English
Austrian
Ten days ago I spent a weekend in the northern rain teaching people how to mow grass with a scythe. I’ve been using a scythe for four or five years, though it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve got any good at it. I began using one because I wanted to cut the grass in my orchard without using smelly, noisy, petrolly power tools, and also because I had come across the great Simon Fairlie and his persuasive addiction to these ancient and mesmerising tools.
Scything, largely thanks to Simon, is undergoing a renaissance in Britain. Scythes were used here from Anglo-Saxon times right up until the 1940s, initially to mow grass for haymaking and later also to mow cereal crops. They were operated by large mowing teams in the summer months and they were, and are, a terrific example of what used to be called ‘appropriate technology.’ The wooden handles, known as snaths, can be made anywhere there are trees by any competent woodworker, and the blades can be made by any blacksmith. They’re a genuinely pre- and post-modern tool, and will doubtless be around long after the Flymo has faded into legend. Keep the blade honed and peened, and know how to use them, and you have probably the most efficient and effective tool for cutting grass ever developed. This is proven entertainingly year after year at the Somerset Scythe Festival where the annual ‘scythe versus strimmer’ contest is always won by the scythe.
Like many other rural crafts, scything pretty much died out in Britain after the second world war, though this was not the case in many other European countries. In eastern Europe, mowing grass with scythes is still very widely practised, and both skills and tools are passed on from generation to generation. Even Western Europe still has a working scythe culture. Here in Britain, as in so much else, we are both ahead and behind: industrial revolution and enclosure rendered our fields empty and our slums full long before this happened anywhere else, and one of the consequences has been the widespread death both of small-scale agriculture and of the crafts, skills and ways of seeing associated with it.
Simon Fairlie has effectively kick-started a reinvention of scything in Britain by importing, selling and teaching the use of scythes manufactured by the 600-year-old Schröckenfux company in Austria. It was the use of the Austrian scythe that I was teaching at the Cumbrian Scythe Festival. Austrian scythes are terrific, lightweight instruments, with a vast array of interchangeable blades, that can be used for anything from mowing your lawn to harvesting wheat to trimming grass around trees on a forty five degree slope. As I say, there is a quiet renaissance going on as a result of the use of these instruments. Landowning charities and local authorities are starting to use scythes rather than strimmers to manage their grasslands, and thousands of people like me are using them privately. But what I saw at the Cumbrian scything event was something I had never seen before, which brought home to me the real meaning of the reinvention of tradition.
The people engaged in the sycthing renaissance in Britain are largely – though not entirely – people with no background in this tradition. Often they are middle class back-to-the-landers, pemaculture enthusiasts, smallholders, environmentalists and the like. They – we – are part of a movement which is attempting to re-learn land-based and practical skills that have been lost, both because it’s fascinating and enjoyable and because it seems increasingly obvious that such skills are going to be where it’s at in a post-industrial future. We are starting in this, many of us, from zero. Before I got my own Austrian blade I had never picked up a scythe before, and never thought about doing so. Like many, I was converted when I did. But I was converted to a tradition other than my own.
The kind of scythe we new-wavers use is not the kind traditionally used in these islands. British scythes are quite different to their European counterparts. The blades are heavy and stamped rather than light and hammered, and the snaths are thicker, weightier and more elegantly curved. They’re heavier, less adaptable and seemingly harder to use, particularly for women – scything in the pre-modern era in Britain was exclusively men’s work. For all these reasons, the old English scythe (and indeed the Scottish scythe, which is something else again) has been largely overlooked by the new-wavers. I’ve seen a few people use them, and have tried myself, but it’s always slower and harder work. Until ten days ago, I was much happier with my more adaptable, sleeker imports. But then I met Jim.
