Fruit flies like a tomato.
A few announcements then on to Farm News!
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We are still looking for an employee to two for this season. If you want to enjoy this summer outdoors — and frankly who wouldn’t — this would be a great opportunity! Getting paid to be outside? Yes! So quit that lousy office job and come learn the fine art of vegetable farming. Contact me if you found this argument convincing!
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Farm News
Here is this week’s question:
“Hey Farmer Chris! I heard on the news that Congress is looking into passing a new law making daylight savings time permanent. Seems like this would benefit the farm, no? I mean, an extra hour of daylight every day has to make the plants grow faster. Will it?” – Optimistic Farm Member
Hey OFM: Thanks for the timely question. As you stated, one would assume having that extra hour of daylight every single day would be great for our plants. I mean, what plant wouldn’t like an extra hour to photosynthesize right? More photosynthesis equals more plant growth equals more delicious summer goodness! But this assumes that the extra hour is really extra, which it really isn’t. See, back in the early days of farming — 2005 to be exact — the legislature passed a law that extended daylight savings time dramatically. They moved the start of DST from the last Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March — an increase in DST of more than a month! They also moved the end of DST from the last Sunday in October to the last Sunday in November — which if my math is correct is another month. So now we have the extra hour of sunlight for far longer than we did back in ancient times.
Now some of you are thinking, “Sure Farmer Chris. But with this new law you’d get that extra hour all year round. That’s an extra three months of daylight! That has to help.” Now here is where that argument breaks down. For us to benefit from an extra hour of sunlight all year round we’d have to farm all year round, and here in Minnesota we like to take a few month off in between fall and spring — something we fondly call winter. We don’t start farming indoors until the first week of March and by the end of October we are done. So this year-round DST doesn’t benefit us at all. Now I hear a few of you mathematicians out there saying, “But Farmer Chris, wouldn’t an extra two weeks of extra daylight at the beginning of March be of some help?” Now here is where my many years of farming gives me an advantage over these mathematicians. Even though we start the greenhouse the first week of March the plants don’t germinate until late the second week of March. So, by the time the plants are looking for the sun we already have the extra hour! When Congress passed this law in 2005 they were smarter than you thought!
“A quick follow-up questions Farmer Chris. You seem like a pretty smart guy — for a farmer — do you have a solution to the DST problem?” — The Same Optimistic Farm Member
Dear TSOFM: thanks for the compliment. There is a reason people say, “Its not like it’s vegetable farming” when describing something that is easy to understand. Anyway, yes I have a great solution to the problem. But first, let’s define the problem. In the summer when we are on Regular Old Time (ROT) we have plenty of daylight in the evening but way too much in the morning with the sun rising prior to our rising. So we either get up when the sun shines though our windows or waste away these hours of the day sleeping. In the winter with ROT we have plenty of morning darkness to sleep in but by the time the work day ends there isn’t any daylight left. So how do we solve this without changing our clocks ever Spring and Fall?
This is so simple I don’t know why these brilliant minds in Congress haven’t already figure it out. What we do is define 6:00 am as the time the sun rises in your area and 10:00 pm as the time the sun sets in your area. This gives you 16 hours of daylight and 8 hours of darkness year round! No need to change the clocks. You get eight hours of sleep in the dark of night. You get at least a few hours of daylight after the work day is through. Plus the plants get 16 hours of daylight every day of the year! This could be a bit of a problem for photoperiodic plants like onions but I’m sure the genetic scientists can engineer a non-photoperiodic onion plant.
So sure, go ahead and change the clocks permanently. But don’t say it’s for we farmers. We have enough daylight as it currently stands and having an extra hour in December really isn’t going to help us.
And if there is enough interest, next week I’ll discuss my solution for the permanent three day weekend.
As always, do not hesitate to contact me with questions, comments, suggestions, etc.
This week’s joke of the week:
I was always late for work because of my sleeping arrangement. My doctor suggested that I sleep in the garden. Now I wake up on thyme.