Are We Willing to Give Up “More Comfortable,”
“Easier” and “Quicker”?
Commentary by Bob Leavitt
June 17, 2010, page 2.....

The cover of “the latest” (The Charlotte News June 3, 2010) had an insert photo of haying in the 40s to 50s, a guess based on my mid-1940s high school summer employment on a small 14-cow dairy farm in Orwell with the Volunteer Farm Workers program, necessitated by the absence of young men at war. Not very big, not very strong, but there I was: getting an education I wouldn’t exchange for all the tea in China (nor all the U.S. debt there).
It occurred to me that we mowed with a team (Molly and Belle), then dump-raked with one horse, then manpowered the windrows into haycocks. We used pitchforks to load the haycocks onto a wagon drawn by Molly and Belle to the barn where a horse served as the power to pull up a large hayfork loaded with hay to the mow (same word, different pronunciation: OW). There it was stored until needed, when it was pitched down onto the bottom floor where the cows awaited their grain and hay. Counting the three men (OK, two men and a boy!) and the two horses, how much of a carbon footprint do you suppose we made? Yep, it was tedious, hot, sweaty work: neither quick nor easy – the seductive words that have convinced mankind to use something other than his muscle power at the expense of polluting the environment.
Far from being expert at farming (even in those days), and far from being environmentally astute or politically inclined, nonetheless, I think we need to consider returning to as much of those “good old days” as we can. Any time we use electricity and carbon-based fuels instead of manpower, we pollute. But are we serious about giving up mowing our lawns with gas or electricity, being willing to stir cake mix by hand instead of with the electric mixer, drying our clothes on the line instead of..? Well, you get the point.
Not one person I’ve ever known has said farming is easy – it wasn’t then and it isn’t now – nor is life for any of us. But farmers or not, until we’re REALLY willing to give up “more comfortable” (how’s the AC in your house/car?), “easier” or “quicker,” we’ll be contributing to changes in lifestyle that distance mankind from the true strengths of our species.
My perhaps incorrect recollection of the IBM slogan, “Machines should work, people should think!” still fits when it does fit. But the ‘machines’ need to be those that don’t use fuels to which we’ve become accustomed.
How are we to manufacture those new machines without using those nasty fuels to make them? Have we yet to cross that bridge or ford that stream?
My thanks for the photo, which brought memories of the days in which machines were simple and man still depended on his own muscle power and that of his domesticated animals to accomplish much of his work.
I need to emphasize that I do not argue that farming could ever return to those days! I use the hopefully simple illustration to bring to bear this thought: that the 60-years-ago culture produced less pollution. By extension, the entire society was less polluting, predominantly by using muscle power rather than external power.

-Bob Leavitt