But. on the other hand......

     In Wendell Berry's novel Jayber Crow, which is as much essay as novel, his narrator bemoans the movement in agriculture from subsistence farming to "big ag."  Certainly much was lost when farming became industrialized. However, it isn't quite as simple as Berry would suggest. There are farmers who mechanized while maintaining a healthy respect for land, soil and wildlife.
   However, there is another aspect to this issue that he also ignores. My father was a horse man responsible for maintaining the herd of horses used in the farm he worked with this father and brother. Someplace there is a picture of him with 24 horses. He came late to tractor power buying his first tractor in 1941, a B Farmall. He kept two horses which he used for mowing, raking, and pulling hay and bundle wagons. I even have a very early memory of him using the horses to pill the tractor out when it got stuck. During my childhood we were lightly mechanized. Hay was loaded by pitchfork into a hay wagon. That was very hard, hot work and not romantic. Grain was cut with a binder and the bundles were made into shocks by hand, later pitched into wagons and then into the threshing machine, This was hard, hot work and not romantic. Rocks were picked out of the field by hand. Cows were milked by hand.  It is clearly etched in my memory from experience and not something I wanted in my future. Mechanization relieved much difficult, tedious, mind numbing work. Certainly there were many good things about subsistence agriculture but it was filled with drudgery and much manual labor. I know, I did it.
 
    There are many memorable passages in the book such as this one:

      "I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready." P. 353

    "One by one, we lose our loved ones..."  Now, isn't that the truth?

Takk for alt,

Al

HAPPY LEAP DAY! 😃