This week I’ve taken a detour from our normal winter planning activities to work on a presentation for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of NY’s annual conference, which is happening this weekend in Syracuse, NY!PS—local folks, you can come see us as part of the Farm Share Fair, happening on Saturday from 2:30 to 5:30. We’ll be there with other local CSA farms, as well as chefs demoing some delicious local food prep!I’m talking about “In-Season Troubleshooting on a Vegetable Farm,” seeing as dealing with trouble seems to be my main skill set (or maybe it’s just we have the bad luck to get lots of opportunities to deal with things going wrong?).Either way, I’ve come to the conclusion that the psychologically best way to get jazzed about the fresh, new growing season that is about to start is definitely not by looking through years of your photos to pick out all of the ones that are of disasters and farm troubles. Yes, I’m one of those weirdos that takes photos of all the bad things, and they hide there in our hard drive waiting to pop out at you between all the innocent gorgeous photos of shares and fields. Remember when I was bit by a brown recluse? Yup, I stumbled across that scene in there in all its graphic glory (ick). How about when our tractor engine blew up? Check. When it rained 4 inches and everything flooded? Got it (only which time, since that happened three years running?). Deer damage, dead chickens, insect damage, weeds, if something was going wrong, I probably took a photo of it like some sort of demented disaster photojournalist.After a few weeks digging into depressing pictures, I felt pretty down these past few days, asking myself, “Why am I doing this anyway?” But yesterday, as I started sliding everything into the PowerPoint, patterns started showing up. We may have bad luck, but we do learn from our mistakes. We may have bad weather, but we have fundamentally shifted our farming systems bit by bit to deal with the nasty storms. We are nowhere near farming perfection (but is anyone?), and we don’t have the capital budget to make a few of the upgrades we need, but setting out these farm troubles in order, there emerges a steady improvement trend.For instance, check out this early photo of our potatoes, when we were growing varieties less resistant to leaf hopper damage: