by Gene Logsdon
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 corn husking 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 hay field 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 much 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 woodstove.
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 sheep (more or less), a cow and calf, two hogs, and thirty chickens is seldom more than an hour a day, and in summer when everything is 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 only increase 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 for longer than two days.
There's another consideration about manual labor in farming that is becoming more important as time progresses. Modern society is losing the knowledge of how to do anything in a direct, hands-on, manuallyskilled 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 his 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. He says, in part:
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 he 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 1 daresay 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 re-shaped 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 illiteracy. Most people don't know how to feed, clothe, or shelter themselves, much less build a house or repair a roof. Hardly anyone, including the so-called trained mechanics, know 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 are in 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, as she related to us, 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. Hmmm. She examined the soil more closely. Why, the ground was full of potatoes!
CHAPTER 2
Pastoral Economics
A farm is like a man-however great the income, if there is extravagance, but little is left.
Cato, On Agriculture, circa 200 BC
Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.
Jolin Ruskin, The Crown of wild Olives, 1866
To make a go of contrary farming, it helps to forget everything you think you have learned about present day cost accounting. Not that you are going to ignore good business practices, but you should approach these from a different point of view: the view of pastoral rather than industrial economics. There are today no pastoral economists in our universities, governments, or businesses as far as I know. Harold Breimeyer, retired from the University of Missouri, comes close to being a pastoralist; in talking about how economic and political policies favor large-scale corporate farming, he once said to me in frustration, "Sometimes I wonder if our economic policies are not deliberately manipulated to get rid of family farms." He then went on to philosophize:
Historically the trend to larger farmers does not reverse itself. Ancient Rome went from family farms to an estate system of agriculture with no return. Historically, small `yeoman farming' starts when new nations emerge and is superseded as the value of the land grows. It may be logical or it may he paradoxical, but the fact is that yeoman farming lasts best where it is not very profitable in the strict capitalistic sense of the word. When farming yields a surplus above subsistence, land is coveted. The more it is coveted, the more it flows into the hands of the people best able to buy it or powerful enough to take it. If current trends are not reversed by policy decisions, then at some date not far in the future, an alarm bell will sound about what will have already happened. It will be too late to do anything about it. We will be on a direct course to a concentrated structure of agriculture, whether through contractual integration, corporate conglomeration, or some form of semi-feudal barony. The family farmer will be extinct.
Scott Nearing, of homesteading fame but an economist by prior career, also understood the stand-off between pastoral economics and "price-profit" economics, as he called it. In The Making of a Radical, he wrote about his maple sugar business: "We were not trying to make money; that is a game in which the sky is the limit. Instead we asked ourselves: `what is the least cash we can get by on during the next twelve months?' When we fixed that amount, taking into consideration all our plans and purposes, we produced enough of our cash crop to equal that amount and to provide a safe margin. Then we stopped production till the next budget year." He then went on to explain: "We aimed to be as free as possible from the market and from wagery. Price-profit economy presupposes the exchange of labor-power for cash; the payment of a part of the cash in t
axes in exchange for regimentation, and the expenditure of the remainder in the market for food, clothing, gadgets and other commodities. The individual who accepts this formula is at the mercy of the labor market, the commodity market and the State."
The best twentieth-century articulation of pastoral economics that I have found was written in 1940 about England by an Englishman, Lord Northbourne, in a book called Look to the Land, now scarce and long out of print although it reads as if written next week. It is difficult for me to select a short passage from this book for quotation since the entire argument makes such a cohesive and inseparable whole, but I will try:
Urban and industrial theories and values have supplanted the truer ones of the countryside. These true ones survive mainly as a sentimental attachment to country life and gardening. Is the romance of country life really only a poetic survival of a bygone age, not very practical because there is no money in it, or is that romance something to which we must cling and on which we must build? Is farming merely a necessary drudgery, to be mechanized so as to employ a minimum of people, to be standardized and run in ever bigger units, to be judged by cost accounting only? Or is the only alternative to national decay to make farming something real for every man and near to him in his life, and something in which personal care, and possibly even poetic fancy, counts for more than mechanical efficiency?
The answer, for Northbourne, is a resounding affirmative, as he goes on to answer his question, the question that I believe is central to the survival of our civilization.
Mechanical efficiency is all very well--it is good, but life can be sacrificed to it. Mechanical efficiency is the ideal of materialism, but unless it is subservient to and disciplined by the spirit, it can take charge and destroy the spirit. In life, though not in mechanics, the things of the spirit are more real than material things. They include religion, poetry, and all the arts. They are the mainsprings of that culture which can make life worth while. Farming is concerned primarily with life, so if ever in farming the material aspect conflicts with the spiritual or cultural, the latter must prevail, or that which matters most in life will be lost ... Farming must he on the side of religion, poetry, and the arts rather than on the side of business, if ever the two sides conflict.
Trying to think, much less act, outside the confines of industrial economics is very difficult because none of us realize how embedded in our psyches and our lifestyles are its tenets. It is like expecting a staunch, lifelong Christian, from a family that has been Christian for twenty centuries, to think objectively about other religions. If I were to say, for example, that capitalism and socialism are in practice more alike than they are different, most people, certainly most economists, would object strenuously because we have been taught that the two are absolutely opposed to each other. But both accept the same basic money system that the industrial revolution encouraged: 1. the use of pieces of paper or metal to represent real goods; 2. the acceptance of interest on these pieces of paper and metal as essential to "growth" (keep in mind that hardly four centuries ago, in a pastoral world, all interest on money was considered usurious and immoral); 3. the right of authority to manipulate interest rates-changing the definition of usury whenever self-serving authority desires it; and 4. the necessity of an expanding credit system that a government or bank can turn on or off at will in an effort to cover its own ass. Both capitalism and socialism, in other words, use money to centralize control over society. They differ only in who the central authority should be: socialism wants it to be the public sector and capitalism wants it to be the private sector.
