Feeding the Good Wolf – Liz Genever

As part of the Farming into the Future events, I spoke about the native American

proverb about the Two Wolves – there is a battle of two wolves inside each of us.

One wolf is evil, representing anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, lies, inferiority and

ego. The other wolf is good, representing joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness,

empathy and truth. The wolf that wins is the one you feed.

It was suggested by Holly from Focussed Farmers as working well with farmers.

It links into the idea that we have control over how we react and need to focus on

training our own brains to calm the chatter and to allow us to progress.

As part of the panel session at the events, I asked the farmer speakers about how do

they feed their good wolf. Basically how do they keep themselves in a positive

mindset. The overarching theme was spending time in nature and ideally with cows.

There was also a few comments on the mindfulness of setting up electric fencing,

and the importance of spending time off farm doing different things with different

people.

During the panel session, I also asked a question about what would the farmers do if

they had a magic wand and could make changes to their farming systems. There

was a theme around infrastructure, including water and fences, and also about

getting more hedges and trees on the farm and getting them growing quicker. There

was also some chat about super-charging their breeding or genetic improvement

programmes. It was interesting that most of the farmer speakers were content with

where they were.

The toy wolf that was purchased between meetings 1 and 2 will be a theme

throughout our activity for the next year.