In spite of popular
enthusiasm for ancient agriculture or even as I did growing up on a
nineteenth century farm, it is really not meant to be fun. Mostly it
is hard physical work and general all hands on deck drudgery. That
is what newcomers all fail to grasp. We really need our power
assisted technologies in order to see real sense out of our land.
On that front we are well
begun but I expect that the biggest assist to high intensity
agriculture will be robotic assistance. Just selective harvesting
alone truly demands it and it is achievable. At the same time there
are many protocols as yet unmechanized, not least been application of
ditch and bank agriculture which screams for just that.
Mobile factories are one
thing but demand a certain type of large field. This has led to poor
husbandry practices that need to end. Replace all that with small
robotic farm devices and quality naturally rises.
Farming the apocalypse
When my life came
crashing down I took shelter on my farm, surviving with 11th-century
tools like the sickle and scythe
by Keith
Ferrell 4,100 words
Keith Ferrell writes
fiction, non-fiction, and computer games. The former editor-in-chief
of OMNI magazine, his latest book is History
Decoded (2013), co-written with Brad Meltzer. He lives on a farm
in Virginia.
When there is a
likelihood of even small amounts of snow, sleet or ice, I move my car
to the top of the hill that shelters my farm. If I need to run
errands during such times, I just walk up the hill to it. The car is
old, our drive is steep and close to a quarter-mile long. Depending
upon how deep the snow, and how often my attention is caught by
something else, the walk can take a few minutes or half an hour. Upon
returning, I park in the same place, and walk back down, carrying the
day’s mail and my small purchases through the woods. Emerging from
the forest at the base of the hill and seeing my farm covered in
snow, I think of it as cut free from time – and myself cut free as
well.
My car can take me to
neighbours, to stores, to town. Across the meadow, my house, a
(mostly) converted barn, contains telephone and internet connecting
me to friends, relatives, colleagues, a universe of information and
distraction, the modern world. Right between them lies the sliver of
land I use to try my hand at agriculture, as it was practised 1,000
years ago.
The transition from
hunter-gatherer to farmer has always fascinated me. The ability to
plant, cultivate and harvest crops stands alongside the emergence of
self-awareness, control of fire, the wheel, and the development of
mathematics and written language as one of humanity’s
transformational events. We became something different once we began
to farm.
I have found something
like that taking place in me. For a variety of reasons – partly
financial, partly intellectual – I have approached my land with
tools that, for the most part, would have been available in 1014:
scythes, sickles and mattocks recognisable from paintings and
tapestries of 11th-century farms. How long would I last if thrust
back by time machine or a collapse of the sort popular in apocalypse
porn?
Calling my 35 acres a
farm is misleading, though not so misleading as calling myself a
farmer, something I never do. My neighbours are real farmers: they
make their living through agriculture. Their fields and pastures are
large and orderly, cultivated and fertilised, tended by workers and
machines. My fields, tended only by me, are disorderly, improvised,
often overgrown. Yet without saying so aloud, I have, over the past
couple of years, come to think of myself more and more constantly as
a farmer; as a sort of farmer anyway. An 11th-century (or so) sort of
farmer, actually, although I am well aware of how little I would have
in common with the real thing, and how poorly my skills would prepare
me to live in that time.
I arrived in the 11th
century through circumstances in my life and career. Purchased in the
mid-1990s as a weekend and summer home, a getaway, part of the farm’s
attraction was the old barn, already half-converted into living
quarters. The downstairs had electricity, running water from a good
well, a water heater, a tub and a toilet, a septic system. There was
a range in the kitchen. The place had a phone line, which meant that
we had dial-up internet (virtually the only option at the time). The
nearest town, Rocky Mount, with just over 4,000 people, was 15 miles
away. On clear nights with the lights turned low, the stars came out
nearly as brilliantly as they would have a thousand years before.
