by Gene Logsdon
THE CONTRARY FARMER
GENE LOGSDON
THE
CONTRARY
FARMER
Contents
The Ramparts People
CHAPTER 1At Ease with the Work of Farming
CHAPTER 2Pastoral Economics
CHAPTER 3The Garden is the Proving Ground for the Farm
CHAPTER 4The Peaceable Kingdom of the Barnyard
CHAPTER 5Water Power
CHAPTER 6A Paradise of Meadows
CHAPTER 7Groves of Trees to Live In
CHAPTER 8King Corn
CHAPTER 9Cottage Mechanics
CHAPTER 10Winter Wheat, Spring Oats, Summer Clover, Fall Pasture
Book the Contrary Farmer Treasures
Index
This book is dedicated to my friend, Dave Smith, on whose contrary farm the marauding wild boars understand retribution but the old redwoods grow peacefully, knowing they will not be cut down as long as lie lives.
The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer
I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so he it. II it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it. I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts, and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing, and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven's favor, in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught so often laughing at funerals, that was because I knew the dead were already slipping away, preparing for a comeback, and can I help it? And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not be resurrected by a piece of cake. "Dance" they told me and I stood still, and while they stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced. "Pray" they said, and I laughed, covering myself in the earth's brightnesses, and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.
When they said "I know that my Redeemer liveth," I told them "He's dead." And when they told me "God is dead," I answered "He goes fishing every day in the Kentucky River. I see Him often." When they asked me would I like to contribute I said no, and when they had collected more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had. When they asked me to join them I wouldn't and then went off by myself and did more than they would have asked. "Well, then" they said "go and organize the International Brotherhood of Contraries," I said "Did you finish killing everybody who was against peace?" So be it. Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what I say I don't know. It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way.
Wendell Berry
from Farming: A Hand Book
Gratitudes
My thanks go first to Dave Smith, to whom this book is dedicated. Co-founder of Smith and Hawken, Dave staked me to the writing of this book both with money and with an indefatigable flow of encouragement. Those who think that American business has grown decadent in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement need to know Dave as well as I have come to know him.
Secondly, a special thanks to Jim Schley, my editor at Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Gawd. There were times when his skill and dedication sent me nearly clawing up the oak tree outside my windowmostly because he was mostly right and I was mostly wrong. If this manuscript reads well to you, the credit should go entirely to Jim's tireless efforts. In fact, so pervasive is his hand in every chapter that I am going to depart from the usual writerly custom and say that any mistakes left are entirely Jim's. Just kidding.
Obviously, for the Contrary Farmer to succeed, he must have a contrary wife and family and a most contrary bunch of relatives and friends. You all know who you are and how much you've helped. And how I can never repay any of you adequately.
I give special thanks to two friends and university teachers, Kamyar Enshayan and David Orr. They are as contrary in academia as I am in agriculture, willing to point out problems in their university establishments with great courage and little regard for their own career security. They are true Teachers, and have inspired me greatly to keep pressing on. If only we had colleges full of people like them, then colleges might make sense again.
The Ramparts People
I remember clearly the day when I was twelve, hunting morel mushrooms with my father, when I informed him excitedly that I had decided to take my dog and my rifle and go deep into the wilderness to live. I would build a cabin on a mountainside by a clear running stream, and live out my days happily on broiled trout, fried mushrooms, and hickory nut pie. I would achieve advanced degrees in the art of living, bestowed on me by Nature, and I would know many things not even Einstein or my stupid schoolteacher dreamed of.
I thought that he would approve, since he was forever retreating to the solitude of woods and river bank and farm field himself. But he almost frowned, suggesting gently in a voice that sounded as if he were saying what he thought he was supposed to say, not what he really felt, that I needed to be thinking about making my way in the world and contributing something to it.
Unfortunately I tried to follow his advice and it took me until I was forty-two to realize that I knew what was better for me when I was twelve. And having hunted everywhere for the peculiar kind of freedom I had tried to articulate that day, I came back to my boyhood homethe place of my beginnings-and found it. What I learned in the process was to follow my own mind because worldly wisdom invariably springs from notions that are largely erroneous. The only really good advice that holds up in all situations is: Always make friends with the cook.
