Not Every Difficult Season Is in the Field

Sometimes the difficult bit is everything else

Written by: Steve Holloway — Technical Manager, SFS

Some weeks, everything seems to arrive at once. The weather turns, plans change, the phone does not stop, something needs sorting yesterday, and the list of jobs somehow gets longer while you are working through it.

Usually, you just get on with it.

I have had plenty of days like that, and I have also had days where nothing particularly dramatic has happened, but everything still feels harder than it should. Sitting in front of a computer knowing what needs doing, reading the same thing twice, getting irritated by something trivial and wondering why a perfectly ordinary job suddenly feels like it needs far more effort than usual.

That is probably the bit I find curious.

Stress does not always look like stress. Sometimes it just looks like tiredness, short patience, poor concentration or that slightly strange feeling of being busy all day without being quite sure what you have actually achieved. 

My first response is normally to tell myself to get on with it.

Sometimes that works.

Sometimes it clearly does not.

At SFS, we talk a lot about resilience in soils and crops. Usually we mean the ability to keep functioning when conditions are not ideal, to absorb a bit of pressure and recover without everything falling apart.

I used to think resilience in people meant much the same thing as toughness. Keep going, keep working, do not make too much of it.

I am less sure about that now.

A resilient soil is not one that ignores drought, compaction or poor structure. It still responds to pressure. The difference is in how well it copes, how quickly it recovers and whether the underlying system is strong enough to keep going.

That feels a bit closer to the truth for people as well. Sometimes resilience is carrying on. Sometimes it is recognising that you are not quite yourself. Sometimes it is admitting that something has been taking more out of you than you realised. None of that needs turning into a diagnosis or a major conversation. Sometimes someone is simply tired, fed up, busy or having a bad week. But every now and then, asking “How are things?” and actually meaning it is probably worth more than we give it credit for.

At SFS, a lot of what we do comes down to noticing when something does not quite add up. A soil result, a crop response, a trial result, a field that looks different to how the numbers suggest it should. Quite often the useful bit is not having an immediate answer, but noticing enough to ask another question.

I sometimes think people are a bit like that too.

Not because anyone needs another poster on a wall telling them to talk, and not because every difficult day needs analysing.

Just because life does not stop at the farm gate or the office door, and occasionally whatever is happening outside work comes in with us.

We spend a lot of time trying to build resilience into the systems we work with.

Maybe part of that is remembering that the people working in them need some too.

And resilience, as it turns out, is not the same thing as pretending nothing is wrong.