The Long Field

Fifty years ago, in a long field the slow rhythm of stepping, sliding the pitchfork, pitching hay, and stepping again echoed the labors of centuries. In the cornfield, the men stepped through the dry, crackling rows and twisted the ears of corn from the stalks. A short heave brought the ears--two or three at a time--into the bed of the wagon pulled along by the mules. When the corn was cut instead of pulled, the men stepped with their corn knives leaning the stalk to the side, hacking, folding the stalk into the curve of their arm and stepped again to the next stalk. They carried an armload of stalks with ears attached to the beginning point of the next shock or stack. As the shock grew, it was secured with a girdle of stalks looped together. As the end of the stalk was looped and twisted back on itself, the pressure of the erect shock pushed against the loop and kept it from unraveling. From a distance the shocks looked neatly belted.

The new technologies--tractors, balers, harvesters, grain drills, plows--have not changed the biology of what happens with seeds and stalks and sunlight, with soil and moisture. What the new technologies change is the social nature of the work. When men work a mule team through the rows pulling corn, they smell the mule, feel the rasp of the dried corn leaves, hear each other hold breath and lightly grunt at they toss the ears to the wagon. And they talk. There is little noise to disturb their day-long conversation. The driver of a New Holland hydraulic bale stacker sits in an air-conditioned cab with an FM radio, CB radio, and cellular phone. This man is farming and is dependent as a farmer upon the same biological processes of germination, photosynthesis, and maturation that are the basis of all farming. But his "society"--the company he keeps as he goes about his work--is very different. He works alone although his radios and phone keep him in touch with distant locations. In a really big field, the CB radios coordinate the tractors and harvesters with the supply trucks. For emergencies or family business the cell phone can be in his hand even while he steers into the next rows of corn.

The new technologies in American farming are not somehow bad or destructive in themselves. We often blame the loss of the "old ways" on the appearance of the new technology, but this causality is erroneous. Tractors did not destroy the older agrarian world. Tractors replaced mules in a world that had already changed away from mule breeding and mule keeping. Most of the new technologies in farming arise as a response to the collapse of an older social order, not from a sinister weighting of one technology against another. Round bale hay making did not drive the young men from the farms. The young men were already gone when their fathers and grandfathers embraced the round balers as a solution to a critical labor problem. Every technology is embedded within a context of a supporting sociology. Social change most often results from changes in the social order, not from the appearance of an alternative technology itself.

In the long field we tossed the hay toward a center pole--usually a roughly lopped cedar sapling--and let the hay mound around the pole. Layer by layer the stack rose, its final shape and height determined by the friction between the individual stalks in the stack. When the stack made itself and the last load tossed slid off the stack, we capped it off with a piece of tarp. Down the field a dozen or more stacks stood in irregular rows waiting the hay wagon. The square baler that followed the men in the fields arrived as our families were getting smaller and as more men worked at jobs off the farm. With the

square bales, three of us could work the field: one on the tractor, another on the wagon, another lifting bales from the field. When we tossed hay, it took a half dozen or more men to work the field. With the roll bales, one man can work the field. Now on many farms one man is all there is to do the work. The grandfather still lives on the farm; the father works at the plant; the grandson has the Camaro. But with the new technology, a man of eighty years of age can make a hay field by himself from the cutting to the raking to the baling to putting it away in the barn.

The American farm as an enterprise of an extended family and as a form of community solidarity to share the labor of work has disappeared. Nostalgia for the land, for the rhythms of the old ways of working, real desire for the society of narrative that went with the older farming make us lament the change. Our unease leads us to condemn the machinery rather than recognize that powerful social forces were already at work transforming America after 1900. The agricultural work force of America has dropped in this century from 40% to less than 3% of the population. Yet we still manage the farms and feed the world. Around the world, the average farmer produces enough to feed about eleven people--himself and his large family. Each American farmer produces enough to feed fifty-five people. We cannot do that with mules.

Wayne Clay and I stood by the road watching the bale stacker work. "It'll pick up 160 bales in 15 minutes and go to the barn at 55 miles and hour," Wayne said. The field was enormous, a half mile long and nearly as wide. There were hundreds and hundreds of square bales of alfalfa in the field. The bales were destined for horse farms in Florida. Forty years ago, that many bales would have been several days of hot heavy work to hoist the bales, stack the wagons, unload at the barn. The stacker completed a load while we talked by the road. As I got in my truck to leave, the stacker turned into the road ahead of me. By the time I got to the end of the short road, he had turned onto the blacktop and was gone from sight. I don't usually drive that fast in the country.