Jim farms Herdwick sheep over at Millom on the west coast. He’s a traditional Cumbrian farmer, from a Cumbrian farming family. He’s no-nonsense, wry and deeply practical. Jim turned up at the scything festival with an English scythe he had inherited from his father. He came because he still uses it on his farm, mainly to dock thistles, but knows few other farmers who do, and wanted to see what we were all about. In a Langdale meadow, in the middle of a downpour, Jim showed us, quietly and simply, how an English scythe is supposed to be used.
It was, for me, a revelation. Jim was a natural. In his hands, this heavy, tough old tool was wielded with efective simplicity. It cut through the grass easily, and left a beautiful swath of lawnmower quality. Jim simply turned up and got on with cutting a whole strip of meadow, and gradually the rest of us stopped what we were doing and watched him. When he’d finished he smiled triumphantly and told us that these fancy foreign scythes were not a patch on the real thing.
Talking to Jim afterwards I learned a lot I didn’t know about how English scythes are and were used, and I’m now caught up in a desire to get my own and learn how to use it. I may even pluck up the courage to seek Jim out and ask him to teach me – if he has time, which farmers rarely do. But I learned something else too, and it was about the difference between an inherited and a learned tradition. Watching Jim cut that meadow was like hearing a snatch of old song that I dimly recognised but could never learn to sing. The man was part of a living tradition. He may be at the end of it, but it can still be found, even here, even now. He had learned his skills from his father, who had done the same. The same tool had been passed on, along with the knowledge of how to use it. The connection, between generations and within communities, was part of what Jim brought to that weekend.
That connection is part, I think, of what we look for when we try to revive these old skills. Yes, we want to learn all sort of practical things that we think will be of use to us, and we talk a lot about peak oil and climate change and all the rest of it, but at least part of what we are doing is trying, clumsily but genuinely, to fit ourselves back into a broken lineage. But we can never do it; the links were severed long ago. We are the deracineated generations: we can sense what we’ve lost, but it’s only when we see it in action that it really bubbles to the surface.
Yesterday I was up in Scotland at the Big Tent Festival, which is full of people working hard to reinvent these ways of life, or to build on them: permaculturists, green woodworkers, low-impact housebuilders, grassland management charities, spinners and weavers and organic food growers. Alastair McIntosh was speaking there about resilient communities, and was talking about his childhood on the Hebridean island of Lewis. Alastair grew up at the end of a dying tradition, and he spoke powerfully about it. As a child, he explained, he was taken out fishing in small boats by his ‘elders’ and taught how to bring in mackerel and herring from the bay. When the boat landed he would walk home, distributing the fish around the village as he did so. It was a close-knit community in which skills and stories were passed on down the generations.
Most of that is gone now. The island is full of people from elsewhere in Scotland and elsewhere in the world, supermarkets on the mainland provide the mainstay of most people’s diets and the young are not taught to take the fishing boats out by their elders anymore. Even if they were, they would catch nothing, for the bays around Lewis have been emptied of fish by industrial trawlers.
What is lost when these skills are not passed on, when the links are broken? Not just the skills themselves, some of which are useful and some less so, but a deep sense of inter-generational community, of being part of a human lineage, in time and in place. What comes instead are new kinds of ‘community’ – atomised individuals and nuclear families, surfing a world of astonishing ‘choice’ within their ‘communities of interest’. One of Alastair’s contentions is that planning for a different future is not simply a case of thinking about tools, fuels or housebuilding techniques, but crucially depends upon building resilience both into real, geographical communities and into the human spirit; resilient human communities are the rock on which everything else is built.
For me, seeing Jim and his scythe at work spoke of something more than ways of cutting grass. It spoke of the broken links that got us here. We can never re-forge them, but we can try to remember them, and we can pass on what we still can. We can also look wider and deeper, beyond where we are and beyond our own background and assumptions and circles of friends and acquaintances, for what still remains, and listen to what it has to say to us. Or, as Alastair put it to me: ‘seek out the elders, and ask them.’
We may be a ‘lost generation’ but that doesn’t mean our children need to be. That is what our local Maori people have done. Their language was nearly dead so they set up kindergartens where only their language was spoken and by those who were still fluent. The result has been a new generation who are naturally fluent (and more so than their parents) and a saved culture.
