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<\/a><\/p>\nIt’s amazing how much stuff can collect, and how many little projects there are, on several properties between two generations – one generation on a farm and the next being a family of 10. I can’t say we got everything completed, but we made a substantial dent in the important things.<\/p>\n
In digging through the stuff, I’m constantly amazed how much farming and technology in general have moved in two generations.\u00a0 My grandparents grew up when electricity finally got out to rural areas, farm machinery did 6-10 rows at a time, milking was done by hand, the phone was a party-line and was prone to throw sparks into the room if the line got hit during a lightning storm.\u00a0 But now, gone are most of the old wooden barns – or they’re simply falling over.\u00a0 The ones that are still in great shape are rarely actually used for farming – but are converted to display pieces or even lived in.\u00a0 Those that get razed are replaced with large aluminum\/steel machine sheds every bit as big as the old.\u00a0 Farmers no longer have smatterings of everything: a little land, a few cows\/sheep\/pigs\/chickens, and a home patch.\u00a0 Now, land farmers have huge machinery and miles long uninterrupted fields.\u00a0 Animal farmers specialize in hundreds to thousands of only one kind of animal.\u00a0 Things are much more efficient and surprisingly cleaner.\u00a0 Unfortunately, this also means fewer people are needed to maintain the same amount of land.\u00a0 Simple economics dictates that small farmers and farms can’t do much more than subsist with $2-4\/bushel corn\/bean prices. Fence rows that needed to be cleared yearly and delineated property simply disappear in deference to larger and larger open areas.\u00a0 Either you’re getting bigger, or you’re soon to be moving.\u00a0 The small family farm, despite the efforts of Farm Aid<\/a> and the various attempts to save the lifestyle, have become victims of technology more than anything else.\u00a0 You just don’t need as many people to farm the same land anymore.<\/p>\n Still, there were all kinds of little farm implements, tools, and techniques that are simply being lost to time and technology.\u00a0 Already there are some tools I used with my grandfather that nobody knew what were but me.\u00a0 And there were all sorts of things you find you can’t make heads nor tails of.\u00a0 The techniques of using these tools or what they were even used are quickly being lost.\u00a0 Amazing to pick up something that was a key piece of equipment 50 years ago, and now nobody even knows what it is.<\/p>\n Don’t get me wrong, I’m not nostalgic for these days to come back.\u00a0 They were rough and dangerous.\u00a0 People lost lives and limbs in pretty horrible ways back then – and still do to a degree today.\u00a0 Farm equipment was deadly – I lost an uncle to a tractor roll-over, a neighbor lost most of an arm, and my own father narrowly averted death with a PTO shaft.\u00a0 Not to mention farming with horses.\u00a0 So it always gets my craw a bit when folks around the city here want to go ‘back to farming the way they did before’.\u00a0 I don’t think they appreciate how hard and downright inefficient farming in those older ways was.\u00a0 Regardless of the pesticides\/chemicals\/organic issues – it was bloody hard work and a yearly gamble to grow a field of crops and see it from planting to harvest. The penalties of failure were not bailed out – you simply lived very lean and poor for a year or two to make up the bad years.\u00a0 Harvest festivals that celebrated a good harvest encapsulated an entire year of planning, guessing, planting, cultivating, and harvesting.\u00a0 I think that’s where I get a lot of my own attitudes of playing things safe financially and using the good times to prepare and set up cushions for the times when you knew they’d be bad.<\/p>\n I guess it came down to this in the end – to remember what you came from in order to really savor the wonderful things we have now – and to take full advantage of those opportunities that were created to their fullest extent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Had forgotten about springtime in the midwest.\u00a0 Everything is just so…green. I’ve been home in rural Indiana the last few days helping clean up some family property.\u00a0 Well, that and brushing up on my nail-gun and roofing skills by finishing off some aluminum siding on our back porch. \u00a0 It’s amazing how much stuff can collect, and how many little projects there are, on several properties between two generations – one generation on a farm and the next being a…<\/p>\n