The Liturgy of the Jang

Liturgy: derived from the ancient Greek λειτουργία (leitourgia) meaning “work or service for the people;” a body of rites prescribed for public worship; a customary repertoire of ideas, phrases, or observances.

The Jang direct seeder is a piece of art. It is simple, elegant, thoughtfully designed, and works with minimal fuss. It’s probably my favorite tool or implement on the farm - convenient, since it’s directly part of my job. While the majority of our crops are seeded by April in the nursery and then we transplant the little keiki, many others do need to get seeded directly into our beds in the field blocks. Most commonly I’ll use the Jang seeder for arugula, mesclun mix, any radishes and turnips, and carrots. It has an array of differently sized sprockets and seed rollers, meaning you can find a configuration to pretty much match whatever spacing requirements a given crop needs in terms of seeds per foot.

When seeding with the Jang, I’ve always thought it feels a bit like pushing one of those kids’ bikes with the parental steering handle attached to the rear. You simply walk alongside it pushing it down the bed, and as the Jang’s front wheel rotates, it turns a front sprocket attached by a chain to a rear sprocket. The rear sprocket then turns the seed roller in the hopper above it, the seeds drop down into a very small trench created (and then closed) by the furrower, and finally the rear wheel presses the soil down as it rolls over the furrow. Voilà! Bed seeded. Like I said, elegant. No gasoline, no fancy setup, just go.

I was handed the direct seeding task from our previous field manager as she was stepping down from her job here, maybe a year and a half ago; I really hadn’t been at Lapa’au that long, so I just tried to do exactly as she did… but dang it made me nervous. There’s no takebacks in seeding, you don’t get to hit delete and start again. So each time I had something to seed, my butt puckered up a little bit, I double- and triple-checked my cheat sheet of which sprockets and rollers go with which crop, and I’d grab the seeds, rollers, the Jang, and set off to worriedly plant a whole bed of whatever, completely unsupervised. Madness!

Like every new thing, there’s a learning curve. Initially, after germination I’d think, ‘Okay that was a little rough. I can see now I should have seeded a little more densely (or less), or my rows were too spaced out (or too squished together), or I got distracted and now half of this row looks seeded by a kindergartener.’ In worse cases, you discover you’ve gotten your numbers mixed up and seeded way too many/way too few seeds, resulting in wasted seed, time, money, and probably more work ahead of yourself in redoing the whole bed.

But that’s initially. You learn things the hard way at first because you have no experience to lean on - such is life. Eventually those bumps smooth out and you start to become more consistent and reliable, building some muscle memory over time and trusting your newfound experience. The bed of mesclun is more or less acceptable; the daikon doesn’t appear to have been sown by a drunk and/or blind raccoon. You’re improving! And then… well, then you begin learning that you could still be doing it better. Always better. You could’ve given a half inch more space between the mesclun rows because it provides the greens that much more airflow and it allows the greens harvester to cut a little better. You see that because of our carrots’ normal germination issues, you should probably use the 10-14 sprocket combination instead of the 9-14. Maybe you even realize after ten months of using the Y-24 roller to seed the hakurei turnips (…which have been coming out fine) that actually the YYJ roller fits the seed perfectly.

As I gained some confidence and proficiency in the direct seeding role, naturally it began to morph a little bit and evolve in ways that better suited my hands. As my wife or anyone who knows me will tell you, I am a creature of habit and consistency, by nature mostly suited to routine and the quiet completion of tasks. (It was a lovely party, thanks for coming everyone, but no, I’ll do all these dishes myself, thank you.) I suppose it’s a decent disposition for a farmer. Anyway, the task started to become routine, and then the routine began to solidify and cohere, and in its coherence I began—much to my surprise—to actually find pleasure in it and enjoy myself. The Jang, I thought to myself, is a fine tool. I began to look forward to seeding and in so doing I began to take greater care in how I approached the task.

A revelation ensued. All those little adjustments over time can add up to something of consequence: actual real improvement in seeding leads to better germination leads to healthier crops leads to better harvests leads to happier farmers and happier customers. The trick is paying attention well enough to accomplish the changes or envision the changes needed. And the only real way to pay attention is to focus your mind on the task at hand, and the best way to focus your mind is, I think, the creation of ritual.

Which is where the liturgy comes in.

The best rituals and the most beautiful liturgies are to me the ones that bring you indelibly into the present moment. They carve out a space—both physically and in your consciousness—that allows you to stand here, now. You’re not wondering what else is going on in the world, in our very busy and complicated and often painful world, because you are participating in this particular thing, here, now. The most impactful liturgical experiences I’ve had were at St. Paul’s Episcopal church in Seattle. My core memory of those Sunday mornings, though more than ten years removed at this point, is the effortlessness with which I slipped into the stream of the service. The enacted liturgy—the standing, kneeling, singing, listening, greeting, and most of all the Eucharistic bread and wine—ushered me out of normal life and into the time of the Spirit. I realized there that the “smells and bells,” as my low-church forefathers would pejoratively call it, were in fact the material and sensorial phenomena through which I found my way. I’m convinced any ritual worth its salt will marry the tangible and intangible, because that is the fundamental human experience: we have a mind that soars and a body that bleeds. We are both - so honoring both is the only way forward.

It’s the same process for farming (minus the incense). When I’m about to direct seed, I first collect everything I’ll need. Often I’ve got multiple crops on my list so I grab the various seed bags from the fridge, I stuff them and the appropriate rollers into my pockets, gather the Jang and a rake into my arms, and walk out to the field. At this point the bed is already 99% prepped—fertilizer and compost added, the soil worked and shaped by the BCS or spader, the walkways cleared of weeds—so now I just need to ensure it’s ready for the Jang to glide atop. Thus, the rake! It’s a good one, real wide and heavy duty, perfect for clearing the top of the bed of anything that will get in the way of a smooth and steady seeding. Goodbye clumps of weeds that will inevitably re-root, goodbye treacherous rocks that send me off course like banana peels from Mario Kart, goodbye subterranean stalks of cauliflower lying in wait like predators. (So satisfying.)

