All of us will come back again to hoe in the ground . . . or hand-adze a beam, or skin a pole, or scrape a hive — we’re never going to get away from that. We’ve been living a dream that we’re going to get away from it. . . . Put that out of our minds. . . . That work is always going to be there.
— Gary Snyder, The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979
My Uncle George liked to say that lazy farmers built the best fences because they didn’t want to do the work over in a few years. That was his way of saying that successful contrary farming depends crucially on reducing manual labor to a minimum by skill instead of expensive machines, and on making the hard work that remains more enjoyable. This is particularly important for those of us who must combine farm work with another job or career to make a living.
This ability to manage manual labor efficiently requires a list of attitudes and skills as long as a hoe handle, but might be summed up by the scene of my grandfather, Henry Rall, grinning mischievously as he drove his horses while sitting on the rocking chair he had wired to the harrow. He even offered a reason to so pamper himself: the extra weight made the harrow do a better job of leveling the soil. Grandpaw Rall was exhibiting the skill most necessary for enjoying hard work: technological cleverness. Grandpaw Logsdon was good at that, too. He pounded a stake into the middle of his large, grassed barnyard and attached one end of a length of rope to the stake and the other to his lawn mower out on the edge of the lawn. Sure enough, the mower would run by itself in an ever-decreasing circle as the rope wound around the stake, mowing most of the grass while Grandpaw cackled and drank hard cider in the shade.
Just as important as technological cleverness is what I call handiness. Good athletes are gifted with handiness — excellent agility and coordination combined with an inborn sense of how to apply muscular power at just the right moment, location, and thrust to gain the most effective result. Society praises as science and art the ability to swing a ball bat, golf club, or tennis racket skillfully. If we would expend a fraction of that kind of attention and honor on the hoe, ax, shovel, and pitchfork, we might be surprised at how much work humans could accomplish without the help of fossil-fuel-gulping machines. They might not even realize that they were performing what journalists who don’t farm call “backbreaking work.” Is there any more backbreaking work than playing middle linebacker? Glorifying work by making contests of it is precisely how society in preindustrial civilization made physical work more or less enjoyable. A boyhood hero of mine, farmer Noble Goodman, was one of Ohio’s great softball pitchers and also the Ohio state-champion cornhusker in 1937.
It is difficult to generalize about hard work, because its definition depends on who’s talking. Another of the farmers who influenced me when I was young, Henry Bils, was an immigrant from Belgium who, during the first half of this century, worked his way to farming success despite overwhelming obstacles. He thought little of weeding and thinning four acres of sugar beets a day with a hand hoe, sixty acres a season. Most farmers would consider his approach to work excessive. But not Henry. He was working for himself, and that made all the difference. “He had vision,” his grandson, also Henry, says today. “He liked to work hard because in his mind he could see that it would pay off.” It sure did. One year in the 1940s he made fifteen thousand dollars from his hand-hoed sugar beets, a lot of money then and enough to pay off his debts in one grand slam. We can’t do that sort of thing in farming today because we have been stupid enough to sneer the hoe into near oblivion.
Henry did not flee the farm when things got tough, unlike the Hamlin Garlands of the literary world, who ever after wrote condescending and denigrating books about “backbreaking drudgery” and economic failure. If Henry had written a book (something he would have considered unendurably painful work), he would have told how exciting and rewarding his life was, even after he had bought a poor farm and gone broke on it. He would have pointed out his mistake and then told how he had tried again on good land and succeeded beyond his dreams. Nor did his sons rebel against the hard work he submitted them to, as the Hamlin Garland school of fiction liked to claim. The sons all went on to be successful farmers, too. Where love is at work, work is mostly play.
My parents worked very hard at farming when they had to, but they had a genius for making games out of work. Picking up ears of corn knocked off the stalks by the binder was a dull, early-winter chore in the old days, but for us it became an exciting hunt for arrowheads as we walked across the bare field of corn stubble. Between arrowheads, Mom would recount stories endlessly from the books she was reading or the latest movie she had seen. Or she and Dad would get into an argument about religion, which was even more entertaining.
