Agrarian Nation: A Short Break

31 October 2011

A Short Break

I missed posting an Agrarian Nation excerpt here on Friday (did anyone notice?) and am also not posting one today. But I will be back on track for the next installment this coming Friday. In the meantime, I invite you to read my monthly Deliberate Agrarian "blogazine" post for October, which I have put online just this morning. Here's the link: The Deliberate Agrarian: October 2011

11 comments:

Kaiser said...: I noticed :); 31 October, 2011 06:48
My name is Earl said...: Me too (:; 31 October, 2011 15:19
Anonymous said...: I noticed, too! In fact, I checked back a couple times, and immediately jumped to the conclusion that something dire had happened to you. (I'm like that.) I'm glad you have NOT been mauled by rabid chincillas after all!

kristin; 31 October, 2011 18:08
Representative said...: Noticed, much. :); 31 October, 2011 22:09
Practical Parsimony said...: I thought it was just me checking too much.; 01 November, 2011 03:46
Herrick Kimball said...: Thank you, everyone, for noticing.

kristin—What a dreadful way to go! You have such a vivid imagination. :-)

I take comfort in the thought that, if I ever AM mauled by rabid chinchillas, there are some people in the world who will notice.

Best wishes,

Herrick Kimball; 01 November, 2011 05:34
Anonymous said...: Looking forward to it!
Jean; 01 November, 2011 21:16
Ryan said...: I noticed, and the fact that I noticed means that the posts are worth the $4.95 a year.; 01 November, 2011 21:44
Anonymous said...: I noticed- and I missed them! But it was fun to find your Blogazine (which I didn't know about) :); 02 November, 2011 11:52
Anonymous said...: same here

Mick; 02 November, 2011 19:25
Boone said...: Herrick, I noticed too. keep it up! I really appreciate your writings. Thanks. hope you are well.; 02 November, 2011 23:12

Welcome To Agrarian Nation

How did people in rural New England live and work before electricity and tractors arrived on the scene? This web site will seek to answer that question by looking at the old agricultural writings of 1825 to 1900.

Join me on a historical journey of discovery into America's agrarian past. We will get advice from the old-timers about the art of farming, gardening, and living a good life.

Like archeologists studying an ancient culture, we will look at excerpts from original-source documents (primarily almanacs and agricultural journals) to better understand how people thought and lived their lives in pre-grid America.

Herrick Kimball
hckimball@bci.net

"From the beginning it was always possible to find farmers who were intuitively suspicious of the industrialization of agriculture. Perhaps they objected to the increased authority of suppliers and experts. Perhaps they felt the discord between machinery and living creatures. Perhaps they had a rational fear of toxic chemicals. Perhaps they disliked paying cash for energy and fertility that they had previously received in kind from their farms and their good work. Among at least a few, for whatever reasons, there was a persistent distrust."
—Wendell Berry

This field, which when the owner took it over eight years previously was barren, now was bursting with life. As I passed alongside of it on the cart, getting a good view of it as a whole, I often thought of the latent power that lay there till released and channelled by man. Nothing to see on that former dry and barren field, save tangled yellowish grass: yet holding within it the force to throw upward what I now beheld. A farmer is a liberator of the energy in the earth, ceaselessly creating what is good, and adding on a vast scale to the beauty of the world.
.....

John Stewart Collis
The Worm Forgives The Plough

"Through World War II, farm life in my region (and, I think, nearly everywhere) rested solidly upon the garden, dairy, poultry flock, and meat animals that fed the farm’s family. Especially in hard times farm families, and their farms, survived by means of their subsistence economy. The industrial program, on the contrary, suggested that it was “uneconomic” for a farm family to produce its own food; the effort and the land would be better applied to commercial production. The result is utterly strange in human experience: farm families that buy everything they eat at the store."

Wendell Berry
(Renewing Husbandry)

A love for the soil and all the pursuits of outdoor life is one of the most healthful signs in a people. Our broad and diversified land affords abundant opportunity for the gratification of every rural taste, and those who form such tastes will never complain that life is losing its zest. Other pleasures pall with time and are satiated. We outgrow them. But every spring is a new revelation, every summer a fresh, original chapter of experience, and every autumn a fruition of hopes as well as of seeds and buds. Nothing can conduce more to happiness and prosperity than multitudes of rural homes. In such abodes you will not find Socialists, Nihilists, and other hare-brained reformers who seek to improve the world by ignoring nature and common sense. Possession of the soil makes a man conservative, while he, at the same time, is conserved.

E.P. Roe