The Horrid (Imagined) Drudgery of the Farm

If I had a nickel for every suburbanite who shook his head gravely and warned, “Farming is hard work,” with the implied addendum, “And you, gut-man, will never make it,” I’d buy me, well, a candy bar. Or a gallon of gas. If the cost of living weren’t so high, that would sound more impressive. But you get the point. I need to meet more people.

Because half the people I meet hear me say “farm” and instantly translate “drudgery”. (The other half translate “sylvan paradise” and are precisely the folks whom the first group spend their lives trying to save from disappointment and fitness.) Well, here I am. Is it unremitting slave labor?

Let’s see. Yesterday, my life of toil began with a wagon ride to a neighboring farm to get hay. We loaded sixty bales or so. At that point, out of an hour or so “at work”, I had only been moving strenuously for twenty minutes. Granted, that alone was more exercise than I might get in a year of graphic design or writing blogs, but it was still only twenty minutes.

Then rain rumbled nearby, so we waited with the hay in a shed and chatted with the Amish hay-seller until the weather was hay-friendly again. Another wagon ride back, (worthy of a blog in itself…be forewarned) and then, gasp, more physical labor as we proudly set the hay in its new home.

Then it was time for lunch.

Of course, not every morning is so easy. Some mornings are all smashing this metal contraption into a tub of soil to make ’soil blocks’, sort of a demented grown-up version of playing with Play-Doh. Some mornings (one so far) involve shovelling a pile of manure (large enough to hide several corpses) into a manure spreader. But even there, after you load the spreader, you get to ride it around and spread it.

Farming, like Frank Sinatra, has rhythm. Work hard, stop, lean on tool, talk for awhile, get water, talk about working hard again sometime, maybe after lunch. Eat lunch (not at O’Donald’s). You get the idea.

Note I have not yet experienced harvest. I may revise this merry outlook when I do. Yet that will only prove this point, for if there’s a time in the year when you must work insanely hard, it’s still only for that time of the year. The rest of the time, you can chat while it rains. I suppose you can do this in an office too, but there’s no boss on a farm.

On this farm, that is. If I were one of the blacks who once drudged to feed those rotten slaveowners, or one of the Mexicans who slave now to feed us, I would indeed call it “hard work”. Having tasted a sane amount of physical labor, I can only imagine the nightmare of unrelenting exertion. God save us all from that, especially those who do it now.

But for folks (perhaps like you) who think of starting your own farm, the story seems to be quite different. At least on this farm. I work ‘harder’ than any of the people I know, but usually for only an hour at a time, if that. Granted, that’s plenty of a culture shock for my poor suburban body, but even my trembling muscles have handled it so far.

Not too scary after all, is it?