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?
“As my daddy said, soil is the basis of everything.”
― Michael Lee West, She Flew the Coop: A Novel Concerning Life, Death, Sex and Recipes in Limoges, Louisiana
― Michael Lee West, She Flew the Coop: A Novel Concerning Life, Death, Sex and Recipes in Limoges, Louisiana
“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 Logsdon, The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse
― Gene Logsdon, The 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 Berry, The Hidden Wound
― Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound
“We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.”
― Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural
― Wendell Berry, The 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
― S.J. Perelman
“All good farmers become connoisseurs of dirt and dust.”
― David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm
― David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm
“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
― 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
― 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 Longfellow, The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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 Longfellow, The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“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 Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
― Wendell Berry, The 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 Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution
― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution
alan skeoch
august 2018