It can be done but it must be worked at now whilst we still have the oldest generation with us. When you go to learn, make sure the children get to learn too.
viv in nz
And when you have finished with the scythe, then you need one of these :
http://www.thenaturalgardener.co.uk/handmade_wooden_hay_rake.php
Even better, make your own :
http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=53405
http://www.bodgers.org.uk/bb/phpBB2/index.php?sid=290379824ce11a3bac911dc6a577b152
Imagine, if you live in the countryside, have acres all around you, the vegetation grows, knee high, waist high, on it’s typical rhythmic annual trajectory towards becoming first scrubland, then forest…
You want to defy this procession, halt it in its tracks, control and suppress it’s exuberance by chopping it down to size.
You want a product from it, possibly. Hay, wheat, rushes. Or just to be able to walk through it. There’s nothing that gets your legs and feet wet so quickly and thorough as sodden hay grass, except going and standing in a pond… and then there’s nettles and docks and ragwort and sorrel and brambles and all the rest…
The cunning farmer uses animals to manage the vegetation. The less cunning land owner pays someone else to take care of the problem. The ‘modern industrial man’ buys a wonder of technology, made in China or Japan or Germany or America, fills it with petrol, puts on various protection, and roars into battle, encapsulated in a halo of noxious fumes, ears defended from the decibels, eyes safely goggled…
This great art which Paul describes so eloquently, of scything, which is so difficult to do just right, something akin to doing a pole vault or dancing salsa, was done by the lowest of the low, on the social hierarchy, the labourer, the farm labourer, the peasant, the man who kept the village lanes passable.
None of his ‘betters’, on the long ladder of social positions that climaxed with lords and ladies and kings and queens, knew how to do it, or even thought of it as a skill. It was just something that was done, like darning socks, scrubbing floors or hammering nails…
And now what is it ? Middle class recreation ? Therapeutic mowing ? Haymaking as a spiritual discipline ? A pleasing topic for Guardian readers to muse upon, momentarily, between the horror of bombed wedding parties and oil soaked pelicans.
Haven’t we been here before, on the strange cultural epicycles that take soceities through historical dramas, decadence, revolutions, reforms, chaos and collapse, and back around to Spartan discipline, Stoical striving, temporary stability, shuffle, rinse and repeat ?
Anyone remember the French aristocracy playing at being peasants prior to meeting Madam Guillotine ?
“For Marie Antoinette, the hameau was an escape from the regulated life style of the Court at Versailles, into a more simple way of life, while, to the eyes of French people, a queen who amused herself at being a peasant did not improve her image.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hameau_de_la_reine
Or maybe, this neo-scything movement is the acquisition of vital survival skills which will be essential for the hand to mouth existence in the new post-peak-oil de-industrialised-cottage-economy ?
Or perhaps the grass will just grow, become overtaken by bracken, blackthorn and hazel, then oaks, ashes and sycamores ?
The blacksmiths and the woodworkers and the knowledge required to make a blade and snaith were once on call in every hamlet and village throughout the land. Nobody ever thought of it as special or romantic or even important. It was just there, like dogs, ducks, children, spoons, buckles, belts, clogs, and the common furniture of country life…
From, well, maybe 500 BCE ? to maybe 1955 ? Is that a fair estimation ? So, until half a century ago, less than one lifetime, maybe a ‘working lifetime’, ago. So, just time, if you’re quick, to catch the last remnants of… well, is it, was it, a tradition ? It was just normal everyday living. Nothing special.
Now it seems slightly incongruous, unfamiliar, like flint knapping or splicing rope. Something learned on a course. I’m certain that in the heyday of scythes and sickles and wooden hay rakes, nobody had ever heard of, or imagined, a such thing called a ‘course’, hahaha.
