Agrarian Nation: Agrarian Nation Changes...

10 February 2012

Agrarian Nation Changes...

Dateline: 10 February 2012

There will be no regularly-scheduled excerpt from the old agrarian writings today. I have decided to make a change from posting here twice a week (Friday and Monday) to once a week, on Monday mornings. I am making this change to free up more time for myself, and it is a permanent change.

Those of you who read my blog, The Deliberate Agrarian, know that I am working on a new book. I have put a few hundred hours into the book already. I still have a long way to go, and spring is coming. I really want to get it done, or as done as I possibly can, before the good weather of spring arrives. Also, this is a slow time of the year for my Planet Whizbang mail-order business, and it will get much busier come May and June.

The book's working title is, The Planet Whizbang Idea Book For Gardeners. I can tell you there isn't another book like it on the market, at least that I know of. What makes the book unique is the blend of old and new ideas for gardeners. Much of the old will be in the form or excerpts related to gardening from the old farm almanacs. Such excerpts will not be a major focus of the book but they will be interspersed throughout.

The most time consuming part of the book for me is the many illustrations and the page layout, which I started working on last weekend. After four long days of focused work, I have ten book pages completely done. I expect the book to be over 200 pages, so I have a long way to go. And I have a regular job that I work at three days a week.

Please check back here Monday for the next Agrarian Nation excerpt, and every Monday thereafter.

Best wishes,
.

Herrick Kimball
Editor, Agrarian Nation

4 comments:

Anonymous said...: Oh my, you do wear many hats! You're a very busy man, including your research into hydrofracking, as a member of the town board.

I pray that the Lord will strengthen you, daily, as you work on your book as well as your many other duties.

In the meantime, I will savor the Monday installments of Agrarian Nation!; 10 February, 2012 07:39
Jet Set said...: Ditto for me as well Herrick. I will also make it a point to send my voluntary subscription fee for Agrarian Nation soon. I know it will be just a small drop in the bucket for you, but I really enjoy these history "lessons." Plus this sounds like a book I would really like to read, so I feel I should send what little funding I am able.

God bless you in your endeavors; 10 February, 2012 14:24
Herrick Kimball said...: Brenda—
Thank you.

JetSet—
Thank you too.

I used to put a donation notice at the bottom of the excerpts but stopped that awhile back. My focus with the blog is not to make money (if it was, I have failed miserably). I just love the old agrarian writings and want to share them with others.

Nevertheless, I'm grateful for any donations that come into Agrarian Nation. I don't get a lot of them but it is always encouraging when I do.

For the record, I'd say that maybe 25 or 30 people sent me a donation last year. Most were in the $5 to $10 range. One man sent me three Mercury dimes. Brenda's donation was far and above the norm (very encouraging).

If anyone reading this would like to contribute to the effort, Here is the Agrarian Nation donation page

Thank you all!; 11 February, 2012 08:07
littlegreengardengal said...: Once a week is plenty. I enjoy reading this blog, but honestly I usually only read once a week and read both posts at that time, so it works the same for me. :); 20 February, 2012 13:29

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