Why I Am Writing Here

I have spent much of my adult life trying to understand how things work.

For a long time, people paid me to do this. The things were generally financial, the questions could be answered with numbers, and a reasonably good answer usually arrived before anyone had to go outside.

Then I bought a coffee farm.

The questions changed.

Why did a neighbor who had farmed the same mountain for forty years decline an offer I thought was perfectly sensible? Why did the Department of Agriculture want me to remove the vegetation I was trying to restore? Why did the coffee mill next door sit idle for much of the year when the trees above it continued growing?

And why, after buying several hundred acres of tropical farmland, was I still having difficulty distinguishing a banana from a plantain?

I began writing things down.

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The notes started as a practical necessity.

There were trees to identify, soil tests to understand, equipment to repair, people to call, and decisions that seemed reasonable when I made them, and rather less so afterward.

Some of the notes helped me solve problems. Others recorded mistakes I was about to make again.

I kept them all.

At Copper Hill, a question rarely stays where it begins. A discussion about a field leads to a disagreement about chemicals. A machine leads to a mill, a mill to a farmer, and a farmer to the economics of an industry that has been doing things the same way for centuries.

Sometimes an old road disappears into the forest and emerges beside a stone drying patio. The trees have grown over it, but the road is still there.

I have found that I enjoy following these things.

I have also found that the people who know the answers are often remarkably patient with a man who has spent a fair amount of money acquiring the questions.

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For years, the writing remained private.

I wrote at Doña Emma, on airplanes, in Maine, in Cambridge, and on walks through the farm with Scooby, Norville, Melita, and Beanie.

The dogs seem to regard these interruptions as a poor use of perfectly good walking time.

I wrote about the farm, certainly, but increasingly about the people around it. About the history that remained in the landscape. About the strange economics of coffee. About things I had believed, things I had been told, and things that turned out to be true only after someone showed me.

The notebooks accumulated.

So did the stories.

Some were funny. Others took years to understand. A few concerned decisions I would gladly have made differently, although those generally produced the better material.

Eventually I began arranging the stories into a book, The Accidental Farmer's Almanac.

That presented another question.

What was I going to do with all the stories while I was writing it?

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I have avoided social media for most of my adult life. I like books. I like conversations. I like the time between observing something and deciding what I think about it.

But I have come to enjoy telling these stories, and I would like to see what happens when other people read them.

So I am beginning here.

Field Notes From the Accidental Farmer will appear most Thursdays. The subjects will move around, as they tend to on the farm. There will be neighbors, trees, old coffee roads, money, history, and experiments whose results were sometimes more educational than I had intended.

Next Thursday, I will tell you how I bought Copper Hill.

The farm has been explaining my decision to me ever since.

Welcome to Field Notes From the Accidental Farmer.