I spoke to a neighbour recently. Waved my broken arm in answer to a cheerful “How are you?”. We stopped on the road. Them, sitting in the car, turned off the engine. And, on a road so quiet you can hear your heart as you walk, we talked.
We came round to a farmer over the hill. Out the road. Past seventy. His tractor rigged with strings and pulleys, hoists and straps for getting in and out, a place to stow his crutches. Scratching at the earth. Still strong. Sharp. A hunger for work and the good it gives. When you spend your life living and working in a place you love, it comes to live in you too, I guess. It is what you do. It is who you are. There’s meaning in it. Almost done with cattle and the farm he is now. No children interested in the farm. Selling off livestock piecemeal as they become just a little too much.
I thought of another neighbour. We had been talking of a different time. When he was young. His favourite time the haying. And when they would stop. Machinery stilled in the hot field. Friends, neighbours, family bringing sandwiches, milk and buttermilk in bottles and tea to the field. Sitting by the ditch edge. Eating. Resting. Talking. A mess of people in the field. The noisy clatter of shared food and conversation replacing the tractor rattle. His meadow worked today. Many hands in it. Another’s worked tomorrow. More sandwiches, milk and company. More hands still. From such things are communities made.
You would keep an eye on your neighbour’s field he said. You were in one another’s farms back then. We are not now. In one another’s mind’s too. Was he well? Was he away? Did his hay need taking? Who has a baler working? Are you short on space in the shed? He helped you with yours. You helped him with his. We were in one another’s fields and lives. It was a social thing. It is a much more lonely thing now. The work filleted of the company of people.
Perhaps that first farmer, had he grown old back then, would have grown old in a farm that had the hands of many other’s in it. A farm was a community. And the community farmed with each other. Other hands would pull together to keep him in his fields.
This is one aspect to the industrialisation of farming. One person can make of a farm enough work for themselves. And a farm becomes a quiet thing. Machinery makes the noise that before was people. Money spent on machines rather than the skill of hands. Modern Efficiency is thirsty work. It takes a lot of Diesel to be that lonely.
