The wet combined with warm weather has also created a potential problem for my cattle. I have been watching my cows closely for signs of worms, which can be a problem when wet and warm weather come at the same time. Many farmers have been busy using chemical wormers to rid worms from their cattle, but because the worms can become immune to the overuse of wormers, I have concentrated on prevention. 

There is no business without contingencies, but in farming they are more stark and defined—plans for a day’s work can change in a moment. Contingency planning, an oxymoron if I've ever heard one, can only go so far. Contingencies by their nature are mostly unforeseen, and in a system as complex as nature, the contingencies are far too many to plan for. As a farmer friend of mine is fond of saying, "there is no day that goes by that I don't say 'I haven't seen that before.'" 

So farming requires a certain listening, a certain humility. And most of all, it requires improvisation. Good farmers must be creative, ready to respond to something completely unexpected. But improvisation is a hard art to learn, and human beings have never favored the unpredictable. If there is any single reason that industrial agriculture has succeeded so well in its takeover of the countryside, I think it’s because of the fear of contingencies. Look at the ads of any of the major industrial agricultural firms and you will see a great deal about science, because science for modern people has been a quest for certainty, the opposite of contingency. The best scientists open up contingencies, sometimes discovering that we were even less certain than we thought. But the techno-industrial science of agribusiness has none of that wonder: It promises bigger yields, beefier cattle, more milk. But the natural world doesn't fit in the lab or the paradigms of agribusiness.  Weeds and worms have a way of breaking paradigms. As weeds begin to grow in the fields of Round-up ready crops against the promises of Monsanto, I have to smile. As much of a pain as both weeds and worms are, they are check on our hubris, and a call to humility and improvisation.