Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food

by Wendell Berry

  In 1936, Lancie remembers, he plowed a hundred acres, sixty of them in sod, with two horses, Bob and Joe. Together, that team weighed about thirty-five hundred pounds. They were blacks. Lancie had been logging with them before he started plowing, and they were in good shape, ready to go. They plowed two acres a day, six days a week, for nearly nine weeks. It is the sort of thing, one guesses, that could have been done only because all the conditions were right: a strong young man, a tough team, a good season. “Looked like, back then, there wasn’t any bad weather,” Lancie says, laughing. “You could work all the time.”

  This farmer’s extensive use of live horsepower is possible because his farm is the right size for it and because a sensible rotation of crops both reduces the acreage to be plowed each year and distributes the other field work so that not too much needs to be done at any one time. Of the farm’s 135 arable acres, approximately fifty-five will be in corn, forty in oats, and forty in alfalfa. Each of the crops will be grown on the same land two years in order to avoid buying alfalfa seed every year.

  The two-year-old alfalfa, turned under, supplies enough nitrogen for the first year of corn. In the second year, the corn crop receives a little commercial nitrogen. The routine application of fertilizer on the corn is 275 pounds per acre of 10-10-20, drilled into the row with the planter. The oats are fertilized at the same rate as the corn, while the alfalfa field, because Lancie sells quite a bit of hay, receives 600 pounds per acre of 3-14-42 in two applications every year. The land is limed at a rate of two tons per acre every time it is plowed. Otherwise, for fertilization Lancie depends on manure from his cattle and horses. “That’s what counts,” he says. It counts because it pays but does not cost. He usually has enough manure to cover his corn ground every year.

  This system of management has not only maintained the productive capacity of the farm but has greatly improved it. Fourteen years ago, when Lancie began on it, the place was farmed out. The previous farmer had plowed it all and planted it all in corn year after year. When the farm sold in the fall of 1971, the corn crop, which was still standing, was bought by a neighboring farmer, who found it not worth picking. Lancie plowed it under the next spring. In order to have a corn crop that first year, he used 900 pounds of fertilizer to the acre—300 pounds of nitrogen and 600 of “straight analysis.” After that, when his rotations and other restorative practices had been established, he went to his present rate of 275 pounds of 10-10-20. The resulting rates of production speak well for good care: The corn has made 150 bushels per acre, Lancie says, “for a long time”; this year his oats made 109 bushels per acre, and he also harvested 11,000 fifty-pound bales of alfalfa hay from a forty-acre field (a per-acre yield of about seven tons) and sold 4,800 bales for $12,000.

  In addition to seed and fertilizer, Lancie purchases some insecticide and herbicide. This year his alfalfa was sprayed once for weevils, and he used a half-pint of 2-4-D per acre on his corn. The 2-4-D, he says, would not have been necessary if he had cultivated four times instead of twice. Using the chemical saved two cultivations that would have interfered with hay harvest.

  What is most significant about Lancie’s management of his crops is that it gives his farm a degree of independence that is unusual in these times. The farm, first of all, is ordered and used according to its own nature and carrying capacity, not according to the dictates of farm policy, expert advice, or fluctuations of the economy. The possibility of solving one’s economic problems by production alone is not, in Lancie’s opinion, a good possibility. If you are losing money on the corn you produce, he points out, the more you produce the more you lose. That so many farmers continue to compensate for low grain prices by increasing production, at great cost to their farms and to themselves, is a sort of wonder to him. “The cheaper it is, the more they plow,” he says. “I don’t know what they mean.” His own farm, by contrast, grows approximately the same acreages of the same crops every year, not because that is what the economy supposedly demands, but because that is what the land can produce at the least cost for the longest time.

  Since the farm itself is so much the source of its own fertility and operating energy, Lancie’s use of purchased supplies can be minimal, selective, and nonaddictive. Because his cropping pattern and system of management are sound, Lancie can buy these things to suit his convenience. His total expense for 2-4-D for his corn this year, for example, was $56—a very small price to pay in order to have his hands and his mind free at haying time. The point, I think, is that he had a choice: He could choose to do what made the most sense. A further point is that he can quit using chemicals and purchased fertilizer if it ever makes economic sense to do so. As a farmer, he is not addicted to these things.