The first couple of years
of ownership had a peaceful pace – peaceful, that is, once I
arrived here at the end of a work week or the beginning of a
vacation. At the time, I was still editor-in-chief of OMNI magazine,
often travelling throughout the country and around the world. My wife
was teaching high school. The farm was our weekend refuge, a place
for rejuvenation, for gardening and exploring. I left most of the
fields in meadow, hiring a neighbour for a few hundred dollars to
bring in a tractor and mow them a couple of times a year. I enjoyed
watching an experienced farmer drive a tractor dragging a brush hog –
a cutter for taking down thickets of briars and small trees. Most
people with a weekend farm would have had the sense to buy a small
tractor or at least a riding mower. Not me. It would have made
sense to buy a four-wheel drive vehicle, too, not to mention a
generator for times of power outages, but I never did.
When a major snowstorm
struck during the first winter we owned the place, we stayed back
home in Greensboro, North Carolina, 90 miles away. I wished I’d
been at the farm. I wanted to know what it would be like to be snowed
in and cut off, perhaps without power. I discussed such things with
friends. We had all read some post-apocalypse fiction – Stephen
King’s The Stand (1978), Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s
Freehold (1964), Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild
Shore (1984) and, above all, George R Stewart’s Earth
Abides (1949). After I purchased the farm, my friends and I
agreed that when the ‘crash’ came, my place was where they would
head.
This was a matter of
mirth and curiosity but not much more at the time. The 35 acres and
the barn-cum-cabin were a reward for the years I’d spent in offices
or travelling for magazine-related business. I had no interest in an
off-hours life as a gentleman farmer. I just wanted a peaceful place
to go.
That it would become far
more should have been clear to me the first night I spent there, in
chilly October, electricity and phone not yet turned on, no running
water, no heat. There was a wind outside, and I read Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s short story ‘Young Goodman Brown’ by oil lamp at
probably the same level of illumination available to Hawthorne
himself when he wrote it in 1835.
Once I finished reading,
I took a walk to the edge of the woods. Though Hawthorne’s
character, drawn by dark forces, had actually entered, I wasn’t
ready yet. I came back inside and slept well. The next morning, I
found myself thinking that I could live here and, if need be, live
here just like this. Later in the day, I returned to the city and,
once the work week began, found myself in offices, on airplanes,
travelling around the country and the world for OMNI, talking
and writing about the future. But now I thought more and more
frequently: I could live there, on my farm.
Not that I planned
anything of the sort.
Planning is one of the
skills that grew along with agriculture. Organisation, community,
co ordination, the ability to anticipate, were all essential to
farms in the 11th century. If you are going to have a crop next year,
you had better store and save some of this year’s seeds. Not to
mention storing food itself against the non-productive and often
harsh months that punctuate the farm year. You must store the
knowledge of how to plant those seeds and harvest their products,
passing down that knowledge from one generation to the next.
That endeavour –
growing food and feeding family, tribe, village, community, nation,
world – occupied humanity for most of recorded history.
Improvements in agriculture and husbandry, the domestication of
animals, came slowly over hundreds and thousands of years.
When people travelled,
they brought back tools that helped their farming improve: new
cultivars and new methods and implements. Gathering mastery of
metalworking made tools more effective and efficient. A metal-tipped
spade, shovel or hoe isn’t just an advance in toolmaking; it
enables fewer people to produce more food, releasing others to work
at new vocations. That’s how the farm freed ever more individuals
to lives as merchants, millers, weavers, smiths.
Until I held a scythe by
the snathe, as one might a baseball or cricket bat, I didn’t
appreciate just how innovative grips were
By the 11th century, most
of the non-mechanised tools at my disposal had been used for
centuries – yet the spade and sickle, the shovel and hoe, would
remain foundational for centuries to come, into modern times. My
father, now 90, once spoke of reaping wheat by hand, of ploughing
behind a mule, of watching my grandfather drag logs behind a horse,
then working those logs into railroad ties by hand. My dad left the
farm, but my neighbours recall when their own ancestors worked fields
by hand and with farm animals, although their farms now are
mechanised and have been for decades.