Both my parents and my wife’s parents extolled hard work, insisting that the era of real horsepower was just as much fun and far less stressful than the high-tech later years. When the work did get grindingly physical, as in hay or grain harvests, a farmer could afford to hire help, they pointed out. Or neighbors got together and made a party of the work. “The young people went from farm to farm on winter evenings to husk the corn from the bundles of stalks stored in the barns,” Dad would recall his father recalling. “Anyone husking out a red ear — and there were lots of red ears in the days before hybrid corn — got to kiss his or her sweetheart.”
That story would prompt my wife’s mother, Helen Downs, to recall, “We were just as proud of our buggies as young people today are of their cars, and we didn’t have to spend all our lives paying for them either. It was more fun courting in a buggy, too, because you could let the horses do the driving.” Then she would pause, smile, and add, “When we went to town we took food along to sell. The grocer always owed us money.”
The truth is that farming at its worst is no more physically punishing than operating a restaurant, brokering commodities on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, or training for the Olympics. Yet our culture glamorizes these stressful occupations and clings to its image of farming as drudgery despite all evidence to the contrary. My brother-in-law, Morrison Downs, likes to say, “I left the farm for the city so I wouldn’t have to work weekends. Now I’m working weekends while the daggone farmers are all off fishing.”
The real shame is that so few people know enough about the world of agriculture to appreciate how fascinating the work actually can be. A farmer of deep ecological sensitivity is to the plow jockey on his two-hundred-horsepower tractor what a French chef is to the legions of hamburger handlers at fast-food chains. The chef’s work is infused with artistic, scientific, and spiritual satisfactions; the hamburger handler’s is infused only with the ticking of a time clock. To the plow jockey, soil is a boring landscape of clods that need to be crushed. To the ecological farmer, every clod holds a wondrously exotic world of brilliantly colored microorganisms, the very stuff of life.
Nevertheless, there is much work associated with even a small cottage farm like our thirty-two acres. Making that work enjoyable is a kind of calling, I think. Not everyone is cut out for it, although I am sure that there are thousands of people going through life dissatisfied (I was one of them for a while) because they do not know that they were born to be nurturers — farmers. Sometimes, as a compromise, they become gardeners, and that’s OK, too.
This calling, by which physical work can be rendered enjoyable and interesting (surely more so than jogging), requires certain characteristics that may be learned, but that I believe are mostly inborn. The first is a love of home. People with a true vocation to contrary farming find so much fascination in the near-at-hand that they feel no need to wander the world in search of truth, or beauty, or amusement. Like the great naturalist Henri Fabre, who turned his back yard into a lifelong, living laboratory for the study of insects, true farmers see their farms and their communities as a source of never-ending discovery, a microcosm of the world. They see the grand canyons and tropical rain forests, the city lights fantastic, the now much-trodden wildernesses, the history of civilization ebbing and flowing, all repeated in their own neighborhoods and villages. If they wish to heighten their awareness of how the outer world is reflected in their lives, they can “travel” the world by book, or by radio, television, telephone, and computer. They learn that people are the same everywhere and that the way to enjoy humanity (or at least learn to endure its absurdities) is to cultivate the people and places of their own community. One can dine as well on standing rib roast and homemade apple pie in a country cottage in Ohio as on chateaubriand and crème brûlée in gay Paree. More to the point, we can enjoy chateaubriand and crème brûlée in a country cottage in Ohio. With this sensibility, a farmer avoids the attitude that most often makes farm work burdensome: he knows he is not missing something grand and great down the road someplace.
Right here in our neighborhood there are dramatic stories waiting to be written about nearly every farm and village home I have been privileged to enter.
For example, in a little country cemetery close by, there is a grave of a woman who became pregnant, not by the man to whom she was betrothed, but by her father’s hired man. Her husband-to-be renounced her. She committed suicide. He spit in her coffin while the carpenter was making it. That all happened many years ago, but someone still places a bouquet of flowers by her grave each May and nobody seems to know who does it.