  The conventional industrial farmer, on the other hand, is too often the prisoner of his own technology and methods and has no choice but to continue to do as he has done, whatever the disadvantages. A farmer who has no fences cannot turn hogs in to harvest his corn when prices are low. A farmer who has invested heavily in a farrowing house and all the equipment that goes with it is stuck with that investment. If, for some reason, it ceases to be profitable for him to produce feeder pigs, he still has the farrowing house, which is good for little else, and perhaps a debt on it as well. Thus, mental paralysis and economic slavery can be instituted on a farm by the farmer’s technological choices.

  One of the main results of Lancie Clippinger’s independence is versatility, enabling him to take advantage quickly of opportunities as they appear. Because he has invested in no expensive specialized equipment, he can change his ways to suit his wishes or his circumstances. That he did well raising and finishing shoats one year does not mean that he must continue to raise them. Last year, for instance, he thought there was money to be made on skinny sows. He bought sixty-two at $100 a head, turned them into his cornfield, and, while they ate, he picked. “We all worked together,” he says. The sows did a nearly perfect job of gleaning the field, and they brought $200 a head when he sold them.

  There is a direct economic payoff in this freedom of choice: It pays to be able to choose to substitute a team of horses for a tractor, or manure for fertilizer, or cultivation for herbicides. When you cultivate a field of corn, as Lancie says, “you’re selling your labor”; in other words, you ensure a relation between production and consumption that is proper because it makes sound economic sense. If the farmer does not achieve that proper relation on his farm, he will be a victim. When Lancie prepares his ground with plow and harrow and cultivates his crop instead of buying chemicals, he is a producer, not a consumer; he is selling his labor, not buying an expensive substitute for labor. Moreover, when he does this with a team of horses instead of buying fuel, he is selling his team’s labor, not paying for an expensive substitute. When he uses his own corn, oats, and hay to replace petroleum, he is selling those feeds for a far higher return than he could get on the market. He and his horses are functioning, in effect, as solar converters, making usable and profitable the free sunlight that falls onto the farm. They are producing at home the energy, weed control, and fertility that other farmers are going broke trying to pay for.

  The industrial farmer consumes more than he produces and is a captive consumer of the suppliers who have prospered by the ruination of such farmers. So far as the national economy is concerned, this kind of farmer exists only to provide cheap food and to enrich the agribusiness corporations, at his own expense.

  Sometimes Lancie’s intelligent methods and his habit of paying attention yield unexpected dividends. The year after he hogged down the forty acres of corn with the 360 shoats, the field was covered with an excellent stand of alsike clover. “It was pretty,” Lancie says, but he didn’t know where it came from. He asked around in the neighborhood and discovered that the field had been in alsike seventeen years before. The seed had lain in the ground all that time, waiting for conditions to be right, and somehow the hogs had made them right. Thus, that year’s very profitable corn harvest, which had been so w
ell planned, resulted in a valuable gift that nobody had planned—or could have planned. There is no recipe, so far as I know, for making such a thing happen. Obviously, though, a certain eligibility is required. It happened on Lancie’s farm undoubtedly because he is the kind of farmer he is. If he had been plowing the whole farm every year and planting it all in corn, as his predecessor had, such a thing would not have happened.

  It is care, obviously, that makes the difference. The farm gives gifts because it is given a chance to do so; it is not overcropped or overused. One of Lancie’s kindnesses to his farm is his regular rotation of his crops; another is his keeping of livestock, which gives him not only the advantages I have already described but also permits him to make appropriate use of land not suited to row cropping. Like many farms in the allegedly flat corn belt, Lancie’s farm includes some land that should be kept permanently grassed, and on his farm, unlike many, it is kept permanently grassed. He can afford this because he can make good use of it that way, without damaging it, for these thirty or so acres give him five hundred bales of bluegrass hay early in the year and, after that, months of pasture, at the cost only of a second clipping. The crop on that land does not need to be planted or cultivated, and it is harvested by the animals; it is therefore the cheapest feed on the place.

