Agrarian Nation: March 2015

05 March 2015

Agrarian Nation Update
2015

Dateline: 5 March 2015

By: Herrick Kimball

Apple picking into the ox cart
This 1880 photograph is one of my favorites
from the archives of this web site.
(click for a larger view)

I have ceased publishing new information to this web site, and am now focusing my efforts on a new web site called Agriphemera.

All the Farmer's Calendar excerpts that were on this site have been removed and will be incorporated into the "Farmer's Calendar Project" at Agriphemera.com

But this web site is still full of many other wonderful excerpts from the Agrarian Nation. Here are links to just a few of the most popular posts...

Food Preservation: 1826 to 1874

Culture of Roots: 1871

Walnuts: An Excellent Family Medicine: 1826

Connecticut Farming in 1875

Hogs Fattened on Sweet Apples: 1849

Rules For Making A Wife Happy: 1877

The Milch Cow: 1825 to 1849

Jerusalem Artichokes: 1861

What Young People Should Know 1867 (Part 1)

What Young People Should Know 1867 (Part 2)

Eric Sloane Speaking About The Agrarian Nation

Corn: 1835 to 1889

Growing & Harvesting Corn By Hand

###

Check the archives (right column, at the bottom)

for many more excerpts from the Agrarian Nation!

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

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