“HORSES WERE BETTER THAN TRACTORS” (LET ME TELL YOU WHY)

HORSES WERE BETTER THAN TRACTORS

(LET ME TELL YOU WHY)
alan skeoch
august 2018
PLOWING IS AS ANCIENT AS CIVILIZATION…MAYBE 6,000 YEARS OLD
“This painting on  an Egyptian tomb shows a farmer encouraging two skinny cows to pull a  tiny stir plow.”
“Stir plow?”
“Yep…early plows were really just tough tree roots  fashioned  to a dull point.”
“How could that plow cut sod?”
“It couldn’t.   Ancient plowmen  only plowed easy fields…no sod…closest thing to bare ground.”
“Bare ground doesn’t grow much  food.”
“You got that right…world population was small…farmers just tilled the tops of  the  hills where a stir plough
would work.”
“Do you mean those  rich fertile valleys  were just left  to the weeds.?”
“Think so.  No doubt some poor sap was trying to grow wheat among the  weeds.”
“Must have been good healthy work.”
“Bad joke.   Most people died young…35 would be old.  Do  you believe that?”
“Nope.   You are like  Trump and  make up a lot of  bull shit.”
“Take  it for what it’s worth.”
‘I’ve got better things to do than read  your drivel, Alan.”
“Bugger off and do it then.”
“Just kidding…”
“Human  beings in western  Europe came down off the tips of the hills  when the  medieval two furrow  wheeled plow was invented.”
“More food”
“Fat people started to appear in large numbers.”

This  is  Herbert La Thanque’s 1895 painting titled the last Furrow.  Note how the plow has two wheels  and curved  moldboard…and  a pair of metal coulters  to get the slice  of turf  started.
“I can’t see all those  things, what the hell is the plowman doing, saying  his prayers?”
“Seems in  a  bit of  a tangle.”
“Even  you don’t know  what he’s  doing.”
“Am I supposed to be  an art critic?”
“Let’s get to the point of this  little story.  You said it was  about FRANK FREEMAN…Get on with it.”
“His story could   make you cry…that’s what it did to me long long ago.
“I don’t bawl …”
“We’ll see…
FRANK  FREEMAN’S HOMESPUN PHILOSOPHY
My uncle, Frank Freeman, was a farmer on hardscrabble land  in Erin  Township.  He was also a  homespun philosopher,  “Alan, I loved plowing with horses…better than  plowing  with a tractor.
Horses  had to have  a rest after a few furrows  and that meant I had a  rest as  well.  I could  sit on a  fence  rail  and admire my plowing or better still  admire our farm…see  the birds, the butterflies,
the pillow clouds, the  rain clouds.  Horses made farming romantic.   Tractors  never  stop. No chance to sit on a  fence rail.  Saddest day  on our  farm was  the day  old Dick and  Dolly were
put out to pasture.  Got a Massey 55…big  red machine that ripped across  the farm leaving  tracks like  a herd  of dinosaurs.   Loved my horses,  Alan.”
Uncle Frank  loved his land as well.  One day  I remember well.   His doctor suspected Frank had some  kind of  bad  cancer…perhaps terminal. What  do you suppose  he did…slacked off
on the couch beside the wood  stove.  Spent his  last days  in bed.  Nope.  Uncle Frank  took what he  thought was  one last walk around his farm.
” The plowing was over and the furrows less sharp.  Storms had worked them  down. Fields were
ready for winter.  Figured my time  had come as it does for all of us.   If I was going into  some  hospital for a spell,  I wanted  something nice to dream  about.  Memorized every step  I took that day
The  crop fields with those upturned soil, the pastures where  the cattle grazed,  then skirted  the swamps, marvelled the maple bush, and sat now and then  on the  granite boulders
rolled smooth beneath a long gone glacier,  We moved those  boulders to the fencerow…harder  for  Ted and me than it had  been for that glacier.  Sat on these boulders often while
Dick and Dolly got their wind back. A couple of Crows followed me  at a distance or
were  they those near human ravens.  Most of the wild animal had gone to bed for the winter.  The pack of wild dogs that cornered me in summer were gone, perhaps to early graves.  People…city
people  dump pets they do not want on farm  roadways.  Cruel death follows.   Alan, I thought of  so many tings…so many good times…some bad times.  I  was ready” (Note: paraphrased from memory)
  As it turned  out Uncle  Frank   did not have cancer.  He had a reprieve.
  His  comment had a profound  effect on me.  Unknown  to him, unwatched  by anyone, I also  walked those fields savouring the luxury of being at
one  with the land.  I did  not need  a  physical reminder of that moment but I took one anyway.  A piece of limestone about the size of a  tennis  ball was  retrieved  from a field Uncle Frank had  plowed
a while  ago.  That piece  of limestone served  notice that the land had  once been covered in 2 kilometres  of  ice and  millions  of years  before that this land had been located in the  tropics  where billions
of little creatures swam and died…their bodies  percolating down and compressed into soft rock that Uncle Frank’s plow had brought to the surface once again.  All this served notice that my life is just a temporary
piece of living matter on the surface of the earth.  And  the earth seems to be eternal.  Not so, of course, for even  this black  furrow in time will disappear into the arms of the universe.  Walking those fields  on that day was
a  powerful experience never to  be forgotten.
Enough of that.
PLOWS THAT HELPED TO FEED US…AND ENABLED US TO TAKE CONTROL OF THE  EARTH
(FOR GOOD OR ILL)
“take a  look here…a medieval single moldboard plow…on a wheel with a coulter to cut the  sod of those fertile  rivervaley…all
chiselled into a  hardwood log.”
“and  here’s another.”
“getting  a little tired  of  those wheels plows,  Alan, can’t we  shift gears…talk about something more
modern.”
 