Just north of the cemetery is the place where legend says the Bower boys beat my great-grandfather nearly to death and left him lying in the road because he was an immigrant farmer from Germany and, horrors, a Catholic to boot. The family that lived in view of the beating (their descendants, the Hollansheads, live there still) nursed my great-grandfather back to health. He told them that he would someday own the Bowers’ farm, and he did.
At the very next house, a windsock rippled in the breeze above the barn roof for more than thirty years, though there neither was nor is an airport for miles around. Why? Walter and Berenice Kail operated a dairy farm there for many years, and their son, John, always wanted to be a pilot. He finally succeeded and went to Korea with the navy. Walter maintained a long, level swath of grass for a landing strip in the field behind the barn so that when John came home from the war to take over the farm, he could handily continue his flying. But John was killed in action, shot down in his plane. A few months later, while the parents were still sick with grief, a bad storm swept over the farm, during which a young man appeared at their door, grinning. “I just landed my plane on your field,” he said. “The storm forced me down. I don’t know what I would have done without that landing strip.” The young man was Bill Dyviniak, a photographer for the St. Louis Dispatch. When he heard the explanation for the landing strip, he was profoundly affected. He became, in a way, the devoted son the Kails had lost, returning to the farm year after year, to this day, though Walter is gone now and Berenice lives in a retirement home. Until the farm was sold, Bill Dyviniak kept a windsock flying on the barn peak, a memorial to what he and the Kail family believe was a miraculous occurrence. By any measure, it was.
Where can I experience the world any more deeply? I am reminded of Andrew Wyeth and the Kuerner farm next to his home in Pennsylvania. Wyeth has done hundreds of paintings on that farm, including many of his most famous works. Has he exhausted the possibilities of this humble, unpretentious bit of farmland? By no means. Karl Kuerner — the third Karl Kuerner, farm-born and farm-raised and himself an artist of renown who also paints the home farm continuously — told me recently that in discussing the artistic possibilities of the place and its people, Wyeth remarked to him, “Karl, we haven’t even hit the tip of this iceberg yet.”
This ability to see extraordinary beauty and drama in a farm landscape is shared by all real farmers, and is another reason that the work remains endurable if not enjoyable even in the most trying situations. The geometry of fields and garden plots never ceases to please the land-lover’s eye, even when sweat blurs the vision. There is, for example, a constant change of colors in the landscape as the sun moves over it. A field of wheat can turn into a rippling crimson lake at sunset. Tree trunks that were conventionally brown in the morning turn astonishingly orange in the dying light of certain magical evenings, especially in winter. Then in the moonlight, the trunks turn pitch black, with a contrast so sharp against the snow that it can take your breath away if the cold air does not.
Farming at its worst is no more physically punishing than operating a restaurant, brokering commodities on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, or training for the Olympics.
The contrary farmer also enjoys hard work out of a sort of mule-headed stoicism. I like getting hot, tired, and dirty putting up hay because it feels so good to clean up in the evening, sit on the porch, and sip lemonade, especially if it is spiked with gin.
Beyond these psychological aids to ease the work of farming, there are actual skills and methods that can make the work easier. The first rule is not to do anything nature will do for you. For example, this is why I favor all-season grazing of livestock with rotated pastures. Why make all that hay and haul it to the barn if the cows can graze it off themselves, even through part of winter?
But the principle of letting nature do the work is far more complex, involving what Swedish scientist Stefin Delin observed a few years ago: “It may well be that the biological processes are many magnitudes of order more efficient than the industrial ones.” This idea suggests fields of knowledge not much explored yet and terms not yet coined that someday will describe how diversity in nature can lessen hard work in farming, not with bigger machines, but with ecological cleverness.
