by Gene Logsdon
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.
In a little country cemetery close by, there is a grave of a woman who became pregnant, not with the man to whom she was betrothed, but to 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 every year in 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 the house in view of the beating (their descendants, the Hollansheads, live there still) nursed great-grandfather back to health. He told them that he would some day 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 Kai.l 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 kept a long, level swath of grass in the field behind the barn for a landing strip 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, when the parents were still sick with grief, a had storm swept over the farm, after which a 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, about which I have written often and will have more to say in a practical vein later in this book. 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-looking bit of farmland? By no means. Karl Kuerner, the third Karl Kuerner, farmborn and farm-raised and himself an artist of renown who also paints the home farm continuously (on the jacket of this hook is one of his paintings), 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 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 landlover'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.
The contrary farmer also enjoys hard work out of a sort of muleheaded stoicism. I like getting hot, tired, and dirty putting up hay be cause 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 the actual skills and methods that can make the work easier. The first rule is not to do anything nature will do for you. The new emphasis on all-season grazing of livestock with rotated pastures (again, I'll say much more, later) is an excellent example: why make all that hay and haul it to the barn if the cows can graze it off themselves, even through at least part of winter?
But the principle of letting nature do the work is far more complex, involving what Swedish scientist Stefin Delin, way ahead of his time, 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 some day 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 130 species of birds, 40 species of wild animals (not counting coonhunters), over 50 species of wildflowers, at least 45 tree species, a myriad of gorgeous butterflies, moths, spiders, beetles, etc., and about 593,455,780 weeds.
What does that diversity have to do with easing work? Does that not in fact sound like a guarantee for increasing work? Actually, not. 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 sometime take root. The expert way to get rid of Canada thistle is to spray them (work) with a suitable herbicide (expense, meaning you have to 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 not 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 semi-permanent sods where the thistle seeds are not as apt to establish themselves, we have an advantage in controlling them. Secondly, when the thistles do come up in the pasture, our sheep will nibble on them despite the prickles, thus impairing the thistles growth. Also two different bugs, the three-lined plant bug and the other 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. Along with a pasture mowing or two, which I have to do anyway, Canada thistles are effectively controlled without one lick from me in the way of extra work.
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. This 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 increasing the 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 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 which we bought to save it 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?
Our home twenty acres are divided into six parts. Two acres along the road hold our vegetable gardens and orchard and woodworking shop. Then come about five acres of woodland in 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 on the most blizzardy days. The winter work of caring for the animals is thus made pleasant. The protection from the trees also means we need less fuel for the house in winter.
Behind this 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 to the plot 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 by-product of ecological farming. Young groundhog is not bad eating either.
As all these life forms interact with each other, they create effects that individually they are incapable of. 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 woodlot 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. And 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 to see," he says with a grin, "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 a camcorder."
My sheep clean out fencerows 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, as loathesome and gluttonous a sight as I have seen on our farm, 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 buzzard's) by saving me the job of burial.
Although we appear to live in a very tame, intensively farmed area, hardly a week goes by that we do not experience some unusual or unexpected little adventure which 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 pawpaw trees, the gorgeous zebra swallowtail butterfly, which feeds only on paw-paw, landed daintily on the tractor.
Learning to let nature do 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 landscapists 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.
Timeliness can be practiced another way: by not biting off more than you can chaw, as the old saying goes. Almost all beginning gardeners who love their work 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 space 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 economic verity becomes even truer 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 has observed. "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 spreading the work load works 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 the 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 is more pleasant than the summer woods. At the end of the month, we tap a few maple trees and boil down a little maple sap.
In March, we shear the sheep and butcher two hogs. Butchering is distasteful work 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 cheeps' wool.
The work in May reaches high tide 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 cl
othes and enjoy the new sun in the sweet spring air. Birdwatching combines well with sun-bathing. 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 in the chapter on that subject, you will see how 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 cat 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 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 slow-down time on the farm, but putting food by in the kitchen is at its peak. Tomatoes, sweetcorn, stringbeans, 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. Also now is the time I usually haul manure out of the barn and give the pastures a second clipping.