How will we cut the grass if there are no metalworkers who send fine blades from central Europe ? How was it done before blacksmithing was invented ? Antlers or wood with embedded flint blades ?
I don’t know.
Paul,
As always a great piece. Whilst I entirely agree with your sentiment about the ‘gut wrenching’ feeling of loss associated with old land based traditions, I do perhaps feel less gloomy about the ability to fit ourselves ‘back into a broken lineage’. I like to think of it as a lineage that is merely ‘biding its time, taking a rest’.
The fossil fuel era is only a blip (albeit a two hundred year or so blip). These traditons you are alluding to are, at heart, based around simple activities borne out of necessity and along lines that allowed easy adoption by everyone. I see absolutely no reason why, given our likely changed circumstances in the future, human beings would not simply ‘re-invent’ exactly the same ‘technologies’ even if the original idea had been lost to a particular community.
Much of what we do and could do is, I believe, unlearned. It is often an automatic response to a particular circumstance we are faced with. If we want to get a bit deeper here I also believe it is why modern life is so stressful. We are faced with having to do so many things (bureaucracy, daft laws, non-sensical strictures, etc)that are not natural responses to the circumstances of our daily lives, nor actually really help provide the necessities of life – food, shelter, human relationships, security, etc. They disconnect us. This is un-natural and stressful.
If you want to test out my basic theory put a six year old in front of a Nintendo DS and a packet of seeds and a pile of soil.
…or an adult in front of a telly or a stream full of trout. See which they go for and what they do !
The lovely thing about all of these old ‘technologies’ is that (in essence) there are only a relatively limited number that you need to learn about before you have re-connected with what will provide most of your needs. Once that has happened you’ve effectively changed your life and more or less left behind all of the energy consuming, resource destroying, stress creating garbage of modern life. Our re-adoption of this is not the problem as I see it. The real problem is that we have (more or less) all been herded into highly concentrated cities. That’s the scary bit ! That’s really what should depress us !
Best wishes
Andy
It seems there are strong connections between Joanna Macy’s work & Dark Mountain.
http://joannamacy.net/index.php
I attended Joanna’s workshop last year – the work that reconnects. It helped me understand that feeling despair at times is entirely human & natural. I didn’t feel like a freak afterwards. I heard Paul speak at the Big Tent in Fife. Dark Mountain helps square this circle & gives a voice to the disillusioned eco-warriors like me.
Great piece.
Wolfbird – scything is not as old as 500 BC, so far as I know. And what’s happening with the revival, as I have experienced it, is not about ‘middle class recreation’ – it’s by no means all middle class, for starters – but more as part of a package of a re-learning of practical skills, which usually comes as part of a project to make land work again. There are plenty of closed-system permaculturists, smallholders and frmers out there using scythes as part of their haymaking cycle, and they do good work. I think you are too hard on them.
Will any of this ’save the world’? Probably not, but it doesn’t follow from that that it’s all a frivolous exercise either. The fact that we need ‘courses’ because we don’t pass on the skills is precisely the point I was making. People are struggling out from under the weight of a system that has systematically riven them from the land and each other, and replaced human and natural relationships with commercial ones. That’s not an easy process, but it’s a good one in itself, regardless of the end results.
Knutty – that’s fascinating and heartening. Andy – I hope you’re right. Perhaps I am too pessimistic. Though I think that if you really want to manage a piece of land and an associated household without fossil fuels, the number of skills to be learned is actually almost infinite. I don’t think we have any real idea how de-skilled we have become as individuals. But we will find out.
Okay, Paul, I’ll provisionally accept your start date ‘Anglo Saxon times’… so what tools did the Romano British use to harvest straw, cut grass and similar vegetation ? And the Iron and Bronze Age folks before that ? They could make very sharp metal swords, I don’t see any reason, in principle, why they couldn’t have made scythes, but without an actual preserved example it must be an open question. Perhaps there are such examples ? I have not searched.
