FARM LIKE YOU'RE MOVING.

My back ached as I threw the last trash bag into the truck to take to the dump. Not the last trash bag of the move, the last bag that could fit the first load.Hannah was joining me the next day but I was already exhausted, yet nowhere near done.As I stomped around the property in Bugtussle, doing the last round of cleanup before we officially left this week, I was completely floored by how much junk we owned—how much stuff had just collected, dotting the property like little flags of half-finished projects.There were endless piles of lumber scraps, broken five gallon buckets to the heavens, glass, plastic, bags, barrels, books. (I don't know why books, but several soggy books outside). I couldn't help but wonder, "What would this place have looked like in another four years?"I vowed (to my aching body, mostly) never to let this happen again. And not because I think we will ever move any time soon, hopefully ever, but because that's exactly what we said when we returned to Bugtussle. You never know where life is gonna take you, and you should never assume it won't move you.Plus, when you treat a place too permanently, you can easily weigh it down. But when you treat it as mobile, you keep it light and airy, flexible, agile even. Whether you're moving or not, that's the farm you want.I wrote a story recently about a farmer named Ben Hartman and lean manufacturing in agriculture. I won't get too much into it here, as I got way into it over at Civil Eats, but one of the things Ben did to lean up his farm was to just take stuff to the dump. Loads and loads of tools and junk he wasn't using got hauled off or sold because, as he wrote in his book, even if excess stuff doesn't have a literal cost, it has a psychological one.And as I walked around our old property this week I felt that cost. I realized how burdened our farm was with our tinkering, with indecision, with general stuff, and how much that in turn burdened us.So as we look towards the new farm, I'm going to remember this ache, this pain, and keep in mind that the farm feels it, too. If I can barely move after taking four loads to the dump, you can only imagine how the farm felt lugging all that for four years. Not good. Not healthy. Not agile, that's for sure. Now, I hope, it feels as alive as we always wanted it to feel, and I hope we can maintain always remember to keep our operation lean. Not just for ourselves, but for that land as well.- Jesse.