Getting There from Here
First Published Farmer-ish, 2021 Annual Print Edition
The telltale whine of the massive boom sprayer rose in a slow crescendo as it lumbered down our country road, but our mules Loretta and Emmylou gave it no notice. They were too focused on the work at hand. So the big steel machine went past, its engine sound falling away in a Doppler hum, as it disappeared beyond the tall corn plants in our neighbor’s land to spray its chemical payload on some farm field further on.
We get used to such mechanical beasts roaming our area. For the most part, unless we are downwind of whatever poison is emerging from the insect-like booms that unfold from its steel body, like the mules we don’t give these giant machines a second thought. They are, after all, one of the more common invasive species to overtake farmland in the last century. As quiet returns, we continue on with our tasks content in the knowledge that our way of farming is predicated on a simple fact; it is wholly possible that as a civilization, we humans once knew things, immensely important things, that we have all but forgotten or dismissed.
Ours is but a small farm. Ten acres total. A mixture of trees, both deciduous and coniferous, fenced mixed grass pastures, and an open hay and wildflower meadow largely left to its own wild device, all interspersed with a series of cultivated sections of gently worked ground where we grow our crops. Situated in north central Illinois in a region that was once part of the vast Tallgrass Prairie, prior to the arrival of European settlers staking claim to a land that wasn’t really theirs it was mostly native grassland covering nearly 22 million acres in this state alone. Today, it is all but gone. Around us now is an endless panorama of corn and soybean fields, mono-cropped, land worked near to death, and farmed using industrial methods of production that have caused more harm to the earth in the last seventy-five years than in all the millennia prior.
Farming became something else after the Second World War, with the rise of the big steel machines and the government-sponsored extirpation of most every draft horse and mule working on farms across the country. These living creatures who had helped humankind farm for generations were now deemed worthless by United States Department of Agriculture decree, aside as some sort of meager same-as-cash trade-in for a brand-new shiny tractor, with the back door of the farm equipment dealership leading straight to the slaughterhouse. All of this just to keep those former-wartime assembly line factories humming with something to do after the conflicts in Asia and Europe had ended and the demand for war stuffs had dried up. Farming was now strictly business, and no longer about making a life, simple and humble as it may be. The mantra became and still echoes today, “Get big or get out,” as if to say, there is no longer a place for the small or the human-scale in our modern industrialized world.
To the large corporations that now control an ever-increasing share of our global food supply, an idea is without merit unless it generates massive profit for corporate shareholders, and a farm isn’t a farm unless it encompasses hundreds or even thousands of acres, always wholly dependent upon a never-ending chain of petroleum-based chemical inputs shipped in from somewhere else, without which the farm itself would cease to function. As for the developing world, where small-scale farms either worked by hand tools or with draft animals still provide a majority of the calories consumed, they are seen as just another market to be conquered on the path to global domination for a tiny handful of multinational businesses. Beauty? Grace? Self-sufficiency? Tradition? They scoff at such non-profitable words.
As the day begins and the sun rises over the Mazon River, Loretta and Emmylou, after finishing their morning oats, wait patiently in their stall, as I ready them in their leather collars, harness, and bridles, all the while talking to our two big Belgian draft mules about this or that as we prepare for the day ahead. Once set in their work attire, they will walk to the waiting cultivator on their own accord, with no lead rope required to guide them, and stand in position as they know the routine quite well. Out in the field we’ll go about our tasks, taking time to rest as needed, to watch and listen to the native place around us and to enjoy each other’s company as we get our farming done. The sound of birds, the smell of soil, the sun, the light, the faint musky scent of sweat from working mules, remind me that there’s no better place to be than right in this moment.
I hear a rumbling whir from the south and the big yellow boom sprayer has returned, warning lights flashing, as it takes up the better part of the road’s width. The driver waves as he passes and I wave back. “Poor guy,” I think, “stuck inside that glass-enclosed cab with air conditioning, surround sound, and more electronics than a computer store.” Never mind that our small farm can produce more human food per acre than any commodity cropland. Forget the fact that, if one wants to talk monetary profit, it takes about 80 acres of the genetically modified corn growing all around us to bring the same income as one acre of well-tended vegetables.
As for the mules, they tread lighter on the soil than any tractor. Their composted manure plays an important part of the closed loop system that returns nutrients back to the soil. And the fuel that keeps them going, namely hay and grain, can be grown right on the farm, season after season, rather than flowing out of an oil refinery after being extracted from a rapidly diminishing reserve, only to be burned into that much more carbon emitted into an atmosphere already on overload from mankind’s excesses.
Of equal importance is one simple truth; I enjoy working with them and, to the best of my discernment, they enjoy working with me. We are, above all else, a team, my mules and me, and farming with, knowing, understanding, and trusting these highly intelligent creatures is one of the greatest joys I have known. Nostalgic? Not deliberately so. The goal isn’t to live in some idealized past nor in some unpredictable future, but in the present moment. Working animals fit in to the grand equation by being living, breathing parts of a whole farm ecosystem, interdependent and connected.
Our way of farming brings with it a sense of peaceful composure and does its best to coexist in harmony as a part of nature, rather than working to conquer and subdue it, like with so many other human endeavors. Will what we do with our small-scale, non-industrialized agricultural methods save the planet? Probably not. The world often seems more bent on coveting conveniences than in fulfilling convictions. But perhaps, quietly maintaining these traditions and sensible means is one tiny, albeit subtle part of a broader shift in the correct direction, keeping the flame alive so to speak, until we recognize our world has limits and sanity returns to our lands. Getting there from here, that’ll be the real trick of it, and the proverbial clock is ticking.
“Step up,” and Loretta and Emmylou shift into gear just like working animals have done for generations. Will there still be draft animals, let alone mules, in farm fields in one hundred years? I cannot say. Our world seems in a headlong rush downward, with the autonomous machine replacing living spirit at every turn as the virtual usurps the physical, so there’s a good chance that our connection to the natural world, and this includes working with animals, will continue to drift further apart, until...
Aldo Leopold once wrote, “That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.” Sage advice for every small-scale farmer who tries to carve out a parallel path abiding with living creatures in their care, for every individual that places a seed in a home garden and tends to it with loving kindness, and to every soul who takes a shovel full of earth and plants a tree where one didn’t stand before, waters it daily, until the day comes when they can finally rest under its cooling shade, transforming their own small corner of the world.
Because, despite it all, there is another way. I know. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.