  Lancie Clippinger is as much in the business of growing crops and making money on them as any other farmer. But he is also in the business of making sense—making sense, that is, for himself, not for the oil, chemical, and equipment companies, or for the banks. He is taking his own advice, and his advice comes from his experience and the experience of farmers like him, not from experts who are not farmers. For those reasons, Lancie Clippinger is doing all right. He is farming well and earning a living by it in a time when many farmers are farming poorly and making money for everybody but themselves.

  “I don’t know what they mean,” he says. “You’d think some in the bunch would use their heads a little bit.”

  Charlie Fisher

  (1996)

  I DON’T IMAGINE CHARLIE Fisher told me everything he has done, but in the day and a half I spent with him I did find out that he was raised on a truck farm, that for a while he rode bulls and exhibited a trick horse on the rodeo circuit, that as a young man he worked for a dairyman, and that later he had a dairy farm of his own. His interest in logging and in working horses began while he was a hired hand in the dairy. In the winter, between milkings, he and his elderly employer spent their time in the woods at opposite ends of a crosscut saw—which, Charlie says, made him tireder than it made the old dairyman. They cut some big timber and dragged out the logs with horses. The old dairyman saw that Charlie liked working horses and was good at it. And so it was that he became both a teamster and a logger.

  Though he tried other employment, those two early interests stayed with him, and he has spent many years logging with horses. There were times when he worked alone, cutting and skidding out the logs by himself. Later, his son David began to work with him, skidding out the logs while Charlie cut. David, who is now twenty-two, virtually grew up in the woods. He started skidding logs with a team when he was nine, and he is still working with his father, as both teamster and log cutter.

  Nine years ago, near Andover in northeast Ohio, Charlie Fisher and Jeff Green formed a company, Valley Veneer, which involves both a logging operation and a sawmill. Charlie buys the standing timber, marks the trees that are to be cut, and supervises the logging crews, while Jeff keeps things going at the mill and markets the lumber.

  The mill employs eight or nine hands, and it saws three million board feet a year. It provides a local market for local timber. This obviously is good for the economy of the Andover neighborhood, but it also is good for the forest. By establishing the mill,Charlie and Jeff have invested in the neighborhood and formed a permanent connection to it, and so they have an inescapable interest in preserving the productivity of the local forest. Thus a local forest economy, if it is complex enough, will tend almost naturally to act as a conserver of the local forest ecosystem. Valley Veneer, according to Charlie and Jeff, has been warmly received into the neighborhood. The company deals with the only locally owned bank in the area. The bankers have been not only cooperative but also friendly, at times offering more help than Charlie and Jeff asked for.

  The mill yard is the neatest I have ever seen. The logs are sorted and ricked according to species. Veneer logs are laid down separately with one end resting on a pole, so that they can be readily examined by buyers. The mill crew is skillful in salvaging good lumber from damaged or inferior trees. This is extremely important, as is Jeff ’s marketing of lumber from inferior species such as soft maple, for it means that the cutting in the woods is never limited to the best trees. Charlie marks the trees, knowing that whatever the woodland can properly yield—soft maple or fine furniture-quality cherry or trees damaged by disease or wind—can be sawed into boards and sold. The mill seemed to me an extraordinarily efficient place, where nothing of value is wasted. Twenty percent of the slabs are sold for firewood; the rest go to the chipper and are used for pulp. The sawdust is sold to farmers, who use it as bedding for animals.

  The woods operation—Charlie’s end of the business—consists of three logging crews, each made up of one faller and two teamsters. Each of the teamsters works two horses on a logging cart or “logging arch.” And so Charlie routinely employs nine men and twelve horses. At times, the cutter also will do some skidding, and this increases the number of teams in use. The three crews will usually be at work at three different sites.

