Remembering the Farming Way
American Greatness,
by
Victor Davis Hanson
Original Article
Posted By: Judy W.,
1/13/2020 10:06:22 AM
Almost all the pragmatic agricultural wisdom that my grandparents taught me has long ago been superseded by technology. I don’t anymore calibrate, as I once did when farming in the 1980s, the trajectory of an incoming late summer storm by watching the patterns of nesting birds, or the shifting directions and feel of the wind, or the calendar date or the phases of the moon. Instead, I go online and consult radar photos of storms far out at sea. Meteorology is mostly an exact science now.
Even the agrarian’s socio-scientific arts of observation that I learned from my family are seldom employed in my farming anymore.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
Delilah 1/13/2020 10:54:21 AM (No. 287275)
I used to watch the barometer, now I watch the radar maps on the internet.
4 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
moonlightflip 1/13/2020 10:57:28 AM (No. 287278)
I grew up on a small farm in north-central So. Dak. in the 50's. Love this article. VDH is a treasure!
7 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
MDConservative 1/13/2020 11:40:58 AM (No. 287307)
Progress is ever accelerating.
VDH points out, "By the early 5th-century AD, “Rome”—already a crumbling Mediterranean hegemony—was a world away from the Italian agrarian state of the 3rd-century BC..." Yeah, and these two periods were 800 years apart. My grandmother lived from before the Wright brothers flew through the moon landing and into the era of Mars landers. My mother from the days of oil lamps in her family's farm house through the electrification of her old homestead and saw its current wi-fi capability and the expansion from a few milk cows to an 800 head herd milked three times daily. None of this was all that long ago.
The good old days were always better...and these are the future good old days for a whole bunch of people.
6 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
Vaquero45 1/13/2020 11:46:01 AM (No. 287318)
As I read this, faces were reflected on my computer screen - the faces of all my mother's relatives, including her parents and grandparents, on their farms in central Illinois in the now so long ago. Their resemblance to the people described by Dr. Hanson is uncanny. I've never before seen their lives, and their way of thinking, described so eloquently. Thanks for the post.
10 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
Jesuslover54 1/13/2020 11:52:18 AM (No. 287323)
Victor, why are you hanging on to the farm?
You've proved you can do it -- is it time to give up the fading nostalgia and push on?
0 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
bad-hair 1/13/2020 12:14:03 PM (No. 287341)
Must read as always from VDH. Although fewer and fewer of us get it. Those who do woke long ago. Grew up in an Alberta farm town where all of the above was true. Somehow spent a great deal of my adult life on foreign-going ships. If you tattoo a pig in your foot you'll never drown. Never coils a rope against the sun. And of course if the gulls are flying high there's a storm coming.
5 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
msts 1/13/2020 12:15:40 PM (No. 287344)
Nostalgia is history without the stink.. That said, i do admire the way that so called illiterate or simpleton farmers were in tune with their surroundings. In New England you see it with house placement. My house faces south/southeast. There are three large trees in the front. In the spring/summer, the sun is high and the trees shade the house. In the fall/winter, the leaves are gone, the sun is low and lights up the house until sundown.
Prevailing winds in the winter are northwest so the front of the house is blocked from the winds but the house, the connecting barn and main barn. This creates a large barnyard area that you can work in without frostbite.
9 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
DVC 1/13/2020 1:07:18 PM (No. 287411)
Wonderful writing as California sinks into a hideous abyss of leftist disaster and is overrun with Mexicans. This is why I always hurry home, shaking my head each time I visit my friends in California in these last 25 years or more.
4 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
Blue-Z-Anna 1/13/2020 2:40:09 PM (No. 287508)
Let us not forget that the Cali Vali farmers were deprived of water (in the name of Saving the Planet) just long enough for real estate prices to crash and their orchards and farms sold to the very politicians (and their corporate cronies) who caused the crash.
"Climate Change" is not a bad mistake.
It's a massive criminal scam.
......like all things 'Socialist'.
7 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
texaspast 1/13/2020 2:49:33 PM (No. 287518)
Plant on Valentines day, Harvest on mother's day.
2 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
ZeldaFitzg 1/13/2020 6:11:12 PM (No. 287677)
The Texas cotton farmers used to say that it was time to plant cotton "when you begin kicking the covers off at night." I enjoyed this article. Thanks for posting.
4 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
wildcat1 1/13/2020 6:27:53 PM (No. 287684)
As a full time farmer/rancher for the last 48 years, and for most of my growing up years before that, I enjoyed this writing emmensly. I am 70 now and still farming full time. My Dad started farming in the 30s with horses and mules with his Dad..
5 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
rubberneck 1/13/2020 6:44:17 PM (No. 287692)
My dad grew up on his dad's farm. Short growing season (eastern Idaho - it gets COLD over there!), no power equipment but rather horse-drawn plow. Outhouse. Well for water. Wood heat. No power. That's just one generation back! And farming was feast-or-famine, dependent totally on the goodness of "mother nature" and the price they could sell their harvest for.
90 years later, it's still "feast of famine" for the family spud farmers. In good years, their kids drive shiny pickup trucks with new snowmobiles in the back. In bad years they sell the shiny rewards and eat their potatoes.
Why can't the government DO something?!? /sarcasm
0 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
Folsomguy 1/13/2020 7:10:08 PM (No. 287705)
I'm not sure it was always good fortune but I had the pleasure of dealing with the men VDH is talking about from 1981 until I retired in 2011. The change he's relating is real. I remember fondly the 5th and 6th generation farmers so proud of what they did. Environmentalist and democrats ruined it when they stoped creating the ability to store and properly use the abundant water supply from the Sierra's so they could protect red toad frogs and blue tailed lizards.
1 person likes this.
Below, you will find ...
Most Recent Articles posted by "Judy W."
and
Most Active Articles (last 48 hours)
Comments:
Victor Davis Hanson's beautifully nostalgic, historic, and melancholy thoughts on a way of life that has disappeared. He grew up in the "farming way" and this is a personal reminiscence written with his usual wisdom.