What I didn’t realize at first is that raking the bed prepares me as much as—or perhaps more than—the soil itself. As I make my way down the full length of the bed, I am paying attention to it. I am working hard, moving swiftly, but I’m also focused on what the bed looks like - not only the weeds and rocks and old organic matter but also to see if I can spot any pests, low spots, anything noteworthy. And I try to maintain good form - just like any physical endeavor, be it labor or athletics, what’s the key? A low center of gravity, knees bent, using your legs not your back. This is the mantra of a million high school coaches the world over, hollering til they’re hoarse to GET LOW DAMMIT! So (Yes Coach!) I get low.

Now, we ready.

The bed is fully prepared—almost eager to receive. My body feels loose from the raking, the rhythm of my back and forth movement still echoing in my blood. My mind, too, is loosened up now that I’ve surveyed the bed; now that the task is directly in front of me, my thoughts are called back into the realm of the present moment. Here, now. At the front of the bed, I get down on my knees (unintentionally but unavoidably paralleling the religious liturgy) with the Jang and remove the lid from the hopper and the little protective plate from the sprockets and chain. I pull up the “Jang seeder numbers” note on my phone to confirm the sizing of the roller and sprockets: Alright, we’re seeding the new variety of arugula (“Uber,” if you’re interested), so that’s the F24 roller with the #10 sprocket at the rear and #11 up front. Once those are all set, I prop the Jang upright and carefully-oh-so-carefully pour the teensy arugula seed into the hopper—at around sixty seeds per foot for nine rows on a 120’ bed, that’s a lot of seed! Arugula seeds secured in the hopper, I stand again and set up the Jang at the very edge of the bed, starting at what will become the outermost row, and …just walk it down the bed. Once I reach the end I turn around and set up on the other far edge of the bed and come back; in this down-and-back fashion I move inward until the whole bed is done. Since this is baby salad greens, we’re looking to get essentially as much growth out of this bed as possible. With carrots or radishes I’m normally seeding just four rows or so—gotta give ‘em room to breathe—but the arugula will get as many rows as I can squeeze into the bed, leaving just enough room for airflow as the leaves grow up.

Now, because we’re a small-scale farm and we do pretty much everything by hand and/or by sight, sometimes the bed is not entirely straight. It might have a little pinch in it or it may bend out a bit, eating into the walkway. Whatever the case, even if it’s a damn near perfect bed, the Jang still requires my focus. The Jang is mechanical, but I don’t get to leave my attention off to the side. It’s not a machine that takes over for my brain but in fact elevates mindfulness. It is a sturdy tool, but that does not mean I get to treat it roughly; it is efficient, but that does not mean I get to be careless. All my senses are engaged. As I push, my hands are sensitive to the angle and force with which I am pushing, ceaselessly making the tiny adjustments my consciousness is hardly aware of. My eyes must stay laser-focused if I am to have any hope for creating relatively straight rows; I also continually glance at the seeder to make sure it’s, you know, seeding. Sometimes the Jang can get jostled in such a way that a sprocket comes loose and the roller no longer rotates, and until you realize this you’re just a dumb ape pushing an inert object in the dirt. Not fun. But my eyes are also helped by my ears - if I’m paying attention, usually I can hear when things go awry, when the sound of the seeds rolling and dropping stops. Touch, vision, hearing: these are the predominant senses used. Nonetheless, as an embodied creature, the senses are a package deal; with one comes all the others. So as I’m touching and watching and listening to the seeder, I also taste the gritty dust kicked up and the salty sweat from my brow. And my goodness have you ever smelled carrot seed? They’re heavenly: floral, herbaceous, sweet and ready for life.

With the seeding finished, I return any leftover seeds from the hopper to the bag and return the bag to the fridge. I take the Jang and the rake back to their homes alongside the barn. The seeding is completed, the work is done. This is both the best and worst part: it’s out of my hands! We are helpless at this point. It’s up to the seeds now.

Few times have been as stress-inducing for me on this farm as when I seed something new for the first time (or just every time I seeded in the beginning). Once I’m done walking the Jang up and down the bed, I can only trust it’ll come out alright: “Okay seeds, well, I guess yall’ve got it. Best of luck germinating. I’ll just, uh, be going now.” I’m not going to see a result right away. When I leave for the day, that bed looks essentially the same as before I started—which is to say, it’s a bunch of dirt. Just dirt. But those little seeds have their recipe for life tucked inside, stashed away in some hidden inner pocket, and I just hope in a few days I see their tiny green shoots breaking up out of the soil. It’s quite humbling, really, to participate in something like seeding. We put in a lot of work up front to get the soil as ready as can be to receive the seeds, but in the end we can’t take much credit.

The farm is alive, and we participate in that life. My little ritualized work with the Jang is bound up in the wider farm leitourgia, the liturgy we recreate anew each day at Lapa’au. And it is, in a very real way, “work or service for the people.” It is a deeply felt joy of mine that I help grow good food for people to eat. What could be better? As I have come to find pleasure in my tasks, I have become a more thoughtful farmer. I love this work that integrates my body and mind, the tangible and the intangible. I am glad for the sweat from my pores and the dirt staining my fingernails, just as I am grateful for the vision and desire of Michael and Lauren and the whole Lapa’au crew. The hours I put in on this land are sacred in their own right, a time that connects me to my fundamental existence as a mortal creature in a mortal creaturely world: I am participating in this particular thing, here, now.

So, if you’ll excuse me, me and the Jang got work to do.