Giving Thanks

On this Thanksgiving Day, Tumbledown is thankful that he is a sheep of the Lord's pasture (Psalm 100), and not the "Tom Turkey" of the Lord's flock.Mindful of those confined to hospital rooms and nursing homes today across this broad and fecund land, and feeling for all those people who are isolated and separated from the celebrations of family and friends, those deployed in military service, and all those who will eat alone or in institutions, Tumbledown's thanksgiving prayer includes a request that the Great Good Shepherd of us all (John 10) will continue to walk with us and our mourning, lonely, ill and aging friends through their dark and pain-filled valleys toward greener pastures, on peaceable banks alongside restorative waters (Psalm 23).

Tumbledown is sure that the Good Shepherd still wields both rod and staff, though the chaos of war and terror and famine and disease seem to betray some broken fences on the Good Lord's farm. There are thieves and wolves about in the world, and some of them are stealing sheep and turkeys and chickens.

Still, Tumbledown's head is oily and his cup runs over as he gives thanks for frosty, peaceful November sunrises on the in-laws' once-upon-a-time farmestead, the quiet sounds of birds chirping in the trees, the rustles of deer moving through the woods, and the brown still of the rising sun on the pond before the gleaming white of the first deep freeze.

The ground this year still yielded an abundant harvest. For that we can be grateful and thankful as we dig in to the green beans gathered and stored in the heat of summer, and spread the fall raspberry jam on steaming wheat rolls. As the Turkey roasted slowly in the oven this morning, Tumbledown strolled through the pasture gates, giving thanks for neglected apple trees;

blessing the Lord's name for the blue-bird's nest, now abandoned for the winter;

glad for the well that long ago watered the people and animals of this place.

The Psalmist is right. Whatever else may be said about this world, the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endures to all generations. Tumbledown has tasted the goodness and mercy of the Lord. So, to the living generations now gathered--in your house and ours--Tumbledown sends a very heartfelt Happy Thanksgiving!

Tumbledown Farm

Too Dumb to Farm

Is Anyone Today Smart Enough to Farm?

Nobel economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) famously declaimed about an ordinary #2 lead pencil: "Look at this lead pencil. There is not a single person in the world who could make this pencil." (The PBS tv Series, "Free to Choose" [1990, Vol 1 of 5, "The Power of the Market."], available today on YouTube, but who knows for how long. Tumbledown has not quite figured out the relationship of that story to the following: Leaonard E. Read, "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read," December 1958.) Friedman could as easily have said that not a single person in the world today can farm. (Maybe that isn't true world wide, yet, but it is probably safe to say of the U.S.) The extensive, monocrop (or, to be generous, the two-crop rotation) agriculture of today, using genetically modified seed and industrial fertilizers, means that no one person could produce even a corn or soybean crop for two years running without the help of strangers thousands of miles away--and, of course, without the help of the oil-rich. The same can be said of animal raising. No single farmer keeps both boar and gilt, breeds boar to sow, cares for the pregnant pig until she delivers her litter of piglets, farrows, weans, and finishes the litter (much less butchering and preserving the hogs). And absolutely no one raises both crops and animals! That was Friedman's point, of course, that thousands of people across the world had to "cooperate"--but indirectly, with their interactions mediated by a market--to produce a pencil. Friedman celebrated the wondrous ability of the market to enable this faux cooperation (he says we might want to kill the person--of another religion, race, or ethnicity--with whom we cooperate to make a pencil, if we had to work directly with the person).

Tumbledown is not saying that the Nobel winner is wrong. (That would be dumb.) The market is indeed wondrous. But it isn't all good--nor the whole good, nor even the highest good. (See the critiques of Ray and Schaffer, Developing an Alternative to the Chicago School, Daryll E. Ray and Harwood Schaffer, UT, Ag Policy Analysis Center, Org. for Competitive Markets. Kansas City, MO, July 2003.) Markets also allow us to cooperate unwittingly in the creation of world-threatening warming, and to buy oil from the supporters of terrorists.

Just think about it: we can no longer even write--and writing is thinking--without globalization. No local community has the knowledge sufficient to produce it's own writing implements (quill and ink anyone?) much less its own food. Friedman was known as a champion of the individual's freedom to choose.

This is freedom? The dependence on a global market is truly freedom? We supposedly choose, when we are free to do so, what is in our best interest.

So, why will more than 50% of us "choose" to live in cities? According to Steven Johnson, we've gone from 3% of the population in cities (in 1880 at the dawn of the industrial age), to 50% (already, not waiting for 2007). "We are now a 'city planet,'" says Johnson, quoting Stewart Brand.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, why do we (dumb?) city slickers choose to eat fastfood?

And why has the Future Farmers of America become the FFA? (Times Article: Agricultural Mainstay Gets a New, Urban Face.) Because we are too dumb to choose farming. We prefer "agriscience," "biotechnology," and "turf grass management." Call us "farmers" and you may receive an old fashioned haymaker. Friedman was right that the economy is to blame. It is no coincidence that the "FFA" was first formed following the hand wringing of the 1920s to attract and keep farm boys on the farm by countering an inferiority complex. (Logsdon, "Our Hidden Wound," in Living at Nature's Pace, "I'm a hayseed, I'm a hayseed, and my ears are full of pigweed" or the struggle with the romantic opposite in Harvey Wiley's Lure of the Land.) Nor is it any wonder that the FFA name change followed immediately after a time of deep agricultural crisis. (The name changed in 1988; see this economic analysis of the period immediately prior: "Things got much worse when the dollar began to appreciate beginning in 1980. Exports fell in value by nearly one third by 1985, and with high interest rates, land prices could not be sustained. In the ensuing farm financial crisis, supply control interventions and farm program fiscal costs were driven to record levels." "Exchange rate effects on agricultural trade," Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Aug 2002. by David Orden.)