For a while, I thought Americans had lost the desire for independence-the kind of independence that defines success in terms of how much food, clothing, shelter, and contentment I could produce for myself rather than how much I could buy; the kind of freedom that examines the meaning of life, not the meaning of cholesterol; the kind of freedom that allows me to say what I think in public without fear that my words will be "bad for business," the fear that keeps my rich acquaintances in town in silent bondage, trading their freedom of speech for dollars. (Not a one of them will publicly say what they privately be lieve: that President Clinton is as mad as ex-President Bush for dropping "well-intentioned" bombs on defenseless countries, and so the polls all appear to approve an act of outright terrorism.)
Then I started hearing about other people who were even more independent than I dared to dream: people deliberately removing themselves from the protection of the great god, Grid, because only beyond the blessings of the holy public utility could they find affordable land of their own: and also people, excluded from even that kind of frontier, who were turning ghettos into edenic gardens. I became acquainted with a university music professor who farmed with horses and in retirement manufactured modern horsedrawn machinery; a scientist who discovered that composted sewage sludge protects vegetable plants from disease; a man who homesteaded with his family in an isolated rural area to start a million-dollar business creating beautiful and useful items out of waste wood even while a rare disease slowly incapacitated his muscular coordination; a Vietnamese immigrant who figured out how to use duckweed (green pond scum) to purify wastewater and then made a nutritious protein supplement out of the scum; a rock star who bought a thousand-acre farm and turned it back into a wilderness that produces more food than the farm did; a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who quit his career to become an organic market gardener; a famous cartoonist who built a sewage system for his huge office complex that uses the shit and urine from his fifty workers to grow exotic plants, fish, and mussels, and then discharges pure water back into the environment; a contractor who uses scrap tires, earth, and beer cans to build houses that run entirely on the sun.
The voice of the turtle can be heard again, ringing throu
gh the land, as the old Wyandots and Mohegans who once roamed my farm would say-a new surge of creative energy that moves the earth in a direction of self-redemption and sustainability that not the richest PAC nor the oldest institutionalized claptrap can stop.
We are pioneers, seeking a new kind of religious and economic freedom. We flee the evils that centralized power always generates. Our God does not reside in the inner sanctums of cathedrals, but walks with us, hoeing in the fields. Sometimes I see Him checking the bluebird houses for murderous starlings and house sparrows and give Him hell for inventing the nest-robbing bandits. He smiles and reminds me that stupid scientists brought the starling and house sparrow to America, not Him.
We are circumspect about our economic institutions. We do not bank on paper money within marble walls, but invest in sun and soil and sweat and the tools that make sweat more productive.
I think of us as the Ramparts People. In all ages we have camped on the edges of the earth, the buffer between our more conventional and timid brethren and those nether regions where, as the medieval maps instructed, "there be dragons and wild beestes." It is our destiny to draw the dragon's fire while the mainstream culture hides behind its disintegrating deficit and damns us for shattering its complacency. So be it.
The hickory nut pie is excellent.
CHAPTER 1
At Ease with the
Work of Farming
... all of us will come back again to hoe in the ground ... or hand-adze a beam, or skin a pole, or scrape a hivewe'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, in The Real Work, Interviews and Talk., 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 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 most necessary skill to 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 lawnmower 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 about how to apply muscular power at just the right moment, location, and thrust to gain the most effective power. 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, axe, shovel, and pitchfork, we might be surprised about how much work that humans could accomplish without help of fossil fuel-gulping machines. They might not even realize that they were performing what journalists who don't farm call "back-breaking" work. Is there any more hack-breaking work than playing middle linebacker? Glorifying work by making contests of it is precisely how society in pre-industrial civilization made physical work more or less enjoyable. One of my boyhood heroes, 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 $15,000 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 "hack-breaking drudgery" and economic failure. If Henry had written a book about farming (which 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 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 became for us an exciting hunt for arrowheads as we walked across the bare ground of the 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 in 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 days of 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-inlaw, Morrison Downs, likes to say: "I left the farm for the city so I wouldn't have to work weekends. Now I am working weekends while the daggone farmers are all off fishing."
The real shame is that so few people know enough about the biological 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 200-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 b
oring landscape of clods that need to be crushed. Jo the ecological farmer, every clod holds a wondrously exotic, tropical-like 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 okay 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 backyard 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" t:he world by hook, 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 in a country cottage in Ohio on standing rib roast and homemade apple pie as in gay Paree on chateaubriand and creme brulee. More to the point, we can enjoy chateaubriand and creme brulee 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.