The Tools of The Trade
The conflicting and confounding situation of choosing the right tools to help, not hinder - and it's usually both at the same time.
I have always had a deep love affair with science, particularly the natural sciences. As a child I would sit for hours on the floor of the huge interior hallway of our 1920s cottage, which had a floor to ceiling bookshelf running its entire length. I would read encyclopedias, the animal fact sheets we had in several binders, and the ‘Creation Science’ (yes, it is an oxymoron but it’s all I had at the time) magazines my parents subscribed to. I checked out the maximum number of books I was allowed to borrow from the library every week. I devoured knowledge as if my life depended on it.
As an adult, I still devour knowledge. I have now however had several experiences of running into the limits of knowledge available to me on certain subjects. This is an extremely exhilarating feeling, and very disconcerting at the same time. It does rock your world a little when you can no longer find a book, or a research article, or a website, or even find someone with an informed opinion, in this information-soaked era we live in. Having run out of somebody else to tell me things, I have to go out and think about them myself.
This essay is a discussion on how knowledge and technology can be both hugely beneficial to us, and also shut the door on deeper knowing that is available if you simply take the time to look and listen more closely. It is about how the tools we choose to help us in our tasks can both assist us and prevent us from truly understanding what we are doing. I don’t pretend to know the answers, or to have found the right balance. I hope that by writing this I can bring us into a conversation on what is the right balance for people and for the landscapes in which we act.
So, ok, what am I actually talking about here?
My thoughts around this have been percolating for a few years now. I first began to consider this when I started to breed chickens. I only use broody hens to hatch and raise chicks, but I do select the eggs they will sit on. Eggs can break, and chicks can die inside the shell, so I check the clutch every day in case I need to clean up any messes or remove eggs. I don’t have an egg candler. An egg candler is a strong light that can shine through the eggshell and allow you to see if the chick is developing inside the egg. I can use my cellphone flashlight, and I do, but compared to a dedicated device for seeing inside the egg, it’s pretty lack-luster. I also have a number of green-shelled eggs I want to hatch each year, which are very difficult to see inside.
The tool for making this easy exists. Getting my hands on this tool has been constrained by stock levels on the model I want, and if it’s really actually that important, when that money could be better spent. One way or another, chicks are going to hatch. Having a candler is going to change nothing at all, except for having prior knowledge of how many are likely to hatch, and potentially avoiding a few messy nests. I still do not have an egg candler.
My lack of this tool has allowed me to pay attention. I have held eggs, I have listened to eggs, I have thought about eggs, I have asked myself questions about eggs. I can now tell with a pretty high percentage of accuracy which eggs are viable. I now know that I need to hold the back of my hand against each egg as it sits in the nest, and pay attention. I know I need to do this after the hen has been off the nest for awhile. I know that I can then feel the slight temperature differences between an egg containing a living chick, and one that is empty or dead. I have checked my knowing by using my cell-phone light. I have learned that while I can’t see inside the green-shelled eggs, they are very unlikely to break even if they are empty or dead. It is much more important to remove the brown or white shelled eggs because they are not as robust. I have learned that how an eggshell looks and feels, and how it cracks when you’re using it for cooking, is directly related to how robust that egg is at growing a chick all the way to hatching day. I now know that selecting for egg-shell characteristics is important for my breeding programme if I want to have a flock of chickens with high hatch rates under natural conditions.
Would I have known any of these things if I had the super-blingy egg candler that I wanted? I don’t think I would. I would have had no reason to even begin to ask the questions, to test my theories, to learn from observation and experience. The egg candler might make my breeding season slightly easier, maybe it would save me some time. But having that candler when I wanted it would have cost me all the knowing I have now.
Another example is soil tests for the garden. Here in New Zealand, soil testing is limited and expensive. It’s really not worth getting one done unless you’re a big farm, or a market garden. For the price of the test you could buy a few years worth of really good fertilizer that has all the trace elements your plants might need. To be clear, I think certain soil tests, and plant tissue testing, and seed testing, are all really useful tools that are very helpful to farmers. They actively save money and can improve crop outcomes. But in my small backyard farm context, they don’t stack up on the economics front.
I have had to learn about all the different elements required by plants, how they interact with each other, how soil characteristics influence the availability of these elements, and how that is observable in my garden. I have learned about what deficiency symptoms look like in different crops. I’ve stuck my hands into the soil and asked questions. Why are the squash plants on this side doing better than the ones on the other side? Why do different tomatoes varieties show different deficiency symptoms even when they’re growing in the exact same place, with the same soil, and the same sunlight? What do these things tell me about the nutrient availability in my soil? Do I need more calcium or does it just need to be more available? When is the right time to boost magnesium levels so it doesn’t reduce calcium availability? Is my soil alive enough to make use of what I am giving it in the first place, or am I wasting my time and money?
I don’t pretend to know the answers to all the questions I ask myself. The point is not that I know, it’s that I’m thinking about it. I think about it, I change how I do things, I see what happens, I think about it some more. If I went ahead and got a soil test, I would be tempted to lapse into simply following the recommendations as shown by the test. I would be tempted not to think about all the factors that influence the health and vibrancy of my garden ecosystem. I would very much like to be able to run a soil test each year, on every section of my garden, and have that data stack up over time. I think that data would now be valuable to me. If I had started with a recipe for what my garden needed, I’m not sure that further soil testing would help me to really know my garden and what it needs. I have learned I must sit in the garden and listen to the plants, to look at the entire picture.
These are just two small examples of ways in which not having the tools we think we need can help us to ask deeper questions and gain a better understanding. It is better to do the work to really know something, or someone. Once you know, the tool takes its proper place. The tool assists your already-existing knowledge. It doesn’t simply offer robotic instructions, which can be followed for years while never understanding why. We must come back to our human curiosity and ask “but why”? Where is our inner three year old child, who so desperately wants to understand the world? Curiosity shouldn’t be satisfied with the first page result of an AI-generated ‘answer’ on a search engine. Tools and technology should fuel our curiosity, not shut it down. Let us think more deeply about our choices, and place our tools in their proper place. The tools are supposed to serve us, we are not supposed to serve the tools.
I cannot believe the timing of your essay Sam! An answer to a prayer, an answer to a feeling of being unsettled lately. Thank you. I am doing a literature course right now and it is 10 weeks long. Up until this week I have felt able to participate, make connections in the broader reading and discussions. This week I have come to a wall. It is not quite your situation where I do not have the tools available but it is more needing to sit and listen and ponder with an open mind, as you have discovered with your garden. So that is what I will do this week, feeling that it is fine and I can be curious as to why I have a wall and what that means. I am a very curious person. Having our granddaughter in our home since birth, reawakened wonder and delight in the world again. It has been 6 years now and it has been the biggest blessing. This was a great essay Sam, I am grateful.