Re ‘frivolity of courses’… compared with about a billion people out there, almost everyone in this country is a rich as those pre-revolution French aristocrats were relative to the peasantry, and as divorced from the reality of pre-industrial rural toil, although you are right, it’s not their fault or any deliberate choice, not even a moral failing, just the way history has unfolded. Anyway, I’m delighted that people do scything. It’s tremendous, an inspiration, didn’t mean to sound as if I was knocking or belittling the achievement.
I agree with your reply to Andy, the skills are indeed almost infinite. The arrogance embedded in the British class system means, ( or meant ), contempt towards traditional physical labour and the skills of artisans, etc, is/was ubiquitous and automatic. I’m speaking from direct personal experience. It’s just part of the culture, unconsciously absorbed.
For example, say you want to catch a fish, to eat. First make a rod, perhaps a reel, ferrules, bindings, then a line, then a hook, then find the right bait or lure, and do all this using natural materials found in the local countryside, no bought artificial bits from shop or specialists. Ah, before that, make the tools you’ll need… then learn how to knot the line, where the fish are, and then… well, what if you spend all day without a bite ?
Yer BSc, MA or PhD or fat bank account or smart motor car or luxury home or pension prospects or ability to write nifty computer code or beautiful wife or connections to important people or your No.1 record in the charts or your successful career in the city or rank in the forces or … nothing is going to help you, if you can’t catch a fish to eat. You’re going to be unable to sleep, because of hunger.
Because you never learned what all ragged grubby scruffy little village kids learned, once upon a time…
Then, similarly, make yourself clothes, from wool, starting with raising some sheep…ever tried making a spinning wheel, without any plans or one to copy or anyone to show you ?
This same formulation can be extended to all daily requirements, from building and roofing your dwelling, to knowing how to sow vegetables and grow them successfully into food, or killing and cutting up an animal, making kitchen utensils, digging a well…
We are all pitifully, woefully ignorant and, as you put it so neatly, Paul, ‘riven from the land’, and the fundamental knowledges which were accumulated and passed down over millennia. We assume we can just ‘do a course’ or two or three…
We are all infantilised, dependent as babies, upon the industrial consumer soceity for…just about everything… it’s undignified and pathetic, but it’s very hard to get free.
It can’t be that difficult to make a rope out of grass. Or to snare a rabbit. Or kill a goose. Or make a scythe or a hayrake. Can it ?
The winter is the Great Teacher, the Examiner. If you don’t get things right, if you don’t know your stuff, you don’t make it through to the next summer.
I tell you, the humble molluscs, the slugs and snails will break a strong mans heart, when he’s laboured diligently to prepare soil, raise seedlings, a nice crop in a neat row, healthy and strong, until a suitable damp night. You turn your back for a day, and the rabbits have eaten every one, or the pigeons…or you sore the veg in a place that’s too warm and damp and they mold and rot.
Any and every mistake means you go hungry…
That didn’t used to happen, because the rural folk *knew* how to do the art and craft of feeding themselves.
We are here because they knew their stuff, knew how to build and sail wooden boats, and build pony traps and calve cows and work with horses and oxen and pletch hedges and thatch hay ricks and weave blankets and clamp turnips and preserve fruit, and on and on, and every task had tricks of the trade, ways that worked well, and ways that didn’t… and they worked, very, very, very, hard.
If only it *were* that simple and easy…
Fascinating! Here in Florida we have a tool which is sometimes called a scythe – which always comes out as “sy” – but more commonly known as a “swingin’ blade”. It has a straight, double edged blade which is corregated along the edges, in a D shaped steel holder, to which is attached a straight wooden handle, angled off the D.
I own one, but have never gotten much use out of it. From time to time I think I ought to try mowing or edging with it, but I have to go over the same ground multiple times to get an even cut.
Perhaps there’s a technique that would make it more effective, but I’m not sure who would know it. I dimly recall seeing them in use in the past, I think by men on a road crew or chain gang.
