So let it be said right off that Maureen Ash has an eye for the substance and details that make her Holding the Lines: Horses, Hard Work, Love, and Potatoes a powerful, readable and rewarding book. It is more than an autobiography or memoir, in fact it feels most like an extended, detailed and occasionally bloody valentine to a family driven to invent themselves as farmers, and more, a valentine to the work and purpose on the windy hillside that is their farm. It is a book full of smells, textures and flavors, a convincing story of a couple making good on the dream that is their life, from how they choose each other, to how they find and build their dreams into a waking reality.

Some years ago, I sat at my friend farmer Tygh Redfield’s dining table and recorded him and his neighbor, farmer Jim Everett. It began with a low-slow-pitch question: what is a farmer? Tygh responded “Well, first, you’re not a farmer unless you are born to it.” Prepared for an intense discussion on Tygh’s premise, what Jim said next enlarged perspectives all around and shook my thinking up. As if to change the politics of the discussion he said: “A farmer is someone who fixes things.”

Practically all trouble with new machines is due to improper setting up, faulty adjustments and lack of oil. The object of these directions is to assist you in setting up this machine correctly and operating it to the best advantage. By carefully following these simple instructions, one person can set up the machine. 1. Place all bundles where they will be handy.

Time slips on, it could be twenty five years ago; we met a friend in the supermarket in Newry. We knew she had retired from school teaching but what we didn’t know was that she had married and was living in rural County Cavan, some eighty miles away. In conversation she mentioned what I took to be an ancient festival in her parish; a hill field with a prehistoric stone and the oldest horse fair in the land. I must say I’d never heard of it, nor had anyone I knew.

A much improved walking potato digger is shown in Fig. 491. The shovel is a large rounded scoop which slides under the potatoes scooping the soil and the potatoes up onto the shaker grate at the rear. The grate is hinged at the front. A five-pointed wheel under the grate gives it an up-and-down motion which sifts the soil from the potatoes as they pass over the rods. A forecarriage to control the depth of the shovel is fastened to the front of the beam in front of the shovel.

It is in the rice fields, however, that the buffalo excels. Rice is not sown broadcast; it is first planted in nurseries, and when about 12 inches high is transplanted a spear at a time into the soft mud of the fields which has been prepared by ploughing. In preparing the ground for the rice, no animal is equal to the buffalo, for in the mud and water of the field it is in its element. Its great weight causes it to sink deep in the mud and its enormous strength enables it to plough deeper than can be done in any other manner.