Jigs Gardner
Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
I have always striven, within the limits of my means, to make the best hay possible: mow the grass when the blossom is still "in the boot," the bud enfolded within a leaf, when the whole plant is tender and sweet, as palatable and nutritious as it will ever be. That optimum moment, however, is but a moment, and thereafter the grass loses value as the stem grows to push the opened flower above the leaves, the flower goes to seed, the leaves wither, the plant dries to hard roughage. The idea is to mow the grass at its moment of perfection, dry it quickly, and get it into the haymow without shattering and wasting the leaves.
My own tiny effort mimics a larger one: in the sixty years I have observed farming, one technique after another has been developed to preserve the mown forage in a condition as close as possible to its freshly-mown state, from barn driers to hay conditioners to grass silage, and the achievement is impressive.
Exactly when this conception became conventional wisdom I do not know, but certainly by the 1920s because every farmer I worked for, most of whom began their careers then, thought that way, and I encountered only a few old-timers in Vermont who held to the view that grass increased in value with age, that the ripe seed head concentrated the plant's energy. It never occurred to me that one day I would farm in a place where the modern view was scorned with contempt.
We were objects of much curiosity when we moved to Cape Breton island in 1971, and people from miles around came to see what we were up to - and to comment thereon. It appeared that everything we were doing was destined to fail: tomatoes would never ripen, and as for fancy stuff like peppers and celery - they smiled with pity. Jersey cows? Not a chance, too delicate to stand the winters. But the staggerer was their vehement response to our June haying: It's too green! You'll never dry it! You'll have to burn it or throw it over the bank! Why did Cape Bretoners think this way? It took me sometime before I thought I had the answers, and I learned them not only by paying close attention to the farming I saw around me, but by my own struggle with the island's climate and soil.
Commercial agriculture, farming deliberately and consistently for a market, was never very big on Cape Breton. The dominant agricultural regime was to be found on the thousands of subsistence farms that produced enough to provide for the modest needs of the large families that worked them, with some sporadic local sales of what could be spared from home consumption. The major difference between these two forms stems from the fact that the commercial farmer has to meet the demands of the marketplace, while the subsistence farmer needs to satisfy only his own family and a few other people known to him. The buyers in the marketplace, distant and unknown, have no ties to the farmer, they care only about the product, and they can be very exacting. Competing with other farmers, he must meet the market's demands, and he must do so as efficiently as possible, keeping his costs down to make a profit. Driven simultaneously to improve his product and cheapen his methods, the commercial farmer is forced to be receptive to fresh thinking and new ideas; for him, farming is a developing process. On the other hand, while individual subsistence farmers may strive to do better, they have no strong incentive to do so, and their situation in a community of such farmers is very anti-innovation, static, traditional, conformist. How often have I head Cape Bretoners say, "It was good enough for my father and grandfather, so I guess it's good enough for me!" It is all too easy to produce something that "will do," something that will pass with an undiscriminating, undemanding audience. The farmers on the island worked hard, and within the limitations of their outlook and methods, ran their farms well - fields mown to the edges, fences kept up, buildings maintained. Their decline began at the turn of the 20th century, continuing gradually into the 1950s when, with the dying off of the last members of the last generation that had grown up in that regime's heyday, the decline became precipitant.
By the time we appeared, a diminished number of such farms were still extant - nearly everyone in the area kept a few cows, a horse, a pig, and some hens - but they were decrepit remnants. Nevertheless the basic pattern of Cape Breton farming could be discerned; what went on might be a sloppy version of past practices, but inadequate performance could not obscure the practice itself. They hayed late, beginning just as we were finishing. It was rarely feasible to start before the middle of June, but my neighbors waited another month, and in the past it was common to begin in August. We found haying records of the 1930s and '40s penciled on a partition in a derelict barn, and the earliest date was August seventh. Because the hay was mown so late, when it was tall and stalky, there was a lot of it - they still judge hay by its height - and they fed it out with a free hand. They had to, it had such negligible food value (two percent protein would be absolute tops). The cattle stood knee-deep in hay in the stables, and what they didn't eat was used as bedding.