One memorable day, a
neighbour showed me how to sweep the long, curved blade of my
wood-handled scythe to slice tall grass or stalks of grain cleanly at
ground level. Done properly, scything is not a chopping or hacking
action. It is fluid and rhythmic, performed with muscles at the waist
more than the arms. Who knew?
The scythe I used had
evolved since ancient times. By the Middle Ages, its sharpened blade
would have been fashioned by a blacksmith, with his own long years of
experience and skill. The addition of lateral grips to the scythe’s
snathe (the long, wooden, often curved handle to which the blade is
attached) improved the farmer’s ability to control the implement,
and made its use more efficient. Until one attempts to use a scythe
by holding on to the snathe, as one might a baseball or cricket bat,
it’s difficult to appreciate just how innovative the grips were.
My attraction to scythes
and other ancient artefacts was curiosity, even indulgence – a city
boy playing with old farm tools – until our full-time move to the
farm in 1997, a year after OMNI ceased its print edition
and I became a freelance writer again.
The permanent move was
prompted by an illness. As a result of that illness, my wife was
unable to continue teaching, and the vagaries of a freelance income
couldn’t be counted on to support two homes. So the farm became our
home. We had hoped to build a small, real house, and make the
barn-cum-cabin my office and library. The small house never got
built.
I planned an ambitious
but not oversized garden 100 yards from the old cabin, and hired a
neighbour to till it. Twice a year, I had neighbours bring in
tractors and brush hogs to keep the meadows clear. I filled my garden
with tomatoes, beans, peas, onions, squash, cucumbers, corn, herbs. I
set up a small desk in a glade overlooking the broad creek that ran
next to the garden. With pencil and paper, I wrote large parts of two
books there, scratching my way through hundreds of pages as the
seasons passed, then returning to the 20th century to type them into
the computer in my office. When fall arrived, I hired a neighbour to
mow and brush-hog the fields and meadows clear once more.
Supporting all of this
was fine so long as the freelance economy was good, and the approach
of the millennium brought boom times for freelancing. But freelance
writing is, in many ways, the very definition of a hunter-gatherer
profession, and my freelance markets collapsed as the internet rose
up.
But by far the most
devastating factor was the mental illness, at first difficult to
treat and ultimately intractable, that overwhelmed my wife. Her
darkness deepened until she retreated almost totally not only from
the world at large, but also the world at hand – the farm we had
once shared. Where once she explored our fields and forests as avidly
as I, she soon ceased going outdoors at all unless it was for a
visit, generally fruitless, to a doctor or therapist. I found myself
becoming a caregiver.
Yet even as I cared for
my wife, for lack of funds I was increasingly unable to care for the
farm. Weeds grew. Brambles began to spread. The forest encroached
upon what I now saw had been an artificially maintained illusion of
order.
Unmown, my lawns and
meadows became seas of tall grass and impenetrable thickets of briars
and blackberry canes. In some areas, the grass reached shoulder
height; the briars grew even taller. The pleasant walk to the big
garden and the glade beside the creek became an obstacle course
blocked by brush and thorns. I lost one meadow, several acres, to
scrub pines, and a good portion of another. Whether kept clear with
tractors and mowers, or scythes and brush axes, cleared land is
artifice, and artifice takes work.
Unable to maintain mine
with costly, large-scale mowing, I found myself in retreat against
the incursion of vines and canes and trees, but it was a retreat that
taught larger lessons than I had ever learnt from the years of
bounty. When I could afford to have the land cleared every spring and
fall, I could walk anywhere I wished, and do so in shorts and tennis
shoes during warm weather. Walking much of my property now requires
stout boots as well as heavy pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and even
then I accumulate scratches and cuts from the briars. The difference
between grapefruit-sized stones turned up and thrown aside in an
instant by a tractor, and a stone dug and worked out by hand was one
my mind already knew – and that my body soon learnt.