Maybe no one today is smart enough to live in the country, or free enough, to farm.

But we cannot end this entry on such a sour note. Maybe some of us are beginning to choose well, to live smart--by choosing and buying locally produced food. The NY Times calls the farmers who produce this food "counterculture farmers." So be it. Tumbledown calls them the real farmers. The farmers who say we can too make this pencil. You bet we can grow our own peppers, Milton, without shipping them from South America.

We will learn the utility of making our own pencils, and choosing to grow our own food and fiber.

We city slickers will have brains enough to farm.

I just know we will, Milton. How's that for confidence?

Tumbledown Farm

The Little Red Hen

Tumbledown is hungry.

Abby McGanney Nolan's review of illustrator Jerry Pinckney's The Little Red Hen reminded Tumbledown this week of all the good things there are to eat down on the farm. The heat of summer is a fading memory; the sweat of scything and bundling sheaves is giving way to long sleeves;

and the aching muscles that once threshed winnowed now rest mostly when they are not shivering.

(See Gene Logsdon's Small Scale Grain Raising for a detailed description of this method of harvesting home-grown garden wheat.)

But there is now wheat to grind and bake for Thanksgiving. There are whole-wheat pancakes to make and smother with butter, and raspberry jam to spread. And Tumbledown has to wonder whether the youngsters will help with the feast, other than with the eating.

But what shall we make? There are so many possibilities. And some are not even that much work. What about No-Knead Bread? Or Kolaches? Or thumbprint cookies?

mmmm! Now there's a lesson that cannot be taught more directly than on the old-time diversified farm. "If a man will not work, neither shall he eat!" (2 Thessalonians 3:10)

Tumbledown Farm

Farming, a Living or a Lifestyle?

According to the profundities of our agriculture professors, these days you can either have farming as a "way of life" or as a "living"--that is, either as a "lifestyle" or as a "profitable business"--but not as both. (Purdue's Michael Boehlje, "From Tractor Driver to Chief Executive," Indianapolis Star, October 29, 2006) Obviously, things have not always been this way. At the turn of the last century, it was assumed that "to a large extent" a farmer's livelihood--food and fuel, and other necessities for living--were taken directly by the farmer from the farm and not gained derivatively through cash from farming. "The country experience" and "rural values" were a part of the "good living" a farmer made, and "the money," 10%, amounted to a return on the farmer's cash investment (5% actual cash profit, if that). Another assumption was that a "farmer" was anyone who had agriculture as the "chief means of livelihood." ("A Good Living and 10%," How to Do Things, p. 254)

As a result, one of the fundamental rural values of 19th and early 20th century farmers was self sufficiency, another was independence. Those are lost to today's "full-time enterprise farm." As Beohlje says, now farmers--as CEOs of a profitable businesses--are contract suppliers who must follow specific production methods and meet targets and deadlines. Targets? Deadlines? Operating "machinery and equipment 24 hours a day"? Sounds like nothing short of slavery to Tumbledown. All the work and none of the lifestyle? Why not punch a clock or sit in an office, if the object is merely money?

Is it really impossible to earn a full-time living and still keep the farming lifestyle? According to the good professor, the full-time farm comprises "5,000 or more acres or 10,000 or more hogs"--and is "more a business than a way of life." According to the professor, some mid-size farm families "choose" to both farm and have an off-farm job. Even so, it is "technology" that allows these farmers to manage "1,000 acres or more." Tumbledown wonders whether working two jobs really leaves time for the farming lifestyle. And when the second job is a result of the "choice" between losing the farm or adding an off-farm job to support the farming "lifestyle," Tumbledown figures the professor should have said these farmers "are forced" to both farm and work an off-farm job. Even so, these mid-sized farmers do not keep it up long, as their decreasing numbers demonstrate. That leaves the "lifestyle" farmer, whose numbers are growing. Maybe we should call these farmers "farming reenactors," weekend preservers of a "lifestyle" that no longer really exists. Artificial farmers.

Tumbledown suspects that these "lifestyle" farmers sometimes do harbor dreams of farms that "warrant the entire attention of at least one [person]" (another assumption in How to Do Things).

According to the same Star article, "65 percent, or 15 million acres," of Indiana land is dedicated to farming today. At the time of the 1900 census, the number was 21,619,623 (out of the total area of 22,982,400) acres, or 94%. (Cyclopedia of American Agriculture) According to the 2005 USDA stats, the number of farms in Indiana today is 59,000--at the 1900 census it was 221,897. Today the average farm size is 254 acres, then--if Tumbledown's calculator works--it was 97. The only statistic that seems to move in a favorable direction is the total cash value of the "agricultural products"--$5.5 billion last year, $203 million in 1900.

Have we taken the farming "lifestyle" out of farming in favor of cash? Do we really prefer dependent city living as the paradigm and independent country living as the exception?

Tumbledown somehow has the same dream as Harvey Wiley (The Lure of the Land) did:

"Theoretically, my idea of humanity would be a scattered population, all of the productive industries taken out of the cities and place in the country to which they properly belong, and the city left only as a place of exchange. Meanwhile, let us make the best of things as they are. ...intend to be real farmers, to live upon the farm and gain [...] livelihood therefrom,--and by farm I do not mean simply fields of wheat and corn, but I mean orchards and dairies and gardens and forests, in fact all the various activities by means of which Mother Earth yields her treasures of grain and fruit and flowers to her tenants."

Or as Gene Logsdon says (from his lips to God's ears), "The Future: More Farmers, Not Fewer." (Living at Nature's Pace) More real, diversified farms. Don't call what Tumbledown does a hobby; it's a good way of living. Now if he could just make a little cash at it--maybe 10%?

Tumbledown Farm