The cattle that could live on such a diet were unlike any I had ever seen, all sizes and shapes and colors, rawboned, coarse, with thick skins and rough coats; unapproachable, they seemed hardly domesticated. But they were tough, they could survive on hay my cows wouldn't look at, they could stand the long, damp winters in lice-infested, dirty stables without windows, they could be turned out to water at a creek a quarter mile from the barn on a January day during a snowstorm. Of course they gave little milk, and not much beef either. I once met a drover who had been trading animals all over the island for nearly 50 years, and he summed up the quality of the cattle in a phase, "A barn full o' cows, and not enough milk for the tea!" But they sure were easy to keep.
And that, I think, had a lot to do with the agricultural regime. In such a marginal environment it is very hard to farm. Growing nutritious forage is difficult enough; making it into hay can be heartbreaking. Whereas if you cut it late, there's plenty of it, and it's almost dry when you mow it so you can just throw it in the haymow a few hours later and zut! There's the major farming job of the year done, thank Heaven. There's more to it, of course. Ignorance, for one thing, and the surly peasant's resistance to new ideas from outside, stubborn suspicion and mistrust, and I think there was another subtler factor involved: to take pains with farming, to strive year after year to produce the finest hay possible, to take pride in well cared for cattle requires a profound love of farming that was common in Vermont but which I never saw on Cape Breton. Perhaps it had to do with their past. Highland Scots were not farmers, a role that was thrust upon them, whether they liked it or not, when they got here. But I think it also derived from the grudging quality of the land. No matter what you do or how much labor you put into it, the results are disappointing, the rewards thin, and the farmer's spirit is sapped.
Most of the fields on our Cape Breton Farm had been regularly mown, but there had been no animals there for eight years, and for some years before that the manure had not been spread at all, just dumped around the barnyard. The grass in the fields was thin and weedy. The remedy seemed obvious; spread lots of manure and lime and watch the grass grow, as in Vermont. We had no idea how poor the soil was. Later, when I began to plow the land, I discovered places were the plow would go no deeper than four inches and the topsoil was only a thin dark smear at the grass roots. The fields didn't seem to respond much to our efforts, although the food value of the hay certainly increased, because the cows needed much less of it. This was a gain, but the fields were still too unproductive for our needs. They would have to be plowed and seeded. I had done some garden plowing with a walking plow, but I had acquired an old sulky plow by the time I tackled the fields. Learning to plow with horses was not easy for me, and it probably caused me nearly as much frustration and heartache as satisfaction, but it meant a great deal to me, and I learned much from the task.
Plow, plough n. 2. figuratively, tillage; culture of the earth; agriculture. -Johnson's Dictionary
November dusk:
plowman's call, jingling bells,
plodding hooves
faintly heard in thickening twilight.
Plowing is the primal agricultural act, the decisive disturbance of the land and its natural processes in order to introduce the artificial regime of agriculture. To abstain is to accept merely what the land will yield of itself, but when I turn the sod I am committing all my powers to a struggle with the land, to make my human mark on it, to make the land grow something it would never produce otherwise, to recreate the original act of agriculture. When I turn the horses' heads towards the field, I feel the apprehensive excitement of facing a hard contest, one which I myself have initiated, knowing that if I would be what I hope I am I cannot do otherwise, cannot shirk the contest, cannot avoid starting it.
I plow down native wild grasses - low in protein and productivity - replacing them with cultivated forages, timothy and trefoil and orchard grass and clover, to make the land more productive, to better feed the livestock, ultimately to provide more for myself and my family - at a cost, naturally, the cost of creation and maintenance. Because, unlike the native grasses whose demands upon the environment are small (hence, yield and value are small), the cultivars need enrichment, lime and manure and fertilizer, if they are to grow successfully in competition with tough native plants. Without that, new fields soon become "old fields" reclaimed by better-adapted indigenes. Agriculture is basically the creation and maintenance of artificial conditions of productivity.
