Tumbledown Farmer Receives an Education

Tumbledown Farmer visited the not-so-tumbledown farms at Conner Prairie today with his family. Here the skills so necessary to life in the 19th and early 20th centuries are learned not from the study of books but from the daily practice of staff and volunteers. (OK, yes, ultimately these practices must be teased from research into that past, which can only come from the study of documents and artifacts, but they are experienced by the visitor as living practices.)

The visit reminded Tumbledown of Gene Logsdon's (The Contrary Farmer's) contention that farms and farmers of the traditional type, with diversity of crops and livestock, require "many other cottage industries" (mechanics, welders, and the like) in order to survive (p. 34). It does indeed "take a village"--represented at Conner Prairie by a pottery, a blacksmith's shop, a general store, a doctor, a carpenter, a weaver, a school, an inn, and a meeting house-- and a whole host of "cooperative" skills to support a small farm. Where is that support today? Logsdon contends that "back-to-the-land" moves most often fail not because the farmers are stupid or incompetent, but because "their homesteads [are] islands in an alien culture" (Living at Nature's Pace, p. 99). The community and skill sets represented by the living history museum (living/museum, isn't that a contradiction in terms?) at Conner Prairie are deemed quaint and easily quarantined onto tracts of land where they may be visited like an amusement park. The skills are there to be observed, but not to be learned and taken home for implementation. Perhaps if we went to school at Conner Prairie, we could rebuild our Tumbledown Farm.

Tumbledown Hunter-Gatherer

Tumbledown Farmer spilled blood (his own) and gathered blackberries (his own) this morning in a pre-dawn battle with the mosquitoes. [Image: Blackberry Picking] His ears swilled the shrill hum of these millenia-old dive bombers as he threaded his arm into the serrated teeth of the bramble branches. (They aren't vines, I tell you.) Each dew laden, pinot thirst quencher plucked from the maw of the red-red religious thief (cardinal) popped into his mouth. Taste the sweet-tart fruit of a stolen moment after ten thousands of years of progress...if you still can. [Image: Blackberry Picking]

Rural Indiana: America's #1 Target (for terror and "progress")

Two Indiana stories have grabbed the attention of the Tumbledown Farmer in the past few weeks. The first contained the news that an Amish popcorn plant sits atop the government's watch list of state terror sites. (The National Asset Database. Perhaps the list was alphabetized? See the front page article in the Indianapolis Star, July 13, 2006.) Brian Lehman, the astonished owner of the popcorn concern, said "I don't have a clue why we're on the list. We're on a gravel road, not even blacktop. We're nowhere" (ibid.) The second story percolated for months in the news, at first merely as a rumor, then as a competition between small towns in Indiana and Ohio to land the next auto manufacturing plant. The reward for selling farms that had been in families for 5 generations was the promise of 750 manufacturing jobs (and millions of dollars, many times the going rate per acre for agricultural land). "Indiana lost 93,000 acres of farmland a year from 1997 through 2002, accelerating a decline stretching back 60 years" (Indianapolis Star, "Green Acres," April 30, 2006; 165 square miles between 1978 and 1992, a chunk the size of Blackford County, ibid., editorial, "State must protect precious farmland"). "Progress" in the form of a Honda plant has put rural Southeastern Indiana in the crosshairs in a way that no terrorist could ever hope to do. And Hoosiers have been complicit in the paving over of the farmland. Is it any wonder that we have inherited a Tumbledown Farm?

Papa's Farm

As a boy of five or six years old, I lived near Papa Walker's "farm"-

-I used the outhouse, helped "slop" the pigs, pumped water from the well. I watched Papa sharpen a hoe and tend a large garden while he sang old gospel songs. I ate the green beans, black-eyed peas, and the tomatoes that grew in that garden, while I sat weary from the heat at a tiny kitchen table next to an enormous window fan. I drank in Papa's values with the cold water he offered from the tin dipper. I want to return there now, but a highway has paved over the place where the sharecropper's house once sat. The terrain is so changed that the exact location is nearly impossible to spot. Corn fields (for fuel?) clothe the landscape with uniformity from ditch to ditch. There are no fence rows, few gardens, no diversity of livestock kept for food. I didn't realize that my childhood eyes were watching the disappearance of that green haven forever.

And if I cannot return, I want to see it again in my mind, clearly, as it was. I want to experience it momentarily, by practicing the skills that made it possible, even in a place as unlike it as night from day.

The farm industry says:

"Keep in mind that on grandpa's farm, the cows and pigs walked in creeks and streams and rain water washed manure off of open lots." (Don Villwock, President, Indiana Farm Bureau, The Hoosier Farmer, Summer 2006)

But I say, "Not on Papa Walker's farm!"

The farm industry says:

"Unfortunately that farm doesn't exist anymore and hasn't for some time." (ibid.)

But I say, "If the way grandpa farmed was harmful, why is its disappearance unfortunate? And if grandpa's way of farming was beneficial, its forced disappearance (by economics) sounds like a capitulation to the worst sort of tyrrany."

Tumbledown Farm is a virtual haven, a place to learn and explore 19th and early 20th century farms. ...a place to sow and grow "contrary" dreams.