The Modern Farmer
In the 1960s, I used to watch an early morning show called The Modern Farmer. It was mostly about tractors, tilling machines, milking machines and other labor-saving equipment. And soybeans. When we moved to farm country, our old house and barn was a trove of rusty hand tools, but all the working farms were doing modern farming. As I sci-fi fan, I saw nothing wrong with advanced machinery, but Peak Oil Hausfrau thinks they were full of manure:
What we call "efficiency" is actually the height of inefficiency. The foundation of modern agriculture is mostly just the addition of more energy to the system, and any fool can do that. Our current food systems are only made possible by massive wastefulness, ruination of natural systems, and unbridled use of our inheritance of fossil fuels. These are the costs that our economic accounting does not take into account.
I don't mind technology cuz I sure do love my cell phone and my computer, but I've never seen what was so wrong with doing things by hand as much as possible otherwise. You get more enjoyment out of the effort, you make less noise, you use less oil, and you pollute less.
Then again, I've never been a farmer. But...I'm just sayin'.
Good post, Donal, and I enjoyed reading the link. It makes you think.
May 20, 2009 8:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is a good post, Donal, and an excellent topic of discussion. I just finished up 4 days of clearing the old canes out of my mothers blackberry patches. She is tying them up then I will go back and weed them. Then we will pick them and get $1.50 a pint. Using last years records we may break $1.00 an hour. This is not romantic, this is work. Americans have demanded less expensive food and they get it. The price of food is determined by the labor it takes to produce it. It is not the because the labor is hard, it is because the farmer cannot pay labor a living wage in this country that we use foreign labor and buy produce from foreign countries. I don't like the huge farms any more then you do, I just want to be able to afford to eat.
May 21, 2009 10:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Local farms and farmers.
Local jobs.
May 20, 2009 8:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Right! and decreased transportation costs as another benefit.
May 20, 2009 9:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
¡Sí, mí amigo!
May 20, 2009 9:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Have you ever read the One Straw Revolution? It takes note of the energy per output ratio Hausfrau underlines but presents the disproportion as part of a larger dysfunction.
May 20, 2009 9:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fukoka's book was one of the first I read on organic farming! :o)
May 21, 2009 10:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
flowerchild, it was the first thing I had read upon the topic as well. My oldest sister gave it to me when I turned twenty.
I just gave away my copy to a young lady at a bat mitzvah after hearing her take on how producing food related to a shared life.
May 21, 2009 9:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Passing the book on was a wonderful thing to do, moat. I mean that.
Thinking I'd like to revisit the book, I checked with the local library. They don't even have a copy! Not one copy in the entire inter-library system. I couldn't believe it.
I can't believe I never owned my own copy, either. So, I'm now checking Ebay, etc., to remedy that situation.
May 22, 2009 11:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you go to this site and click on the book, they will let you download it after filling the certificate promising that you are only using the book to get smarter.
It sounds like you might dig some of the other books on this site.
May 22, 2009 3:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh. My. That is THE most awesome site! And dang, wouldn't you know, I've already ordered the new paperback version that is coming out June 2nd. But, oh what a find, moat. I've bookmarked it and will promise them to only use the the d/l's to get smart. I cannot promise I will stay smart, though. ;o) Chi migwetch (thank you very much), moat.
May 22, 2009 10:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Very few realize that under that userpic's unkempt pile of hay is an Ellsworth Truth.
Donal is the very model of a Modern Farmer.
May 20, 2009 10:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nice bikes. I have a hand-made Serotta, actually, from upstate NY.
May 20, 2009 10:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
And what kind of "hay" is it?
May 21, 2009 2:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
The reason railroad companies went out of business is that they were mistaken about the nature of their business. They thought their business was trains, when it should have been transportation.
May 21, 2009 12:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
We had our farm shows in the fifties, early sixties in Minnesota. The death of the family farm was the headline. All the time.
May 21, 2009 5:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
For the past four days there have been two of those ginormous farm tractors pulling equipment to plow up a 15 year old alfalfa field next to our property in order to plant corn. The smell of diesel fuel, the noise, the dry topsoil kicked up and blown away in the wind, and later the acrid smell of chemical fertilizers, all make for unpleasantness on many levels.