Paul, it’s worth remembering that the old lineages began in conditions not that different from the ones we’re starting to experience now. How many of the people whose families have lived in Cumbria since time out of mind are descended from refugees who fled there to escape one wave of invaders or another, and had to learn new ways of living in an unfamiliar place? History is full of such disruptions; the industrial age has managed the thing on a much larger scale than any past example, to be sure, but I suspect that living in urban Roman Britain during its collapse was no easier an experience than living in urban industrial Britain during the approaching collapse will be.
Picking up scraps of older and more viable technologies is something people have always done in times like ours, when they’ve had their wits about them. You learn what you can and make do, and a thousand years from now your attempts have evolved into something graceful and traditional.
Wolfbird – actually I have an archaeologist friend who has recently discovered a Roman scythe, so my A/S timeline may be off, though I don’t know if it was used in Britain. The Celts had hard enough weapons, so maybe scythes too (on Boudicca’s chariot wheels perhaps). Before that … well, a bronze blade wouldn’t cut much grass. Maybe grass was managed differently, I don’t know. I would love to hear from anyone who does.
You’re right about the toughness and expertise of past generations, and about our current dependency. The machine works by making us dependent, which is why I personally applaud all and any effort, however small, and whether or not it involves courses, to take back a measure of independence. The crucial thing about those old communities though, is surely that they were communities. There’s never been a time when an individual has had to do everything alone. You trade and barter and share, everything from hay ropemaking to barn-raising to childcare and that, as much as anything else, gets you through the winters. That’s something else the machine has taken from us, turning us into individuals and consumers, and it’s something else we need to take back. But I reckon that learning how to live in inter-generational communities again is going to be a lot harder than learning to make fish hooks or hay rakes.
Bob – that’s intriguing! Do you have a picture? I’d love to see what that looks like.
John – a very good point. In Cumbria the folk are patched together from bits of Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Scot. The words for mountain (’fell’) and stream (’beck’) amongst many others are from Old Norse: evidence of terrible upheaval. It’s been under English, Scottish and Danish law in the last thousand years so yes, there has been much upheaval, and I’m sure there is a pattern in which new skills are learned as a response to settlement and change, then settle down to become a ‘tradition.’
Perhaps what is hard for us now is that we can see the end of an old tradition fading away, but having nothing new yet to replace it: or rather, the picture of what is coming is not clear, and probably will not be in our lifetimes. This can be hard to live with for some: though others may relish it; it depends on how you cope with change, I suppose. But yes, it would have been a lot harder in the past. The old Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin gives some impression of what it must have been like to live in a country full of great ruined cities, evidence of a collapsed civilisation the makers of whom were only dimly remembered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin
Thanks, Paul, for the wonderful stimulation, it’s a great topic to think about… you’ve got me ranting and cross-posting..
http://www.permacultureforum.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=849&p=4151#p4151
The very best lawn mowers are sheep, rabbits and geese. They all leave messy droppings though, maybe that’s why our modern ‘hygenic’ culture dislikes them, and prefers carcinogenic petrol fumes, but at least they give something to eat as a bonus
PS on Swinging Blade: Ace Hardware has this tool listed online as a “weed cutter”. They also carry a snath and matching scythe blade, plus something called a grass hook which looks like a scythe with a long, straight handle. I was about to post a couple of pictures, but Ace’s shows a lot less rust than mine:
http://www.acehardware.com/product/index.jsp?productId=1272540
Some scythe links I liked :
Scythe Connection, lots of cool stuff.
One day, a huge fire started in a forest that was home to several animal species. All of them were terrified and aghast, watching the disaster helplessly. “What’s going to happen to us? What will become of us?”
During this pandemonium, only one tiny hummingbird was busy, going to get a few drops of water in its beak to throw on the fire. He flew back and forth non-stop from the river to the blaze.
After a while, the armadillo, irritated by the hummingbird’s pathetic efforts, said: “Are you a fool! You don’t believe that with these drops of water you’re going to put out the fire?!” The hummingbird responded: “I know I won’t, but I’m doing my share.”
