A Visit to the Indiana State Fair

Tumbledown and family attended the sesquicentennial (150th) celebration of the Indiana State Fair

on Friday and was pleased to see that farming--especially the raising of animals (poultry and rabbits, cattle, horses [especially draft horses], sheep and goats, and swine) and the history of farming--are still central to the event.

Tumbledown always enjoys a visit to the Pioneer Village, with its array of antique tractors and its focus on demonstrating traditional arts and crafts. But he was disappointed as usual to see most of the equipment (threshers, shellers, plows, and the like) sitting on the floor gathering dust or hanging from the rafters like so many "objects de art."

One area certainly worth the effort of a visit is the art exhibition entitled "Painting Indiana II: The Changing Face of Agriculture," a collection of 40 paintings on the third floor of the Clarian Health Home & Family Arts builiding. The exhibit is a collaborative effort of The Barn (The Center for Agricultural Science & Heritage; contact Justin Armstrong, jarmstrong@indianastatefair.com; and see the article in the Indianapolis Star) at the Indiana State Fairgrounds and the Indiana Plein Air Painters Association. The work of these ten "plein air" painters is certainly worth seeing "life size" as well as in the book by the same title. Of course, Tumbledown appreciated the paintings based on "the family farm" and nearly choked on the one that showed a space-age hovercraft harvesting corn. "Just sayin', 't'aint nat'ral."

Another highlight was the blarny spun by a young lady from "Barn Tours" of Granbury, TX.

But most of all, it was and always is the animals that grab Tumbledown's attention, especially the "World's Largest Boar"

and the Grand Champion and Reserve Champion Sows with their litters.

Enjoy the menagerie.

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.