My inner Anglo-Saxon and the right tool for the job

I was pretty much a card-carrying white Anglo-Saxon Protestant to begin with, but I got a birthday present last month that made me feel even moreso.  My husband gave me a beautiful new scythe from Scythe Supply in Perry, Maine, and I've been learning to use it to mow the grasses and weeds in the clearing around our house.

Learning, in this case, has involved some trial and error, and also some diligent reading of David Tresemer's classic The Scythe Book, which came with the scythe.  Tresemer has a deep sense of the history and lineage of this particular hand-tool, and the book reminded me of how the pre-modern continues to lurk in many aspects of our supposedly postmodern world.  You can definitely hear it in the old English words that turn up in scything:  peen, tang, snath, windrow.  And Tresemer also notes that in the days before standardized measurements, there were many variations on how large an acre was, perhaps based on what could typically be mowed by a person in a day--a metric that was influenced by differences in local and regional methods, tools, and levels of skill.  Mowing a field with a scythe evokes some sense of connection to peasants haying in preindustrial Europe and yeoman farmers carving out farms in colonial New England.

The scythe's renewed popularity seems to be part of a recent trend toward "reskilling" and the somewhat longer-standing "appropriate technology" movement.  These and other related movements (for example, DIY and urban homesteading) emphasize hand tools, small-scale production, muscle-power, and low energy inputs, all of which also tend to support personal and local agency rather than top-down or large-scale control of resources and production of all kinds.  Among the hybrid farm/history sites that I've been keeping an eye on as I've been thinking about the intersection of historical knowledge about farming and contemporary farm economies, there are two that have clearly embraced this approach:

• Tillers International, in Michigan, connects the dots among historical and small-scale modes of farming, energy conservation and efficiency, and rural self-determination.  Its classes and projects are a fascinating blend of the nostalgic and the forward-looking, and it treats the historic farm tools in its museum collection as "models of innovation" that can be used to inspire re-designed and re-invented technologies for contemporary farming.

•  The Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York state has recently launched a "Slow Tools" project that aims to create efficient, ergonomic tools and machines suited to the small scale of most new young farmers' operations.  Beginning with a small electric tractor that can serve multiple purposes (above), the engineers and inventors working on the project plan to offer open-source designs for a variety of energy-efficient equipment.

 Scythe Supply's "Why Use a Scythe?" page includes a list of many different kinds of people and groups who find scythes preferable to petroleum-powered mowers, and the list reflects the heartening diversity of the hand-tool and back-to-the-land movements.  Farmers, gardeners, ranchers, and growers of various kinds are represented;  so are those who want to limit the environmental impact of their mowing by avoiding heavy equipment (an argument sometimes put forward for the use of draft horses in small-scale logging operations).  The page mentions "A pair of 81 year olds who remember mowing in their youth and have returned to scything for exercise" as well as "Living history centers needing period equipment"--all in all, an interesting blend of the nostalgic, the practical, and the representational.

A dissenting voice on this comes from a commenter on a post I wrote earlier this year extolling the virtues of small-scale farm equipment.  When the piece was re-posted recently on the National Young Farmers Coalition "Farm Hack" blog, a fifth-generation Wisconsin farmer took me to task for ignoring the many downsides of old equipment, including safety concerns and costs in time and effort.  It was a useful reminder that we always need to ask the question, "Why did we move away from doing this in the first place?", a historical approach that can be an important corrective to assuming that anything old or small-scale is inherently better.

"What's the best tool for this particular job?" is perhaps an even better question to ask, with an awareness that "better" might encompass everything from fuel costs and environmental impact to the aesthetic/physical/personal satisfactions of feeling a sharp blade slicing through damp grass in the early morning.

Among the machines

The Central Mass. Steam, Gas, and Machinery Association held its annual engine show at the Orange Airport last weekend, and Fred and I made our annual pilgrimage there.  Fred goes because he finds useful parts for things there and because he really likes the old machines.  I really like the machines, too, but mostly I enjoy watching and thinking about the people.  (Anthropologist.  Sue me.)