As a way to get at this intriguing but still-hazy idea, walk with me in spirit over our little farm, where biological diversity is our first order of business. On this farm lives a human family along with several families of sheep, chickens, cows, bees, hogs, and, in my more naive days, riding horses. Nurturing all of us and being nurtured by us are families of corn, oats, wheat, orchard trees, grasses, legumes, berries, and garden vegetables, the whole domestic tribe living in a sort of hostile harmony with the wild food chain: animals, insects, and plants in such diversity that I have not been able to name them all. On our little farm, I have identified more than one hundred species of birds, forty species of wild animals (not counting hunters), more than fifty species of wildflowers, at least forty-five tree species, a myriad of gorgeous butterflies, moths, spiders, beetles, etc., and about 593,455,780 weeds.
What does this diversity have to do with easing work? Doesn’t it in fact sound like a guarantee for increasing work? Actually, no. For example, in the chemicalized fields that surround our farm, Canada thistle is a most noxious weed. The thistledown blows into our fields, too, and the seeds sometimes take root. The “expert” way to get rid of Canada thistle is to spray it (work) with a suitable herbicide (expense, meaning more work to pay for it), even though it is obvious all around us that herbicides do not control the thistle very well. But we don’t spray the Canada thistle and it is not a problem for us. The reason why is bound up in the inextricable webs of diverse life on our farm. First of all, Canada thistles prefer tilled soils, where they behave like the early Christians: the more of them you behead, the more they multiply. Since most of our farm is in thick, permanent or semipermanent sods where the thistle seeds are not as apt to establish themselves, we have an advantage in controlling them. Second, when the thistles do come up in the pasture, our sheep nibble on them despite the prickles, thus impairing the thistles’ growth. Also, two different bugs — the three-lined plant bug and another I can’t identify — riddle the thistle leaves until the infected plants stop growing. Most interestingly, a disease often strikes the thistles growing in sod, turning the tops white before they blossom and eventually killing them. Not counting a pasture mowing or two, which I have to do anyway, Canada thistles are effectively controlled without one lick of extra work from me.
I believe that the more diversity of species on a farm, the more the various forms of life keep each other from achieving out-of-balance population relative to the other species. Increasing diversity means more than merely “balance,” which is a negative accomplishment. Increasing diversity means to me increasing biological dynamism, which leads to an increasing amount of total food produced without an increased amount of human labor or purchased agricultural supplies. The most obvious example is growing clover. Clover works with rhizobia bacteria in the soil to draw nitrogen from the air and make it available to itself and other, subsequent plants without any effort or cost to me. A factory to extract nitrogen from the air, on the other hand, costs millions of dollars, and society’s tendency is then to use the nitrate so produced to make gunpowder, not to enrich soil.
Ten acres of our thirty-two lie about a mile from the main farm. This is old-growth forest we bought to save from the bulldozer. We manage it for an important crop: wood for fuel to keep us warm in winter, wood for construction lumber, and wood for our son’s woodworking business. We have to work to turn that wood into fuel and lumber, but nature does all the work of producing it. What would be the energy efficiency of humans producing steel compared to nature producing wood?
The twenty acres where our home is built are divided into six parts. Two acres along the road hold our vegetable gardens and orchard and woodworking shop. Then come about five woodland acres within which the house and barn are nestled. The trees act as a windbreak to protect the barn in winter from cold westerly winds so that the environment around the buildings is fairly calm even during a blizzard. The winter work of caring for the animals is thus made pleasant. The protection provided by the trees also means we need less fuel for the house in winter.
Behind these woods are about twelve acres of open land divided by fences into plots of permanent pasture, temporary pasture, and grain crops. In one of the pasture plots, we dug a pond to avoid the work of hauling water that would otherwise be necessary in rotational grazing. Behind this area, at the rear of the property, are another two acres of wooded pasture, through which the creek meanders. Our farm thus contains all the kinds of farm and wildlife habitat in north-central Ohio: garden, lawn, orchard, woodland, grassland, cultivated ground, creek, pond, and wetland. This panoply of habitat and the abundance of food it produces means that we are literally besieged by deer, raccoons, rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs, opossums (they make a nest in my grain harvester in the barn every winter), chipmunks, geese, ducks, and coyotes. We could easily obtain from this quasi wilderness our yearly supply of meat if we so chose, and avoid the work of raising domestic animals altogether. I would guess that our farm sustains a yield of about two bushels of groundhogs per acre as a byproduct of ecological farming. Young groundhog is not bad eating either.
As all these life forms interact with each other, they create effects they are incapable of individually. For example, cow flaps draw earthworms to dine on the organic matter. Young trees that have crept into the meadow over the years from the adjoining woods draw the cows to their shade. The cow-manure-earthworm-tree environment draws woodcocks to the farm. These birds come for the earthworms under the cow flaps and under the moist dirt bared by tree shade and cow hooves. Not incidentally, the combination has also produced on occasion a fairy ring of edible mushrooms. Also not incidentally, the animal manure is all the while being broken down and returned to enrich the earth. All we have to do is stand and watch in awe and pick the mushrooms.
Sometimes wild animals work quite directly for us, like hired hands. My honeybees pollinate our crops and then provide us with honey. I know farmers who still let hogs and beef cattle harvest their corn. Mike Reicherts, a well-known Iowa farmer, says his hogs have learned how to knock the stalks over to get to the ears. “It is really something,” he says with a grin, “to see a hog walk up to a stalk, look up at the ear of corn on it, and deliver a tremendous blow with the side of its snout and wham! Down comes the stalk. Somebody ought to get that on video.”
My sheep clean out fence rows for me with their grazing and also save me much mowing. When a sheep dies, the buzzards soon swoop in out of the blue and gorge themselves on the carcass, a loathsome and gluttonous sight, but for that reason fascinating, too. The point is that the buzzards perform a useful activity from my point of view (not to mention the buzzards’) by saving me the job of burial.
Although we appear to live in a very tame, intensively farmed area, hardly a week goes by in which we do not experience some unusual or unexpected little adventure that lightens and even makes gladsome the work: a pale green luna moth fluttering in the porch light; a fungus that looks like a little pile of sand; another that looks strikingly like a human penis; an ant “milking” its herd of aphids; a killdeer nest right in the middle of our gravel driveway. And three years after we planted papaw trees, the gorgeous zebra swallowtail butterfly, which feeds only on papaw, landed daintily on the tractor.
Learning to let nature work for you applies to gardening and landscaping, too. Many people mow their lawns twice as often as they need to, to the detriment of the lawn, and before long they are complaining that their place is too big to keep up.
Often the rules that landscape architects lay down for trimming trees (or foresters, for thinning a young stand of hardwood trees) instruct you to undertake work that, if you wait a year or two, will be done by natural shading. Working hard at building and turning compost heaps makes some gardeners happy and results in a wonderful soil amendment, but you can save lots of energy by just spreading leaf and grass waste as mulch and letting it rot to compost in place, in its own good time.
If diversity is the first major worksaver, the second is timeliness. For example, it is crucially important to control weeds when they are tiny and easy to destroy. After weeds grow even two inches tall, controlling them becomes unpleasant work.
A farmer of deep ecological sensitivity is to the plow jockey on his two-hundred-horsepower tractor what a French chef is to the legions of hamburger handlers at fast-food chains.
Timeliness can be practiced another way: by “not biting off more than you can chaw,” as the old saying goes. Almost all beginning gardeners plant gardens that are too large and then don’t have time to tend them properly. Good French-intensive gardeners can raise more on a hundred square feet than I am presently raising on three times that much land because they can concentrate water, soil nutrients, and their labor on a smaller area. And although I expend on thirty acres the same amount of time that a large operator spends, with several workers, on a thousand acres, my costs will be lower because my payroll is zero and my tools much cheaper, while my production per acre is much higher. I can focus all my skills and time on comparatively few acres. This becomes even more the case as the number of acres farmed diminishes below twenty.
