Instead, we cover up crops as best we can when the sky turns grey, replant when the clouds solidify into hail, trust that our members and customers understand if things happen (in 2017, we were relieved that most folks were cool buying and eating veggies with some hole action), and hope for the best as much as we can.Which brings me at last to something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year, and that lies at the root of my hail fears: uncertainty.Most of what is stressful or hard in farming is the constant uncertainty that underlies everything you do when working in a field that intersects with nature. We can do our best, but still might not have success. Sometimes there’s a freeze or hail or injury or just plain old crop failure. We hedge our bets, plan for the worst, and build in all sorts of protections and redundancies, but there is always risk and uncertainty.I am a super uptight, type A person with anxiety issues that likes to plan and control for everything. I have absolutely no idea why I like farming and survived in this field all these years coexisting with the level of uncertainty farmers have every minute of every day (maybe it’s the beer or the ice cream?).I never considered the ability of farmers to develop and practice coping skills around uncertainty as something positive. In fact, most of my adult life I’ve worked to be less anxious about uncertainty. It’s only in a world now shaken up from Covid, where we can’t plan ahead like we used to, or feel confidence in knowing what’s coming, or be able to insure our way to a positive outcome, that I’m finally seeing that learning how to deal with disconcerting levels of uncertainty is a skill I guess I’m okay with having. But it’s also a series of fears, stresses, and experiences I wish that all you non-farmers out there could have been spared, because like hail, uncertainty sucks.