If there are any easy days on a family farm, I haven’t seen them. After getting the rotted pipe out of the water system – the pipes began gushing water yesterday – Ed has to replace the old steel pipe with a new one, and thread the ends, which he does by hand. “I do the bull work,” he  says, smiling. Farmers don’t see these eruptions as crises, just the normal course of a day. Family farms always seem to me to be hovering on the eddge of catastrophe, but these people are resilient, strong and almost Zen-like in their philosophical handling of trouble. Trouble isn’t a crisis on a family farm, it is the work.