Every animal was affected by this reply and got to work. Each one did its part and they succeeded in saving the forest.
When you see a hummingbird, think of its determination. We each have a responsibility to the world. Regardless of what happens, if we put our minds to it, we all have some power.
http://www.scytheconnection.com/index.html
General info.
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Scythe
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+scythe+historic+tool+on+the+modern+homestead.-a0219898333
Scythes and Scythians…
“According to the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities of Sir William Smith (1830-93), the scythe, known in Latin as the falx foenaria (as opposed to the sickle, the falx messoria ), was used by the ancient Romans; for illustration, Smith shows an image of Saturn holding a scythe, from an ancient Italian cameo.
According to Jack Herer and “Flesh of The Gods” (Emboden, W.A., Jr., Praeger Press, NY, 1974.); the ancient Scythians grew hemp and harvested it with a hand reaper that we still call a scythe. Cannabis inhalation by the Scythians in funeral rituals was recorded by the Greek Historian Herodotus (circa 450 B.C.E.) in the early 5th Century B.C.E. The nomadic Scythians introduced the custom to other races such as the Thracians.
The scythe appeared in Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries. Initially used mostly for mowing grass, it replaced the sickle as the tool for reaping crops by the 16th century, the scythe allowing the reaper to stand rather than stoop. In about 1800 the addition of light wooden fingers above a scythe blade produced a form of scythe called the cradle which soon replaced the simple scythe for reaping grain and mowing other tall vegetation such as reeds.”
http://www.reference.com/browse/scythe
The scythe as a practical farming tool
http://1812garden.hamiltoncollegeblogs.com/index.cfm/2008/12/10/The-Scythe-as-a-Practical-Farming-Tool
Hungarian scythe
http://mek.oszk.hu/02700/02790/html/60.html
The mowing of a field, superb piece of writing by Hilaire Belloc
http://bartleby.net/237/11.html
Thought this very interesting and useful to know
“Many antique tools are “rusty,” however unlike most rusty tools the rust is always small-grained and even. This is because the tool has been “browned,” that is intentionally rusted and preserved. A full browning treatment involves cleaning the tool to bare steel, applying a rusting agent (such as salt or salammoniac), allowing it to rust, removing all rust, reapplying the rusting agent, allowing it to rust, removing all rust and so on until the coat of rust is very even and “solid,” that is that the rust won’t flake off even when struck against a hard object. At this point the tool is finshed with linseed oil, then waxed. In this manner the rust itself provides a means of preventing further rusting. It is amongst the oldest methods of preserving iron and steel, and in some cases is still used today.”
http://hotrodjones.blogspot.com/2009/10/hand-tools-scythe-pt-1.html
Scythes in hay making art.
http://www.hayinart.com/003277.html
I’ve been thinking about the two links above, Hungarian scythes and the Hilaire Belloc essay.
Learning to use a scythe is one thing. Not as difficult as, say yoga or tai chi.
Learning to make a scythe is something else, I’d say it’d take years to become good at the blacksmithing and the woodwork, especially the blade.
But there’s something else, that’s missing. You can learn the ‘how to do it’. But then there’s the ‘when to do it’.
Those links mention particular days, the right day to begin cutting. What’s more, particular times of the day. When the grass is weighed with dew, before the sun rises, for instance.
The actual chemistry of the grass changes through the day. People who make their own dyes know this. Foliage gathered at one time of day can produce a different colour to foliage gathered at another time of day.
In the old days, getting the hay or oats successfully harvested was a matter of life or death. No kidding. Now it’s done with convoys of contract workers, monster machines roaring, shrieking, thundering, with flashing orange lights and working after dark by headlights. What used to take three weeks is done in nine hours, the whole procedure fueled by intensive input of petrochemicals, from manufacture of the machinery to fertilizer to the final wrapping in plastic.
