moment.