If good plowing is such a satisfying act, nothing drives me to despair like bad plowing, and I've done plenty of it. There are the consequences: the hours of difficult discing next spring, the poor seed bed, the weed-choked field. One round lost to nature and all my own fault. Worse, however, is my sense of failure at the crucial act of farming, with the accompanying feelings of ignorance, stupidity, and inadequacy. Once, I began so badly that the field looked as if it had been struck repeatedly by lightning, with sods flung here and there, half-opened furrows, rolled-up furrows, shallow furrows, narrow and wide ones, every form of land wreckage. I tried every adjustment I could find on the sulky plow, pulled every lever, shifted the horses on the pole, all for naught. I struggled on, going out to the field every morning with desperation in my heart. After a week of tinkering, trying this and that with no real idea of what I was doing, I improved to a barely acceptable level, but I did not know what I had done to make the plowing so bad, nor how I had improved it. I was in the dark, ignorant of something crucial to my farming life.
"Sir, (said he) a desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge." -Dr. Johnson, quoted by Boswell
Originally there must have been a manual that went with the plow, I thought, so I took a chance and wrote to International Harvester in Chicago, which led to a lengthy correspondence with the Corporate Archivist, identification of the model in a 1935 catalog, and finally the manual was in my hands. I went out to the machinery shed, manual in hand, and stared at the McCormick-Deering No. 9 plow, but I could see it would not be enough. It would be a help, but the manual presupposed a certain amount of plowing and mechanical knowledge, most of which was beyond me. Well, I thought, I'll do my best with it, I'll wrestle with the manual and the plow when the time comes in the fall. But in August there appeared a new neighbor who had a book with a chapter on sulky plowing, and he knew something about it himself. When plowing time came in November, he generously helped me set up and adjust the plow.
Next morning when I pulled the lever that lowered the plowshare, I felt the decisive moment had come. I called to the horses, and the coulter cut the sod, the point slipped beneath, the furrow slice rose firmly on the moldboard and turned over smoothly, rolling out behind in a continuous strip of brown earth. Keeping the horses straight, glancing anxiously back at the furrow bank, I drove on steadily to the end of the field. And there I sat, breathing deeply, looking back at the long, straight, unbroken furrow, satisfied that I was plowing again as a man should plow.
What I know of practical matters I have had to learn, often with great difficulty, by myself, awkwardly trying this and that, picking up clues, as with plowing, wherever I can. Consequently, I have no prejudices about knowledge - I'll take it wherever I can find it. Once, a neighbor's son was at the farm and he sneeringly asked if I were a "book farmer or a real farmer." As I tried to explain to the lout the value of knowledge irrespective of its source, I recalled his father's farm, a real farm: no manure is spread on the fields, which are tastefully edged with junk cars; haying begins in August and he doesn't cut the back swathe, so the woods encroach on the fields; the woods are a cutover waste. It is only those whose ignorance is bottomless who know so much that they can afford to be choosy about their sources of knowledge.
Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. . . . In the right state [the scholar] is Man Thinking. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Too often, country people are prejudiced against book learning out of envy and dislike: because the educated are often arrogant, snobbish, and absurdly impractical; because it seems the province of the rich and powerful; because the educated often seem so glibly superior. It is difficult to accept for it what it is, another form of knowledge which expands the horizons of our practical learning. Just as often, and with far less excuse, the educated are prejudiced against practical knowledge. I have known this question from both sides, having modest claims on learning in both spheres, but my position is disadvantaged because each side regards me as a member of the opposite camp. My neighbors, like the sneering young man, regard me as a silly eccentric, while educated visitors look upon me as a benighted peasant. Because I have some book learning I cannot possibly know how to farm; because I milk cows and shovel manure I have no culture and probably no intellect at all. On the whole, however, I count myself lucky, for I have been able, in ways not easily available to most men, to combine the so-called intellectual life with the so-called practical life, greatly enriching myself, becoming, I hope, Emerson's scholar.
Winter is upon us. The ground is iron-hard, but the first snow has not yet fallen. I look out the kitchen window, across to the plowed field.
Dark furrows
etch the land
under a dark sky.
In 1977 a sample of our hay was tested at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. It was the most nutritious (18 percent protein) hay tested in the Province that year.
The deed bears out the words. *