I had a brief interesting chat with the guys at the International Harvester Collector Club table--the same group I wrote about in an earlier post this spring.  They had a row of beautiful Farmall tractors set up, and I asked them if anybody in the club actually used these for "real" farming.  Not really, they said--aside from an occasional Plow Day event when they help out a farmer in exchange for a place to run the machines around, the point is more the collection and restoration of the tractors, not their everyday use.

They did mention that a handful of club members found the older tractors useful for working small patches of land or doing specialized jobs.  But by and large, these collectors aren't farmers.  When I asked about that--i.e. how many members of the club had ever worked as active farmers--the answer was one that I could have predicted:  "Well, a lot of us had grandparents who farmed, but we do other things."

It's a very familiar answer when you talk to people in preservation, public history, reenactment, and related circles, and it confirms my sense that for a lot of those involved in preserving and commemorating elements of the past, it's more about reconnecting with a lost piece of family background rather than discovering something that might be put to use in the present.  And anyone actually using these machines to cultivate fields isn't going to spend a weekend sitting at the engine show--they're out growing things at this time of year.

So the aura of "pastness" is always pretty intense at the engine show.  But it's still fun to walk around and look at the often bizarre and beautiful machines, and to realize what an extensive community exists around them.  Like public historians, these people are engaged in saving and showing how to use aspects of small-scale farming that can't be relearned overnight, and even if they're not using that knowledge directly themselves, that's not to say that what they're doing isn't important and potentially useful to others.

A work bee, with a twist or two

Driving back from running errands yesterday, Fred and I noticed a sign on Route 202 near the Hunt Farm in Orange:  "Plow Day."  When we stopped to look, we saw that a number of antique tractors were crossing and re-crossing the big field where George Hunt grows feed corn for his dairy cattle.

I already knew that there's a whole sub-culture of tractor collectors and enthusiasts.  I didn't realize, though, that some of them--in this particular case, Chapter 18 of the International Harvester Collector Club--periodically converge on a willing farmer's field to practice their plowing skills or just (as one man put it when I asked him about the event yesterday) "to play" with machines that they wouldn't otherwise get a chance to use.  A bit of Internet research on Plow Days turned up a definition, some similar events using draft animals, and a  YouTube playlist of videos from around the country.  (I wouldn't necessarily say that watching someone plow a field is less riveting than watching paint dry, but I did find that watching just a few of these more than satisfied my curiosity.)  Closer to home, I found some video of the 2011 event at Hunt Farm and an article about 2010's gathering.

This is actually proving to be a more complex event to wrap my head around than I thought at first.  On the surface, it looks like a bit of old-fashioned reciprocity among farmers (or new-fashioned, if you compare it with the crop mob phenomenon among a younger slice of the farming demographic).  I have land that needs plowing, you have a group of people looking for a place to use their tractors--hey, kids, let's get together and plow some fields!  The fact that the tractors are from a previous era just seems to make it an interesting example of using older tools and skills around the edges of the present-day farm economy.

But the hobbyist aspect makes this a somewhat different animal.  My guess is that the main reason the tractor enthusiasts are willing to volunteer their skill and labor is that it gives them a chance to do something removed from the realm of present-day farming.  The old tractors are fun and collectable in large part because they're obsolete, and the reciprocity is strangely indirect.  It takes a detour into the kind of antiquarianism that you encounter in living history settings, where people work to recapture the past for reasons of recreational pleasure, education, or self-discovery rather than for more utilitarian purposes.  This is something quite different from choosing old machinery because you think it has some inherent advantages (as Tillers International does, for example).

Still, it's interesting to think about how the "pastness" of the tractor collectors and the present-day operations of a host farm come together on Plow Day.  It strikes me that this is a precise mirror image of a historic site that invites modern-day farmers to work its fields in order to preserve a historic landscape (something that happens, for example, at Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio).  This leaves me with the same sense of disconnection that frustrates me when I encounter it at historic sites--but at least the old and the new are butting up against each other within the same framework.  When that happens, there's the possibility that someone will figure out how to take things a step further.  And meanwhile, the fields are getting plowed and everyone is pleased--so even to my cynical eye, this seemed like a pretty happy occasion!