Opinion: Rest isn’t weakness, it’s part of the job
© Tim Scrivener Everyone talks about the weather. We have to. It’s the one “colleague” we never chose, the one “deadline” we can’t negotiate, and the one “competitor” we’ll never beat.
The old saying, “make hay while the sun shines,” isn’t just a quaint phrase, it’s a mindset. We spend our careers competing against something we can never control.
Yet, for all the conversations we have about the weather, there’s one thing we rarely mention once the rush is over. Fatigue.
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I don’t mean the sort of tiredness that disappears after an early night, but the kind that creeps up once the pressure eases.
During frantic days, adrenaline carries you through. Then the rain comes, the machinery is parked and the urgency disappears.
Everyone assumes life simply returns to normal. But it doesn’t. Your body finally catches up with what you’ve been asking of it.
The exhaustion settles into your bones and the strange thing is that slowing down can feel harder than speeding up.
After days or weeks of living at 100mph, sitting still almost feels uncomfortable.
You find yourself on the yard looking for another job, checking something that doesn’t need checking or convincing yourself you should be doing more.
Perhaps it’s because farming has quietly convinced many of us that being busy is the same as being productive.
Rest can feel like laziness. Taking an afternoon off can bring a sense of guilt.
We tell ourselves we’ll slow down next week, then next month, then when winter comes you suddenly remember that gate that’s been hanging on by optimism and one hinge since lambing.
Many us of wouldn’t dream of putting a tractor through hard graft without giving it the once over to check she’s up to the job. We know machinery performs better when it’s looked after.
Yet we often expect ourselves to keep going regardless, ignoring the warning signs we’d never ignore in a piece of equipment.
Somewhere along the way, exhaustion became a currency in farming. We compare hours worked, nights missed and weekends sacrificed as though the person running on the least sleep deserves a trophy.
The truth is, there’s no trophy for surviving on four hours’ sleep or proving you’re the most exhausted person in the yard. If there is, I’ve certainly never seen it presented at a show.
Perhaps the real achievement isn’t seeing how much of ourselves we can give away, but building the farm with a culture that doesn’t require us to run ourselves into the ground to prove our commitment.
Fatigue isn’t a sign that you’re weak or that you’ve lost your work ethic. More often, it’s evidence that you’ve given everything you had to the job.
Recharging isn’t an interruption to farming, it’s part of it.
Looking after yourself isn’t taking your foot off the pedal. It’s making sure the engine is still capable of pulling when the next weather window opens.
The weather shapes our work, our income and often, our mood. But maybe, once the forecast has been discussed and the work is finally done, we should spend just as much time asking each other a different question.
Not: “Did you beat the rain?” But: “How are you holding up?” Making hay while the sun shines is essential, but so is making sure there’s enough left of yourself to do it all again.