Could a 21st century man
survive as an 11th century field worker? We lived here, and
I was on my own
I learnt other things as
well: to appreciate the wild grasses and flowers consuming fields
that had once been mown; to work my way through blackberry brambles
with a brush axe, in the thickest spots, and on hands and knees with
heavy clippers and loppers. Working at ground level, I learnt to hear
the quiet: the gentle sounds that the curved blade of a sickle (the
baby cousin of the scythe) made slicing through canes, the rustle and
scurry of rabbits and mice through the underbrush; the buzz and whirr
of bees; the angry calls of birds displeased at my intrusion on their
world – and once, the unmistakable chatter of a rattlesnake.
Working so close to the
earth, I found the early farmers fuelling my thoughts. In a
fundamental way, I was like them. Lacking the money and wherewithal
to have my fields clear in mere hours, I asked myself: what could I
do with what I had?
The parameters of an
experiment began to take shape. I would see how a 21st-century man –
one who bought his farm with income from writing, editing and
speaking about the future – survived as an 11th-century field
worker. After all, we lived here, whether I could afford to
keep the fields cleared or not. I was on my own.
The 11th century farmers
I conjured would have had children, relatives, perhaps a draft animal
for ploughing and hauling. But with my wife self-confined to the
house, our son married and only infrequently here, I was my sole
source of labour, so I picked my spots to make my stands, to preserve
in certain areas at least something of the sense of a farm, of what a
farm is, what it provides. I did my best to keep the areas nearest
the house – the yard and even a stretch that could honestly be
called a lawn – neat and mowed. I put in a vegetable garden closer
to the house than the big garden had been.
And I kept that
11th-century idea in my head, a vision and a game. If I cranked my
lawnmower, or on occasion a neighbour’s borrowed tiller, I did so
while roughly calculating what the equivalent of an hour of mowing
would be in true horse – or ox – power. I thought of what that
would have meant to my imaginary predecessors who I saw, vaguely, as
living on the edge of some great forest in England or on the
continent, cut off from cities and towns. My imaginary predecessors
moved to Ireland, from where I learnt about loy ploughing, an
ancient approach to hand-tilling hilly and rocky soil inaccessible to
horse teams. The loy is closest to the tool we now know as the spade,
and the spade was a tool I owned. I would take my spade and dig in,
working out rocks and roots, cutting a furrow as straight as I could
manage (not very), moving sod and soil to either side of the trench.
A few hours’ work, and I could plant a few seed potatoes.
My most constantly used
tool was the mattock, which offers a pointed pick on one side of its
head and a hoe-like blade on the other. Also a favourite 1,000 years
ago, the mattock’s two heads, one for digging and one for cutting,
give it a versatility that I find unmatched. The spade was once
called the ‘poor man’s plough’ and I thought of my mattock,
which I used to break ground, chop roots, pry up rocks, turn and
prepared beds, the same way. Restricted to one tool, I would choose
the mattock.
Only gradually did I
realise that I had far more in common with a post-apocalypse survivor
– and chronic illness, not to mention financial challenges, are
apocalyptic in their way – than with an 11th-century farmer. Those
farmers, after all, knew what they were doing; their whole lives
would have been spent doing it. They were far more prepared for a
post-apocalypse life on the land than me or almost anyone I knew.
A central truth about
living closely on the land is that the land itself will show you what
you have accomplished and what you have done wrong. Mine mostly
showed me my mistakes. Opportunistic pines, finding purchase and
uncut when small, soon became trees. Blackberries, spreading beneath
the ground, erupted, their briars making familiar pathways
impassable. The first emergence of an invader is the time to catch it
– something I failed to do. This year’s seedling pines are next
year’s forest covering a portion of a favourite meadow.
