In the beginning, as Rudolf Steiner puts it, a child is virtually a pure “sense organ”, which is to say, all it can do is absorb from the environment: food, water, impressions from people, etc. During this stage, an infant is pretty helpless. It needs constant tending and more concentrated direct attention than it will probably ever receive again. The same is true for the farm organism. As Bill Mollison liked to advise people: spent the first year doing nothing but observing. Just witness the cycles of nature on the farm. What plants grow in different areas? What are your weed problems? What patches of soil dry out? What areas get water-logged?
Initially, all the farm can do is “take” from the farmers, from the environment, and it gobbles up time, energy, and resources like a voracious child. It takes a number of years for this infant farm organism to really begin to be able to sustain itself and at least be able to take care of itself in a basic way. Expect the farm to take for the first seven years. Such a farm isn’t even (so to speak) “potty trained.” You wouldn’t expect an infant to help you set the table, so be careful not to expect too much from your farm too soon. Trying to force the farm to “grow up” too quickly is also inadvisable, because it develops hardened and set patterns too early. If you want to change those habits and optimize the farm later, it is much harder to undo bad habits than it is to learn new good habits.
Rather than pushing your farm too quickly or leaving it to trial-and-error, it helps to enlist the wisdom of elders. The hierarchy of experience is all we as human beings have. If you want advise on parenting, it’s worth speaking to parents. If you want advice on farming, it’s worth speaking to farmers. It’s as simple as that. If we can help you avoid some of our own errors, that’s how we make a better world. The value of avoiding decades of mistakes is priceless. How do we put a price tag on something priceless? When a small piece of advice, gained by years of struggling, can save you hundreds of dollars every year for the rest of the life of the farm? How can someone charge the real value of something like? We can’t! So we charge based on what we now feel our time is worth. If we take our time away from farming or teaching, we need to be able to earn as much as we would doing these other tasks. We don’t charge you what our time is worth or charge you for how much time we save you, because that’s priceless.