Sophomore

The Wise Fool

It’s been a long couple days.

Over the weekend, we made upgrades to the soil farm. We wanted to have everything nice and smooth for friends covering us as we got out of town for a few days. Turns out we did not leave town, we are appreciating the improvements.

Today, I made a circuit through mid-Mo and back to St. Louis. I visited Bluebird Composting in Fulton, grabbed some burgers at Columbia’s famous Booches for lunch, then down to Lebanon to pick up this year’s chicks at Cackle Hatchery.

At home and tired, checking butts and dipping beaks in water as we took the little boogers out of the box one by one, I was thinking about our first year. We were nervous, uncertain, and so very careful. Every step was new. We did a ton of research, though we did not know what anything was like in real life. Our first real resulted in a 100% success rate brooding our chicks, which apparently is amazing.

This is now our sophomore year keeping livestock. I want to take care to not be too confident. I do not want the brooder I just dusted off and set back up to be so familiar I fail to notice something awry. Until we’re intuitive old pros down the road, we need to stay alert, sensitive, and teachable.