I made a bedside shelf for Jamie. This event took place last year. I’m telling you about it — likely for the second time — because I was proud of it. It was a project that represented an attention to detail unprecedented for me. And it required patience. Also unprecedented.
The conception of this project, the validation of completing it and the sheer euphoria of installing it before Jamie got home from school was, packaged together, an experience I want to repeat over and over again. It also represented a waypoint along a learning trajectory of seemingly infinite length and depth.
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The shelf was made from steel and wood. I wanted to see if I had it in me to be patient and competent enough to build something precise. I didn’t know it then, but I had taken a tiny step into the vast world of precision fabricators and makers.
About one year ago, I became acquainted with a local grain marketer. Big deal, I know. This person, however, moonlights as a bicycle builder/fabricator. Yes. He makes bicycles, and he does so from scratch.
He would swing by my farm to talk about markets, but chatter would soon bend towards the workshop and what I get up to inside its walls.
I gave him a tour of my space and in broad brushstrokes walked him through how I was working to make it as efficient as possible. He indulged me. In hindsight, his reaction to my workshop show and tell is probably best interpreted as gracious. I would soon learn that his workspace is not only more organized than mine, but it also contains tools and jigs I didn’t know existed.
The shelf that once represented my foray into precision building doesn’t hold a candle to the kinds of work this person can do and does do in his workshop. I wanted those tools. I wanted to be able to do those things.
I started following fabricators on YouTube and Instagram. I scour Kijiji for such things as metal lathes, milling machines, metal benders and belt grinders.
My tendency is to be a mile wide and an inch thick. I trust we’re all familiar with that idiom, which, put crudely, means only knowing a little about a lot. It’s a celebrated, if not required, trait among farmers.
When I began writing this column 10 years ago, I was learning how to farm again after being away for a couple of decades. I brought you along with me. I would write things the established farmer would be too embarrassed to admit he or she didn’t know, covering topics like basis and soil pH.
It resonated with farmers because it allowed them to privately explore topics that they had previously glossed over and perhaps failed to understand in the first place. I get it. You’ll receive no judgment from me. I do this all the time.
I learn enough about a topic to hold my own in a conversation, or, put another way, I can weld well enough to get an implement back on the field. To a person who builds bicycles and whose welds are visible to the end-user, it would not appear as though I know what I am doing.
Knowing a little about a lot is not a negative trait. It’s incredibly effective. But knowing a little about a lot is not the same as expertise. It’s remarkably different.
Presumably, we all make the decision, whether explicitly or implicitly, to stop learning about a given topic or thing. But that’s not the most interesting point to all of this. What is most interesting, at least to me, is our ability to claim authority on subjects we clearly don’t know a lot about.
I did not claim to be an authority on welding before I met the bike builder, but after meeting him, I have tempered how I talk about my metal fabrication skills. They’re there. I can build things. But I am not armed with clear evidence of my deficiencies in that area.
There are analogies to be drawn from this that are relevant to what is happening in the ag sector today. I’ll leave you to make them yourself.
Perhaps it’s just me justifying the sizable gaps in my knowledge base, but I have always been a strong proponent of uncertainty, of grey areas, of the muck. It is, I believe, foundational to meaning and growth.
I will continue down this fabrication rabbit hole for a while. It’s intriguing. I know so little about things and I don’t mind that at all.