In contrast, two miles down the road. after throwing on a layer of composted manure from their horses and cattle, the Amish farmers use a team of Clydesdales to till their fields. Four abreast, the big beasts pull an antique plow with a little bearded guy in a straw hat perched on top. (The Amish here will always wave at you as you go by them on the road. Men and women both, and the older kids. It's nice to have your presence on the planet acknowledged by another human being.)
But, come harvest time, there is not much difference in grain yield between the two farming methods. The only real difference is the expenditure of human effort.
I do not want to give up my computer, either...and I've grown rather fond of electric lights in the dark, but the inefficiencies of energy via fossil fuels to bring us food is defeatist in the long run.
I could go on for 35 more paragraphs, but I'll just end with this: Bring back the family farm!
May 21, 2009 10:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
Great visual. The Amish can certainly help remind America what farming used to be.
We just need to find a balance between the need to make a living and the requirement for sustainability. If we are going to continue subsidizing agriculture, then it should be in a way that sustains family farming. I am sick to death of subsidizing big business at the expense of everyone else.
The list of things we have lost over the last forty years outweighs the benefits in my mind. We could have gotten cell phones and computers without the waste, fraud and abuse of our common resources.
May 21, 2009 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Great post! We do need to evaluate how we get our food, but part of that is coming to terms with having to spend more. In every otehr country the percentage of income used to buy food is around twice that of the US. Bottom line is that we wil have to pay more for food if we wish to have it from local sources and family farms. The trade is that the food will be worth eating.
May 21, 2009 1:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Farming is still part of the local community here. In the early 1990's, my first teenage job was hoeing cotton at 4 bucks an hour. Many of the farms still use people as a main source of labor, but they are fading fast, and these farms are usually owned by an older generation. The newer farms are dominated by huge machinery (complete with A/C and satellite radio) and it almost seems like a competition (keeping up with the McDonald's?) to who can get the largest piece of equipment.
May 21, 2009 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
One of the pleasures of life on PEI (Prince Edward Island in the Maritimes of Canada) is in watching Percheron and Clydesdale horses (and their people) dragging the beaches (and the surf) for Irish moss:
http://simplymarvelous.wordpress.com/2007/11/10/irish-moss-gathering-prince-edward-island/
Gentle giants (the horses) engaged in a time-honored, and entirely organic form of farming from the sea. No chemicals. And no noise -- other than the companionable communication between man and mammoth beast.
It's a beautiful thing.
May 21, 2009 3:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have pleasant memories of bicycling around PEI. Amazing green grass, a green I've never seen before or since, backed by the vibrant red bluffs which drop to a cold, but beautiful sea.
May 21, 2009 3:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
That Maritime combination of blue sky/green grass/ red bluff/cobalt blue water -- all offset by white houses-- is really beautiful, isn't it?
I've got photos; do you? I'd post a few, if I knew how, technically. (I know, I know -- the rest of you understand the directions, but so far, I haven't managed to learn the correct way to do it.)
May 21, 2009 4:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've got 'analog' photos in a box somewhere. I would like to fish them out as that truly was one of the most surreal color combinations I've witnessed in any of the places I've visited. This will give some one an idea what it looks like, but the colors are much more saturated in my minds eye than what the photo conveys.
May 21, 2009 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mh2O -- beautiful. One might think the photo had been adjusted, except the colors actually look like that in real life. Thanks. (Still working on successfully posting photos in blog, all these hours later. Ahhhh.)
May 21, 2009 8:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
For some reason I've not been able to use tpms 'insert picture' function in the movable type program when writing posts either Wendy. Go to this page and scroll down to the box: "this code produces this". Copy the script on the left side of the box. Then convert your blog from 'rich text' to 'none'. Find the point in the blog where you want to insert the jpeg, (I usually put a bunch of blank lines into the blog where I want to insert the picture before converting to 'none'. This shows up as a bunch of 'br' bracketed by 'carrots', so you can more easily find the position in the blog). Paste the text from the left side of the 'starflower' box. Then replace 'starflower.gif' with the html 'location of the picture you want to insert. Convert back to 'rich text'. I hope you find this useful.
May 22, 2009 2:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you so much. I'll try it tonight, or tomorrow.
May 22, 2009 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink