The Contrary Farmer

by Gene Logsdon

  I am not going to describe how to shock ripe corn for later feeding (see my earlier book, Practical Skills, for a complete description of that) because I don't think this traditional method is at all necessary on modern cottage farms. I have learned, quite by accident, that sheep, cows, and horses can be turned into fields of standing dead stalks after the ears have been harvested, and the animals will eat the leaves and top stalks on their own, thus saving all the work of making shocks. The animals in fact appear to relish this food even though the fodder seems too dead or dry to have much food value. The animals also knock down the stalk parts they don't eat, making a crisscross of plant residue on the soil surface that prevents soil erosion and provides cover for wild animals in winter. In the spring the rotted stalks are easily disked into the soil in preparation for planting oats. This "grazing" of corn stalks has become an important addition to my pasture rotation, since the stalks become available in late September and October right when I am often hurting for pasture. The fodder most relished by the animals is the dead sweet corn stalks and leaves, which they will eat right down to the ground. It would be quite practical to grow a field of sweet corn, sell the ears at farm market, and then "graze" the field with sheep, thereby profiting from two crops instead of one.

  We harvest popcorn by snapping the ears off the stalks, husks and all. Then we strip back the husks but leave them on the ear. We tie the husks from three ears together and hang them on a wire in the garage, with metal can lids on either end of the wire so mice can't get to the corn. We do not shell the corn from the cob until we pop it, and in the unheated garage the corn on the cob seems to last indefinitely and still maintain good taste. We are presently popping corn that is three years old.

  Some surplus sweet corn we use dried for parching. Throw a handful of the dry kernels into the popper after popping corn, to roast them.

  Smoking meat with corncobs gives the meat a distinctive flavor. Corncob jelly is a traditional cornbelt delicacy, largely, I suspect, because it is made with a lot of sugar or honey. Cobs make a good bedding, under straw, for livestock. And if you want to apply for admittance to the ranks of real husbandmen, you need to be able to roll a cob across the barnyard under your hoot ever so slowly and methodically when salespeople are trying to persuade you to buy something you don't need. If you proceed with the cob with great enough concentration, they will become impatient and, believing you are too dense to talk to, will leave.

  CHAPTER 9

  Cottage Mechanics

  A bulldozer in the hands of a wise man does good work; in the hands of a fool even a spade is dangerous.

  The author's fattier in casual conversation, 1960

  The boy pondered the task he had laid out for himself: to bolt two hand hoes to the back of the goat cart his father had made for him so that he could, by pushing the cart backwards, cultivate weeds between the rows of tobacco that seemed to stretch all the way across western Kentucky. He tinkered. He cogitated. He tinkered some more. No one could have foreseen that fifty years later, in the 1990s, he would be inspired by the contraption he was building to successfully design and manufacture modern horsedrawn and human-powered farm machinery. Nor could even the wisest prophet have predicted that between boyhood and manufacturing, he would follow a successful career as a classical guitarist and university music professor-and keep on farming, too. All he cared about at that moment in the 1930s was how to get the tobacco weeded faster and easier than with hand hoeing.

  The cart cultivator, like most of Elmo Reed's ideas, worked. "Mo and I could cover two acres a day pushing that thing," recalls J.B. Tyree, a neighbor who delights in recalling the story. "That was the real beginning of both his horsedrawn Three-Point Hitchcart that is sold worldwide today, and his hand-pushed wheel hoe cultivator for gardens." J.B. pauses, reminded of another story that amuses him. "My granddaughter is a track star. She took Mo's wheel hoe to the garden one day and jogged up and down the rows with it. Mo said: `Now that's real progress."'

  Elmo Reed would be the president and chief executive officer of the contrary farmers if contrary farmers could endure such regimentation, which, thank heavens, they can't. He exemplifies perfectly the combina tion of artistic and mechanical creativity without which farm work can become either a grueling exploitation of the human mind and body or, at the other extreme, a ruthless exploitation of nature. The same artistic creativity in Elmo Reed that flowered into good music, flowered into good farming. One of the travesties of modern life is that we have tried to separate "manual" work from "mental" work, as if that were possible. But Elmo says it so much better himself: "We have been taught that the world of art and poetry is far removed from the menial arts like farming. That's a myth and a very sad one because actually the so-called higher arts flow directly out of the so-called lower ones or they lose their vitality. If our rural society is lost, as now seems possible, what will become of urban culture?"

  Much of the prejudice of "higher art" against mechanical artistry arises from a revulsion at the excesses of technology today. Traffic jams. Acres of barrels full of nuclear waste. A 200-horsepower tractor that replaces a hundred rural people and sends them to the cities to compete for jobs with a hundred people already there who can't find jobs. Gargantuan lumber machines that can swallow a tree whole at one end and spit two-by-fours out the other. It is almost amusing to listen to lumber companies hypocritically blame the spotted owl for lost jobs while their machines every year displace more thousands of jobs than a whole decade of environmental reform. If job loss in the timber industry is the issue, one could argue that the chain saw is far more to blame than all the endangered owls in the world.

  It is precisely because of such issues that many people who claim to be environmentally conscious are suspicious of any machine larger or more complex than a pocketknife or a bicycle (even though they would never dream of giving up their automobiles or refrigerators). They harbor a notion that not only is playing a violin a far more noble pursuit than grease-monkeying an old tractor back into running order, but like Jean Jacques Rousseau, they believe that biology is something totally distinct from and culturally purer than mechanics. One of the blessings of farm life is that it teaches the error inherent in that point of view. Farmers see the utter dependence of biology and physics on each other. Birds use architectural construction skills to build their nests. Humans use the physics of air pressure to blow their noses. There is no instance of bio logical behavior that exists apart from mechanical principles. People who do not understand and are not willing to learn that, who because of this prejudice against manual arts even boast that they know nothing about how to build a house, repair a motor, sharpen an axe, or apply the physics of lever and gear to their work, will have a very difficult time as a farmer no matter how contrary they are. In my close observations, more cottage farms fail because of ignorance of mechanical arts than for any other reason.

  I do not know how to articulate an accurate distinction between "bad" mechanical technology and "good" mechanical technology, or if there is one. If the use of lever and gear and heat and pressure and gravity, which is what all mechanical technology comes down to, makes work truly easier for the laborer without disrupting societal stability or ecological balance, then it is "good" I suppose. But almost always human behavior runs to excess and that is where the difficulty lies, not in the machine itself. You can kill a man with a pocketknife. But you can save a life with a monstrous 200-horsepower tractor that I consider an excess of technology, and in the 1978 blizzard when the roads were blocked by snow to all ordinary traffic, I saw that happen.

  It seems to me that when artistic creativity becomes interested in agriculture-if we can increase the number of Elmo Reeds, in other words-the problem of "excessive" technology eventually takes care of itself. And I suggest this not only because excess is self-destructive in the long run anyway; when creative artistry embraces mechanical skills, the result invariably is a move away from excess. In agriculture, for example, the forerunner of th
e huge, four-wheel-drive, articulated steering tractors that make it possible for greedy farmers to hog more and more farmland, was built right here in Wyandot County by the Schmidt brothers, some of the most caring and gentle and mechanically creative men I know. They were not interested in hogging land but were simply enjoying the exhilaration that they felt from using their creative talents to build for a customer, Herb Walton, a tractor that would pull more than the World War Two tanks he was trying to farm with. And Herb was not a ground hog farmer either. He in fact was one of the first to pull back from the headlong race toward expansion and cash grain monofarming, and to begin trying to put into practice many of the tenets of organic farming. In the 1940s the need appeared to be for more powerful tractors, which is why he had the creativity to think of army-surplus war tanks.

  And what do the creative wizards at Schmidt Machine Works specialize in today when the world is full of big farm machinery that no one can afford? They are front-runners in manufacturing what are called "after market" parts needed to repair the existing behemoths during these times when agriculture trembles before an unknown future. I have a notion that when the true costs of farming dictate a more efficient, small-scale approach to farm equipment, the artistry that built the Schmidt Machine Works and shops like it will lead the way back to sanity.

  Lloyd Riggle, another locally famous machinist, is a consummate organic gardener. I doubt he or his wife goes to the grocery store once a month. They even make their own soap. They heat entirely with their own wood. But Lloyd is also a mechanical genius. He used to be a troubleshooter for International Harvester. Wherever a monster IH tractor or combine broke down in the U.S. and no one else could fix it, Lloyd was sent to the rescue.

  What does he specialize in today? Restoring and repairing old small tractors! And we keep him fully employed. "It's more of a challenge to me to see if I can make a worn-out old tractor better than it was when it was new, than work on the big new stuff," he says. His specialty is installing alternators in place of old generators that barely kept batteries alive on older tractors, and rewiring a tractor's whole electrical system to fit the alternator. Lots of mechanics can change 6-volt systems to 12-volt systems this way, but when Lloyd does it, a tractor will start almost by snapping your fingers at it. With the motor reconditioned, such a tractor becomes not just an old restored tractor, but for all practical purposes a new, better tractor for modern small scale farming. What is needed, and what appears to be happening, is a Lloyd Riggle or two in every farming community.

  Elmo Reed of course is the best example of what is happening. Can anyone imagine how students would greet a professor of agricultural engineering today if he told them that there was a good business opportunity in horsedrawn equipment? Only a very contrary and inventive person would divine such a possibility. "It didn't really take any genius," says Elmo. "I wanted to farm with horses myself when I retired from the university but it was hard to find horsedrawn machinery that wouldn't fall apart the second time across the field. Horse forecarts to which machinery could be hitched instead of hitching directly to the horses were already in vogue, greatly easing the work for the horses. All I did was put the standard three-point hitch on the forecart, along with hydraulics and PTO. That was still cheaper than a tractor, and I could then use all the modern machinery made for small tractors. In fact some of our customers pull my Three-Point Hitchcart with all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) instead of horses. That works fine and makes small scale farming more affordable to more people."

  Today the small farm scene is full of PTO-equipped horsedrawn forecarts and there are half a dozen manufacturers of them. But Elmo, once the creative juices started flowing, went another step back into the future to make lower cost rather than higher cost new machines. He perfected ground-driven power-take-off shafts (PTOs activated by the forecart wheels as they roll over the ground), an idea Amish machinists had also been re-examining, and which was a commonplace technology in the old bull-wheel driven grain binders. Ground drive eliminated gasoline or diesel engines on the forecart, for those who preferred not to deal with piston power. But ground-driven PTOs which could turn fast enough to operate a rotary mower with the normal speed of a walking horse, required very sophisticated planetary gear designs. Elmo got the assistance he needed from high-tech engineers at Dana Corporation who had never thought to apply their technology to such an unusual purpose.

  The Amish are past masters at using advanced technology to lower rather than to raise the cost of machinery, the opposite of what modern agribusiness does. Farmer Martin Schmucker near Fort Wayne, working with his neighbor, Melvin Lengacher, an Amish machinist, converted his baler and cornpicker to ground-driven PTO, dispensing with motors and using four horses to pull the machines. In operation, the balers and pickers are eerily quiet: the muffled rattle of chains, the whirr of gears, and the snuffling of horses are the only sounds. The two men even converted a heavy snap bean harvester to ground-drive.

  The use of motors on forecarts to drive PTO systems is, however, more popular than ground driven systems (so far) with horse farmers and is an excellent idea for small farmers with very small tractors who do not wish to buy a larger tractor. The forecart engine finding favor with the Amish is a very new diesel made by Mitsubishi that uses a remarkably small amount of fuel-" We've been running the cornpicker all day and burned only about a pint of fuel," said the Amish farmer I visited recently, hardly believing it himself. "Arid the engine is so easy to start compared to the old Wisconsins we used to use." It also runs far quieter. The farmer showed me how any small PTO-powered piece of equipment could be hitched to the forecart's draw bar and its PTO shaft, just as you would do with a tractor. In front of the motor, handy to the farmer driving the horses, there is a little hydraulic pump, manually operated, to which hydraulic hoses from any piece of small machinery can be linked, again just as with a tractor. Working the handle on the pump backwards and forwards several times raises the implement, and then when the pump pressure is released, the implement lowers into operating position by gravity.

  "English" farmers (which is, as I said., what the Amish call the rest of us) laugh at these arrangements, but it is the Amish who laugh all the way to the bank. The hydraulic pump costs a couple hundred dollars; the Mitsubishi engine, $3000. With the whole forecart assembly and a team of horses, the outlay of money is still less than half of what a new tractor powerful enough to do the same work would cost. Moreover, as my good Amish friend David Kline (he has a Ph.D in Contrary Farming from the University of Ornery Knowledge) patiently explains to visitors: "Our church allows tractors around the barn, but the power for field work must issue from horses. Otherwise, with tractors, the temptation to expand acreage would become too great and we would start competing each other out of business, as English farmers have done to their great detriment."

  If you decide to farm with horses, subscribe to the Draft Horse Journal (Box 670, Waverly, Iowa 50677). That will give you all kinds of leads to horses and horse equipment. If you can visit Kidron, Ohio, in the heart of Amishland, for the big spring or fall farm machinery auction, you can get a crash course in horse and used small tractor machin ery. Or visit the Pioneer Equipment Company at Dalton, Ohio, not far away, where modern horsedrawn machinery is still being made.

  Most contrary cottage farmers at least for now are sticking with tractors for motive power, and in that regard they face a problem. New tractors, even smaller ones, are too expensive to justify for very small scale farms. Only from Russia and the Balkans are tractors being imported that are realistically priced for such farms, and dealerships for these tractors are few and far between. A few years ago, one of the U.S. farm machinery companies was thinking about manufacturing a very simple, long-lasting, low-horsepower, crude-looking tractor, easy to maintain and repair, but only for marketing in third world countries. I asked one of the executives why they didn't market such a tractor in America. "Oh, Americans wouldn't buy a tractor like that," he said. "They want soft contoured seats, cig
arette lighters, twelve forward gears and two reverses, headlights, fenders, rubber tires, syncromesh transmission, shift-on-thego, power steering, rollover bars, cab, gas gauge, front and rear PTO, dashboard lights, quick-mount hitches, gaily painted hoods, electronic fuel injection, four wheel drive, individual wheel brakes, radio, etc., etc., on their garden tractors." I replied: "The hell we do. We want what you intend to sell to Third World countries." Then the executive smiled and admitted, half in jest, what I think is wholly the truth: "Yeah, that's what we're afraid of. That would ruin our American market for fancy expensive tractors."

  So until demand increases enough to lure farm machinery manufacturers back to making the tractors we really want (there is a company starting up to do that right now, in Ohio, but as of this writing it is not far enough along to want publicity), contrary farmers are buying Russian (Ozark organic farmer Eric Ardapple-Kinsberg says he has had no unusual problems with his Belarus) or are restoring and repairing old reliable American tractors. The market for them is being spurred by collectors and that is a good thing because the two groups-users and collectors-together amount to enough demand to generate a humming underground restoration supply business. (See the list of collector newsletters and magazines on page 184.)

  There is in fact no better time than right now to equip the cottage farm with used machinery. Everything you need is available cheap be cause this equipment is obsolete on commercial farms which are locked into expansion and newer, bigger equipment. I saw a perfectly good four-row planter sell for $100 this spring at a farm sale. I recently bought a 50-horsepower tractor of 1967 vintage with a hydraulic loader on it, along with a 12-foot, hydraulically operated disk, plus a harrow, a cultipacker, and a three-point hitch plow all in good shape and all for $6000. By comparison a new "estate" tractor of only 30-horsepower (we call them "yuppy" tractors), which would be otherwise perfect for my size of operation, cost $18,000 or more with only a front-end loader. The smallest Belarus from Russia, at about 20 horsepower, costs around $8000.