Fixing Things

by Lynn R. Miller of Singing Horse Ranch

Some years ago, when collecting audio for FARM DRUM, 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.”

Jim and I rolled that around in our brains for a bit, with me offering that I did not agree with the notion. Tygh went on,

“You can’t decide, midlife, that what you want is to be a farmer, and work for a little while and then say you’re a farmer. You have to be born to it, have family that are farmers, be around the work from day one, chores, routines, rituals, failures, successes. It has to be in your blood and your genetic memory.”

“But Tygh, I see you as a farmer, a good one, and you weren’t born to it.” I offered.

To which he responded, “I’m not a farmer, not a true farmer, because I wasn’t 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.”

Jim’s statement felt like a soft back hand or brush off — but with a note of regard as afterthought.

I didn’t want to but – being a farmer – it was hard for me not to agree with that simple notion. As someone who worries too much, Jim’s definition just didn’t go far enough for me, not in the moment anyway. One who fixes things? Inside of that is the simplistic premise as obligatory; is that farming requires this of its people, because it is full of lots and lots of breakdowns and if you aren’t capable of fixing things you ain’t gonna get the work done. Fix those things or step aside, brother. To which I say, rough go. But really, to think about it, that’s not a bad thing. All the manner of engagements farming requires of its practitioners, including repair work – birthing – husbandry – sharpenings – adjustments – arguments – teamwork – have the outsized potential to grow each farmer in stature, character, resolve and gratitude. Yet society does not see it that way. