Keith Ferrell, once editor-in-chief of Omni magazine, found himself out of work, living on what used to be his rural retreat, farming with simple tools — and without a lifetime of experience:
My peas tasted no less sweet for the disarray of their rows. Potatoes dug from soil roughly worked with spade, shovel and mattock were firm and well-shaped, tasty and nourishing. I never used synthetic fertilisers. Whatever I produced was nurtured, instead, with compost, manure (during the years we had a horse), chopped leaves and hay cut with a scythe. I ate plenty of blackberries from the canes that sprouted across once-mown fields, and appreciated the animals – hawks, fox, even bear – whose population increased along with the spread of habitat. The deer and rabbits and groundhogs didn’t care how straight my rows were as they dined upon them – and in any true apocalypse, they could feed us, too.
But time exerted its effects. Planting a large crop of anything by hand took so much time that plans for other large plantings went unfulfilled. This season or phase of the moon for planting this crop; this temperature means it’s too late or too early to plant that one. Eleventh-century farming was a pre-sunup to post-sundown endeavour, or nearly. Yet even my reduced livelihood required that far more hours be spent at my desk (and not the one by the creek) than in my fields. For everything I accomplished outside, far more tasks and chores – not to mention plans – languished undone.
Medieval farming was a communal effort involving large extended families and neighbors. If you’re going to farm by yourself or a small nuclear family you need powered machines.
Talk about ‘nostalgie de la boue‘.
“Farming” seems rather generous for what dude was piddling at.
You can have my tractor when you can pry it from my cold, grubby, fat fingers.
Truth be told I probably run it about 200 hours a year, way less than the 1000+ that my neighbors would do.
35ac should be a good size for working with horses or oxen. Not too big really. Some pasture, some crops. But to use human power only makes it a bit of a stunt. I have a friend with a 100+ha farm who wants to move to horses so that’s going to be quite a big deal.
He’s missing the obvious, though. You don’t only clear land by hand, you use your livestock to do it. Cattle, sheep, goats, pigs. I’ve got 2ha of scrubby land with small trees (and a lot of old vines) and I’m just about to put some pigs on to go through all the small stuff.