“In the United States, we’ve always talked about the fact that as farms become larger they become more efficient,” Hugh Popenoe at the University of Florida observes. “But we’re talking about comparing a fifty-acre farm to a five-thousand-acre farm. We’ve never talked about farms of two, three, or four acres. As farms become smaller than three acres, yields start increasing dramatically.”
No matter how small the farm, easing the work is better achieved if there are many activities in progress, spread over the entire year so that at no one time does work become overwhelming. Briefly, here’s how we spread the workload on our farm:
In January, we have little to do other than the usual daily chores of feeding the animals, keeping them in clean straw, and feeding the stove in our living room with wood. We spend a lot of time reading and watching television and making big plans we never put into action.
In February, as the snow (if any) melts, I get into woodcutting mode. If cold winds blow from the west, I cut on the east side of the woods, and vice versa. Out of the wind, the winter woods are more pleasant than the summer woods. At the end of the month, we tap a few maple trees and boil down a little of their sap.
In March, we shear the sheep and butcher two hogs. Butchering is distasteful to me, but family and friends join in and with only two hogs, the job becomes almost trivial. I broadcast clover seed on the dormant wheat and sometimes on pastures. Woodcutting continues. I try to build several hundred feet of new fence every March and make any repairs needed in the existing fencing. Installing new fencing is work, but not nearly as hard as trying to keep animals inside deteriorating old fences.
April is lambing time. I turn the animals on pasture about midmonth or sooner. Toward the end of the month, as soon as the soil is dry enough, I disk the corn-stubble field and plant it to oats. We also walk over the pastures, hoeing out any burdock that might later produce burrs to tangle in the sheep’s wool.
The work reaches high tide in May no matter how carefully I have spread the load. The priority job is getting garden vegetables and field corn planted and then continuously cultivating until July so that weeds never become a problem. Asparagus is in full production. But there will always be time on those first warm, bugless days to shed clothes and enjoy the new sun in the sweet spring air. Birdwatching combines well with sunbathing. Watch especially for the sharp-eyed prude that flits about on angel wings keeping the world safe for the clothing industry. You can usually identify it by its song: an irritable tsk tsk tsk.
June means haymaking, my hardest work. But I have considerably lessened the time and labor of that job with “technological cleverness.” Also, we dare not slack up on weed cultivation, except to go fishing. Fish in farm ponds bite best in June. I add another “super” (honey compartment) to each of the beehives in June. And eat more strawberries than I should.
July is the third and last of the big labor months, though I have not missed a softball game yet. This is the month we butcher the broilers bought in May as chicks. The second cutting of hay comes in now, the wheat and oats are harvested, and the straw is barned for winter bedding. Time to rotate livestock to a different pasture and clip the one they have been grazing with tractor and mower. Lambs may need worming. Pick raspberries and blackberries. I swim in the pond with eyes closed, pretending I’m on the Riviera, wherever that is.
August is slowdown time on the farm, but putting food by in the kitchen is at its peak. Tomatoes, sweet corn, string beans, peppers, peaches, plums, and so on must all be canned or frozen for winter’s fare. We do not try to do all of a crop in one freezing or canning bout, but do small amounts several times. The work is less grueling that way. Now is also the time I usually haul manure out of the barn and give the pastures a second clipping.
Corn harvest begins in September. We feed the sweet-corn stalks, relieved of their ears, to the sheep and cows and, if pastures have dried up, cut some green field corn for them, too. As the field corn matures, I begin to husk it from the stalks or, in some cases, cut stalks with ears intact and set them up in shocks. Toward the end of the month, I disk the old oat stubble and plant wheat.
In October, we finish the cornhusking and remove the top compartments of the beehives for our share of the honey crop. We gather hickory nuts and walnuts and put the cider press into action. We make apple cider, apple pie, apple vinegar, applesauce, apple everything, and still, in most years, there are plenty for the sheep and cows.