Contrary farmers have no choice but to live and work within the capitalist/socialist economy that society now accepts with such naivete. But if success is to be achieved on our homesteads, we must separate ourselves as far as possible from that economy. The first and foremost way to do that is to borrow money only with extreme caution or not at all. As much as possible, work with earned capital and non-cash assets like your muscles. This is especially true in agriculture and any other business activity directly connected to biological nature. There is something incompatible between biological systems and borrowed money. Farms are invariably lost because of over-borrowing; if they are not lost, they often are farmed in a bad way to get the quick money needed to pay interest. The problem is not so much the borrowed money itself, if only very moderate sums are borrowed, but the fact that rates of money growth (interest) seldom match rates of biological growth. An ear of corn never heard of money interest: it grows the same way whether interest rates are 6 percent or 15 percent. Nor is the weather going to smile benignly on you just because you borrowed a big wad of cash to buy a new tractor. You will have to pay that money back on a schedule that ignores the occurrence of drouths and floods, wind and hail.
Because nature and biology are not made the basis for the measurement of money growth, what happens is that for generation after generation, farmers borrow the stuff at a rate of interest that is not much lower, and is often higher, than their actual net return from farming. Like the sodbusters in old westerns, farmers still go to the bank in spring to borrow money and return in the fall to pay it back with maybe enough left over to buy their families a Christmas present or two.
You can borrow money presently at about 8 percent but it is difficult to get a net return on farming much higher than that. So farming has to be artificially subsidized to keep indebted farmers from dragging their banks and suppliers into bankruptcy with them. Since agriculture is fundamental to the entire economy (everyone must eat), government eventually finds itself subsidizing everyone. The only way to do that is with deficit spending. So now interest on the national debt ticks away like a time bomb, over half a billion dollars a day.
But how can a prospective cottage farmer not born to land or money ever own a farm without borrowing?
The answer is to start out SMALL. We think of a farm in the midwest as being at least several hundred acres in size and costing about $1500 an acre as of 1993. In other words this is something few of us cottage farm types can afford. I heard an economist tell a class of young people that if they wanted to be cash grain farmers today they had to have at least 1500 acres for a "viable unit." Worked right into that requirement for viability is a big chunk of income to pay off the colossal debts that such size is bound to generate. (Is it any wonder that bankers are so often found on the boards of trustees of agricultural colleges?) But such assumptions are meaningless from the standpoint of pastoral economics. A cottage farm of only an acre or two can, with high value crops, produce supplemental income which may be all the cottage farmer wants. (According to New Farm magazine, July/August 1990, Kona Kai Farms grossed $238,000 worth of salad crops on one half acre in Berkeley that year.) In traditional grain/livestock arrangements, one hundred acres devoted to astute husbandry can provide a decent living with pastoral economics, as the Amish prove over and over again.
The second precept in living pastorally in an industrial society is do not try to make your entire livelihood from the farm, at least not at first. Do like almost all our ancestors did, even in pioneer times: Pay for the land with a job not directly dependent on the farm's income. Even a casual reading of rural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth century shows that almost every farmer financed his initial land purchases by earning money in a hundred different ways--from teaching to blacksmithing to carpentry to working as a hired hand.
Today it may be even wiser to establish a way of life that permanently combines farming with another career or occupation. This has become true for almost all so-called mainstream farmers, a fact that agribusiness doesn't like to have publicized, so why should it not be so for small cottage farmers? Interestingly, Richard Body, a farmer and barrister in England who is also a member of Parliament, has reached the same conclusion for his country that some of us contrary farmers have long predicted for the United States: the present untenable situation will be superseded by thousands of new, smaller farms, most of them operated by people with du
al careers. Two main factors point to this conclusion. First of all, these new farmers will be able to out-compete the very large commercial farmers for access to land, for reasons given below. Secondly, electronics allows such cottage farmers to pursue their other career in any rural place they wish to live. Writes Body, speaking of England:
It's anyone's guess how many will make the move. Let us assume it will be no more than two million-that must be a very modest estimate. How many of them would wish to shrug off all their suburban values and immerse themselves in country living, must also be in the realm of surmise. While only a few might have the inclination, let alone the capital, to take over a 200-acre farm, it might not be unreasonable to expect one in ten to dabble in some form of agriculture. That is 200,000, which is much the same as the number who are farming today . . . Many will be content to produce only for themselves, but the 200,000 I have in mind will be engaged in serious part-time farming and like today's modern farmers, they will not be motivated by self-sufficiency but engaged in securing a supplementary income from the market (A Future for the Land, edited by Philip Conford. Green Books, 1992).
With another job, borrowing can be avoided or kept to a minimum. Here are some ways that my neighbors and I have found successful:
Rarely borrow money specifically for farming. Always have a dual use or intention for that money. If you have a job and have any savings sense, you can, for example, borrow for a country residence and pay it off out of job earnings. You obviously are going to have to pay for housing one way or another. The trick for the prospective cottage farmer is to pick a house that has land with it. In villages and rural areas there are reasonably priced homes that come with an acre or two, and that is plenty of land to start with. In many instances, there are humble rural homes on twenty to fifty acres that can be purchased for less than the price of an average suburban home on a quarter-acre lot. We bought our original twenty-two acres as bare land (no house or barn) for $14,000. Had we purchased just an acre lot for a house in the city where I was previously working, it would have cost us at least $10,000. In a way I bought a farm for the price of a house lot that I would have had to buy in any event.