But even in the spots
where I put in the time to keep things clear, especially my garden,
my struggles were obvious. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in a journal
entry from May 1843 of the honesty a row of peas imposes upon the
planter: ‘My garden is an honest place. Every tree and every vine
are incapable of concealment, and tell after two or three months
exactly what sort of treatment they have had. The sower may mistake
and sow his peas crookedly: the peas make no mistake, but come up and
show his line.’
The deer and rabbits and
groundhogs didn’t care how straight my rows were as they dined upon
them
My own rows – perfect
in the days of having the ground tilled by tractor – now rarely
rose straight, their twists and turns mocking me and imposing irony
and honesty upon my thoughts. Was my declaration to ‘do what I
could with what I had’ just denial? My circumstances all but
demanded that I let the farm go, and with it the freelancing, to move
back to Greensboro or another city where I could find a job. But I
kept on.
During the worst of my
economic problems, I came close to losing it all, and wondered if
that might not be the best thing for myself, my wife, and the land.
Someone else, I knew, could come in with money and equipment and open
it up in a season. This wasn’t, after all, a species-wide
apocalypse, but a personal one – I could pack up, leave, start over
elsewhere. But I continued to believe that both my career and my farm
could be turned around – and that if I really had to, I could
survive on what I grew.
My peas tasted no less
sweet for the disarray of their rows. Potatoes dug from soil roughly
worked with spade, shovel and mattock were firm and well-shaped,
tasty and nourishing. I never used synthetic fertilisers. Whatever I
produced was nurtured, instead, with compost, manure (during the
years we had a horse), chopped leaves and hay cut with a scythe. I
ate plenty of blackberries from the canes that sprouted across
once-mown fields, and appreciated the animals – hawks, fox, even
bear – whose population increased along with the spread of habitat.
The deer and rabbits and groundhogs didn’t care how straight my
rows were as they dined upon them – and in any true apocalypse,
they could feed us, too.
But time exerted its
effects. Planting a large crop of anything by hand took so much time
that plans for other large plantings went unfulfilled. This season or
phase of the moon for planting this crop; this temperature means it’s
too late or too early to plant that one. Eleventh-century farming was
a pre-sunup to post-sundown endeavour, or nearly. Yet even my reduced
livelihood required that far more hours be spent at my desk (and not
the one by the creek) than in my fields. For everything I
accomplished outside, far more tasks and chores – not to mention
plans – languished undone.
Still I held on. When my
son came to visit last November, I dug potatoes to share with him and
with other members of my family. I was still here.
During those seasons when
my approach works well, having a visitor remark on how attractive my
land is, how nicely it is kept, provides a pleasure as deep as
receiving a compliment for a piece of writing.
But I know the truth –
these past few dark years, this place I love so much resembled a
backwoods hollow straight out of Deliverance.
Yet things are looking
up. The year 2014 promises to be a good one at my desk, giving me the
lift I need to work my farm. In light of the lessons of the last few
years, I am ready to reconsider my strategy and renew the fight to
reclaim more from the briars and the canes and the pines.
Our modern era’s
dependence upon technology and, especially, chemical and motorised
technology, has divorced most of us from soil and seeds and
fundamental skills. The schism would challenge survivors in any
post-apocalypse world. Without modern agricultural technology, and
the production and distribution systems that are built upon it,
hunger would arrive quickly in most cities and towns, with starvation
close at heel. A cinematic global apocalypse would see most of the
survivors dead by starvation within months if not weeks. Those who
made it through – farmers and gardeners, undoubtedly some preppers,
maybe (or maybe not) me, would find themselves in subsistence and
endurance mode for years. Planning and long-practised rhythms were at
the core of the 11th-century farmer’s life; improvisation, much of
it desperate, would be the heart of the post-apocalyptic farmer’s
existence.
I find I’ve become
better at both. Oddly – or maybe not – as life improves, I find
myself looking at powered equipment less longingly.
But I do have my eye on a
custom-crafted, straight-snathed European scythe.
