Danny's Day in the Field

In my day I have worked on a golf course, installed underground irrigation systems, and at one point was the guy responsible for finding missing shoes at a major Toronto “sporting-lifestyle” store. Prior to this morning however, I had never been a farmhand. But as of 12 hours ago, I can officially say that there is some small part of Danny Austin that is a farmer. Hypothetically, if civilization crumbled and I was stranded with a friend who knew how to cultivate edible plants but for some reason didn’t know how to plant them, I just might survive.
This morning when the farm manager Mutuponde asked me whether I wanted to help out with planting in the fields I was pretty much priming myself for a good Internet cruise. My mornings in the office are spent corresponding with future guests, but there is always time to keep up-to-date on the latest news. I was going to try and find other overzealous Obama supporters and read their reactions to the election. I was going to read various previews of the Arsenal-Manchester United match taking place this afternoon in London. I was even planning on checking up on the latest Iron Man 2 script updates (apparently Terrence Howard has been replaced by Don Cheadle). However, once the offer to prove myself in the field came along, my internet-surfing itinerary was immediately a thing of the past.
My morning of farm work began with planting cardamom plants. Basically, any individual cardamom plant will provide a high yield of beans for five years. After those five years, most farmers will cut them down and replace them with new plants. If however, you pull a stock of cardamom out from the roots and replant it, a new stock with identical properties will grow directly next to it. You can therefore produce an entire crop of top-quality cardamom plants simply by monitoring what plants produce high yields or appear resistant to disease and replanting them. For the first hour and a half of my farming adventure I dug holes, and my boss’s daughter Maya would stick a six foot cardamom stock into the ground. It was such a fun change from sitting in an office that it made me feel like I should consider a change of careers. I thought to myself “Wow, I was born for this! I am such a great farmer!”
As it turns out though, when Mutuponde asked me if I wanted to help out with the farm work he declined to mention that after the first hour and a half I would have to kneel down with all my weight on the balls of my feet and plant young coffee plants for a full two hours more. It’s like playing leap-frog for two hours, but without any of the leaping or the hilarity of seeing grown adults acting like frogs. If you are like me and have a history of back problems, this ends up being incredibly painful. I should revise my earlier hypothetical end-of-civilization claim. It would appear that if I had to survive in a post-apocalyptic world by planting young coffee plants I would not last long. How anybody spends every day of their adult life crouched over in this position digging holes is beyond me. By the end of the morning I could barely move. I ended up spending a good portion of my afternoon lying in bed wondering when my Advil would kick in.
When I was in high school all of the supposed “tough guys” were obsessed with gangster rappers like 50 Cent. It turns out that they had it wrong. 50 Cent may have been able to sell crack on the mean streets of Brooklyn, but I do not think he would last one hour on a farmer’s field. Instead of baggy jeans and hooded sweat shirts, the teenage tough guys at my school should have been wearing overalls and straw hats if they wanted to prove how hardcore they really were.