As I understand it, in terms of joules, or however such things are measured these days, the farmer is actually putting more energy in, than they are getting out from the crop. Which is kinda insane. Like spending more money travelling to work than you get paid for the job. Of course, it doesn’t seem that way, to the farmer, what with cheap red diesel, subsidised fertilizer, ignoring the true cost of the externalities, like compaction of soil, like the pollution of oceans and atmosphere, and so forth.
Farmers like it, because they are released from that age-old fear, that the weather might change and ruin the harvest.
The first line of the story of the Apocalypse, the Armageddon, the Great Die-Off, must read :
‘ That summer, there was no diesel… ‘
In the past, people stayed in one place for a lifetime. Knowing the weather, the right time to start, became intuitive. With no forecasts on the tv, you just ‘felt’ that it was the right moment to begin, looking at the field, looking at the sky, and remembering every previous year’s experience. How could a novice today learn THAT ? It’s not something that could be taught on a course is it. It’s different in every part of the country. Even different between neighbouring farms and adjacent fields, depending on soil, aspect, height above sea level…
What happens when climate chaos means every year has ‘extreme weather events’ ? Without reasonable predictability , nobody will be able to gauge the right thing at the right time anymore…
http://www.applewarrior.com/celticwell/ejournal/lughnasa/wales.htm
Wolfbird,
Your comments evoked a memory of one meteorology professor of mine, who used to describe himself as a “farmer”. In the context of a discussion of the radiant energy balance at the earth’s surface, he said that you could tell from the sound of a hay baler [machine] when the balance went negative. When the earth began to cool in late afternoon, there was a sudden, definite change in the chunk-chunk sound coming from the baler.
I’m not sure how fully the modern farmer is released from fear of harvest failure, unless merely to the fear of personal failure. I recall an Iowa friend’s story of a farmer baling hay alone at night under artificial light, being sucked into the baler.
Yes, there are subsidies, cheap fuel and – in the US at least – generous credit terms. But with all this help, the farm operator still is hard up against the unknowns of nature- the timing and intensity of rain and frost- and is competing in a global market.
- Bob Wise
Hi Bob,
Yes, everything is always changing, positive and negative ions in the air, humidity, all kinds of subtle invisible things going… I live on the side of a deep valley. In some weather conditions, I can hear my neighbours talking on the other side, a mile away, as clear as if they were here.
Re the fear of harvest failure, it’s to do with the speed of getting it in. It’s much easier to get a single day window in the weather right, than a three week window, when weather ( here ) is so changeable.
Not saying that farming isn’t a hard job though. It’s a difficult job, requires great skill and knowledge to be successful. I think it will get much harder, even impossible, in the future, because of climate change, which will lead to increased frequency of extreme weather events. Seems that’s already begun.
As I see it, the fundamental change ( from scythes to combine harvesters ) was a change from a time when the primary purpose of farming was to produce food, for the farmer, labourers, local community.
Nowadays, thats not the purpose. The purpose now is to make money. That’s a big difference.
In other words, what occurred was the industrialisation of subsistence farming.
Industrial farming ( agri-business ) may be more ‘efficient’, in the sense that it produces more, which is what is required to feed all the people in the cities, but it radically changes the relationship between humans and land.
Once humans thought of the land as something sacred, and the fruits of labour were a gift from the Earth. Now, the land is just a huge factory floor, which can be exploited, abused, in any way that is profitable. The animals are also degraded, from sentient beings into widgets, units of production. As you said, ‘competing in a global market’. That might make sense to accountants and economists and politicians and investors, but the problem is that it makes no sense ECOLOGICALLY.
We are biological creatures. If we trash the biosphere, we destroy ourselves. That’s what we’re doing. Land use and farming is just one component, of course.
I loved that weekend! Jim really did piss on all of us, didn’t he, though he wouldn’t accept my explanation as to why you couldn’t cut brambles with my grass blade. Soft steel is clearly not known in Cumbria…
Beth
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