  Mostly they log small, privately owned woodlots within a radius of forty or fifty miles. Charlie recently counted up and found that he had logged 366 different tracts of timber in the last three years. And there are certain advantages to working on this scale. In a horse logging operation, it is best to limit the skidding distance to five or six hundred feet, though Charlie says they sometimes increase it to a thousand, and they can go somewhat farther in winter when snow or freezing weather reduces the friction. Big tracts, however, involve longer distances, and eventually it becomes necessary either to build a road for the truck or to use a bulldozer to move the logs from where the teamsters yard them in the woods to a second yarding place accessible from the highway. For this purpose, in addition to a log truck equipped with a hydraulic loading boom, Valley Veneer owns two bulldozers, one equipped with a fork, one with a blade, and both with winches. Even so, about 98 percent of the logs are moved with horses.

  The logging crews work the year round and in all weather except pouring rain. The teamsters, who furnish their own teams and equipment, receive forty dollars per thousand board feet. Two of his teamsters, Charlie says, make more than thirty thousand dollars a year each.

  The logging arch, in comparison to a mechanical skidder, is a very forthright piece of equipment. Like the forecart that is widely used for field work, it is simply a way to provide a drawbar for a team of horses. There are a number of differences in design, but the major difference is that the logging arch’s drawbar is welded on edge-up and has slots instead of holes. The slots are made so as to catch and hold the links of a log chain. Each cart carries an eighteen-foot chain with a grab hook at each end. Four metal hooks (which Charlie calls “log grabs,” but which are also called “J-hooks” or “logging dogs”) are linked to rings and strung on the chain, thus permitting the cart to draw as many as four logs at a time. The chain can also be used at full length if necessary to reach a hard-to-get-to log. Larger logs require the use of tongs, which the teamsters also carry with them, or two grabs driven into the log on opposite sides. The carts are equipped also with a cant hook and a “skipper” with which to drive the grabs into the log and knock them out again.

  The slotted drawbar permits the chain to be handily readjusted as the horses work a log into position for skidding. When the log is ready to go, it is chained as closely as possible to the drawbar, so that when the horses tighten the fore end of the log is
raised off the ground. This is the major efficiency of the logging arch: By thus raising the log, the arch both keeps it from digging and reduces its friction against the ground by more than half.

  We watched a team drag out a twelve-foot log containing about 330 board feet. They were well loaded but were not straining. Charlie says that a team can handle up to five or six hundred board feet. For bigger logs, they use an additional team or a bulldozer. A good teamster can skid 3,000 to 3,500 board feet a day in small logs. The trick, Charlie says, is to know what your horses can do, and then see that they do that much on every pull. Overload, and you’re resting too much. Underload, and you’re wasting energy and time. The important thing is to keep loaded and keep moving.

  Charlie Fisher is a man of long experience in the woods and extensive knowledge of the timber business and of logging technology. He has no prejudice against mechanical equipment as such, but uses it readily according to need; for a time, during his thirties, he used mechanical skidders. That this man greatly prefers horses for use in the woods is therefore of considerable interest. I asked him to explain.

  His first reason, and the most important, is one I’d heard before from draft horsemen: “I’ve always liked horses.” Charlie and David are clearly the sort of men who can’t quite live without horses. Between them, they own six excellent, very large Belgian geldings and two Belgian mares. Charlie, as he explained, owns three and a half horses, and David four and a half. The two halves, fortunately, belong to the same horse, which Charlie and David own in partnership. Charlie has long been an enthusiastic participant in pulling contests, and David has followed in his father’s footsteps in the arena as in the woods. Last season, David participated in twenty-three contests and Charlie in five, which for him was many fewer than usual. Charlie and his wife, Becky, showed us several shelves crowded with trophies, many of which were David’s. It looked to me like they are going to need more shelves. Charlie and Becky are very proud of David, who is an accomplished logger and horseman. David, Charlie says, is an exceptionally quiet hand with a team—unlike Charlie, who confessed, “I holler.” Since they would have the horses anyhow, Charlie said, they might as well put them to work in the woods, which keeps them fit and allows them to earn their keep.