One of the greatest learning experiences of my life came from raising tobacco has an 8th grader. Yes, I’d worked for other farmers in town doing different jobs along the way, but I’d never witnessed the entire process from start to finish, and this was a long time before YouTube. And even then, there was no online video that was going to teach me much what I ultimately found out the hard way in a tobacco field when I tried to manage my first payroll.
It was August, and the burley was bright yellow and ready to harvest. I had four other guys with me and the rest of the crew was in the barn with my older brother hanging the previous day’s work to dry.
But when I got to the field with “my crew,” the tobacco was brittle and hadn’t yet had time to *fall*, which meant it hadn’t yet wilted in the summer heat.
Tobacco, like lettuce or celery is extremely crisp in the morning, and is easily damaged. Farmers always wait until the crop is limp before they cut it, so the leaves don’t break off. But I had four guys sitting on their ass making $9/hr, which I thought was a fortune.
I didn’t do the math. Because even if the crew sat on their ass for two full hours while the crop fell, I’d only be out less than $80. But all I saw was people sitting and I thought I was losing money, so I instructed everyone to cut the tobacco, but go slow and to be easy.
It didn’t matter. About 20% of the leaves broke off and once we put the tobacco on the scaffold wagons, it took the crew about two full hours to pick up all the leaves that had broken off in the field. And in the end, my decision to not wait for the crop to fall was more work for less money—a breakeven blunder at best.
And this one experience is exactly why I don’t day trade or “change lanes” from one investment to the other when buying stocks, because like tobacco, I figure every time I take a position, that movement is going to cost me money. Can't mistake *movement* for process. So, I always try to make as few trades as possible in a year so I’m sitting on my ass and making money, verses switching lanes because this one is ahead today and that one is ahead tomorrow.
In short, today is all about efficiency. And that’s a lesson that came straight from the tobacco patch.
The second lesson was about business ethics. Because when I called this old, retired guy who didn’t have anything better to do than help us strip the crop, which was the process of taking the dried leaves and baling them for market, the old man was polite but refused on ethical grounds.
He said he didn’t want to work tobacco because tobacco caused cancer, and well…cancer killed people. Facts of life, or death in this case.
But by then, I was a freshman in high school, and the old man had given me something to chew on, because up until then, I thought everybody admired our initiative. I’d never been forced to think of the consequences of my actions or how all my hard work was being put into a product that would later be the cause of death for hundreds of people across the country.
And to ease my mind, I tried looking up all the positive uses of commercial-grade burley tobacco...other than smoking. And what do you know, there were none, which is when I realized that cancer didn’t care how hard I worked or how little I made for bringing a few thousand pounds of tobacco to market. Because if I was going to work that hard doing something, I decided it should be a product that helped people instead of killing them.
That’s why I love ATYR so much. It’s a full-circle moment for me, because I’ve gone from damaging people’s lungs to investing in a drug that is designed to heal them, and that makes me sleep a lot better at night verses having the ghosts of all the people I helped kill come flying through my dreams every time I close my eyes.
Sweet dreams,
\-Tweedle