“Bank robbing is more of a sure thing than farming.” 
TASK  FOR ANY READER WHO HAS  GOT THIS FAR”
WHICH  QUOTE BELOW HITS YOU THE HARDEST?
“Bank robbing is more of a sure thing than farming.” 
― Allan Dare PearceParis in April
“As a working definition of art, I lean toward Tolstoy’s: “Art is a human activity having for it’s purpose the transmission to other of the highest and best feelings to which mankind has risen.” It seems to me that, regarding agrarian art, the farther it moves away from the natural world, especially when the main goal is money profits, the more difficult it becomes for it to reflect “the highest and best feelings” of humanity. The same is true of, of course, of agriculture itself. The farther it tries to remove itself from nature in search of money, the more it moves away from the highest and healthiest kinds of food.” 
― Gene LogsdonThe Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse
“I should understand the land, not as a commodity, an inert fact to be taken for granted, but as an ultimate value, enduring and alive, useful and beautiful and mysterious and formidable and comforting, beneficent and terribly demanding, worthy of the best of man’s attention and care… [My father] insisted that I learn to do the hand labor that the land required, knowing–and saying again and again–that the ability to do such work is the source of a confidence and an independence of character that can come no other way, not by money, not by education.” 
― Wendell BerryThe Hidden Wound
“We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.” 
― Wendell BerryThe Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural
“A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn’t know enough to stay in the city.” 
― S.J. Perelman
“All good farmers become connoisseurs of dirt and dust.” 
― David Mas MasumotoEpitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm
“I know this place like I know the calluses on my hands.” 
― Brenda Sutton RoseDogwood Blues
“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.” 
― Thomas Jefferson
“There’s relief in not having to be outside. No gardening, no mowing the lawn, no tyranny of long daylight hours to fill with productive activity. We rip through summer, burning the hours and tearing up the land. Then snow comes like a bandage, and winter heals the wounds.” 
― Jerry Dennis
“Awake! arise! the hour is late!
Angels are knocking at thy door!
They are in haste and cannot wait,
And once departed come no more.
Awake! arise! the athlete’s arm
Loses its strength by too much rest;
The fallow land, the untilled farm
Produces only weeds at best.” 
― Henry Wadsworth LongfellowThe Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles.” 
― Ayn RandAnthem
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” 
― Wendell BerryThe Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” 
― Masanobu FukuokaThe One-Straw Revolution
alan skeoch
august 2018

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