In November, the most important farm job is getting the old hayfield plowed. Usually this is the month we saw logs from our woods into lumber. Firewood cutting begins now, along with making bittersweet-and-wild-grapevine wreaths for the coming holidays. We sell the lambs, butcher our beef calf, and put a ram in with the ewes.
On nice days in December, we cut wood. There is feverish activity in the woodworking shop, where we are busy making Christmas gifts. Otherwise there is time to write letters to faraway friends and snooze by the warm wood stove.
There is a daily rhythm to the work, especially where farm animals are involved. Morning and evening chores are inevitable with animals — feeding and watering them, gathering eggs, and milking the cow if a calf is not nursing. But the time involved in this daily routine with our forty-odd sheep, cow and calf, two hogs, and thirty chickens is seldom more than an hour a day, and in summer, when the animals are out on pasture, hardly any time at all. Even if I doubled the number of animals, I have now learned enough skills and shortcuts that the chore time involved would increase only a little.
To get a weekend away from home, we pick times of the year when the animals are on pasture, or provide them with enough food inside to last for two days. We have made arrangements with other contrary farmers to do each other’s necessary chores if emergencies arise and we have to be away longer than two days.
There’s another consideration about manual labor in farming that is becoming ever more important. Modern society is losing the knowledge of how to do anything in a direct, hands-on, manually skilled kind of way. I don’t know if the words progressive or advanced can be applied to a nation that can no longer function without certain technologies over which individuals have no control. The more local communities become dependent on centralized powers for food, clothing, and shelter, the more they become enslaved to that power. The typical American farmer today spends more time wrangling over subsidies at the local Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service office than he does planting corn.
I like what Jay Dorsey, a young agricultural engineer at Ohio State University, has written in a memo to his fellow engineers, protesting the loss of practical knowledge in farming:
The highly technological agriculture we prescribe today has adversely affected the management skills and ability of the farmer. In the move to gain more control, the practitioner is losing touch with some basic agricultural principles that are effective in any agricultural system, regardless of the level of technology used, such as: stability through diversification; timing tillage and planting for weed and insect control instead of getting it all done as early as possible; and the use of rotations for free nitrogen, soil building, and weed and insect control. Farmers have lost much of the “feel” (practical knowledge) for how to farm because modern technologies have trivialized that knowledge. As a result, farmers don’t “know” their farms or their soils as well as they used to, and in a sense they have lost the flexibility that would allow them to adjust to adverse environmental conditions. Farmers (and other groups, of course), who used to be considered artisans, are becoming little more than technicians.
As an example, there are very few professional farmers who know how to milk a cow by hand anymore, and I dare say none with the muscle tone to milk five in a row as my mother and I each used to do when Dad was busy in the fields. Even more alarming, the typical dairy cow today has been genetically reshaped to sport teats that are fine for milking machines but too small to be hand-milked.
If farmers are becoming ignorant of practical knowledge, think how much more so society at large suffers from this lack. Most people don’t know how to feed, clothe, or shelter themselves, much less build a house or repair a roof. Hardly anyone, including so-called trained mechanics, knows how to fix the ailments of electronically controlled cars. The mechanics don’t fix these cars; they merely keep replacing old parts with new ones until the vehicle runs again.
But the best way I can describe the dilemma we face is to tell a true story. A young, well-educated woman I know, with her heart very much in the right place, decided to grow a garden last year. She planted lots of potatoes. They grew wonderfully. Then suddenly, inexplicably, the plants all died. Not a potato had been produced, she sadly told her friends. Surveying the scene of desolation, she tripped on a bulge in the soil. And what did she dislodge? A potato big as a softball. She examined the soil more closely. Why, the ground was full of potatoes!
“The Contrary Farmer” is excerpted from Gene Logsdon’s book The Contrary Farmer. © 1993 by Gene Logsdon. It is reprinted here by permission of Chelsea Green Publishing Co., P.O. Box 428, White River Junction, VT 05001, (800) 639-4099.
— Ed.
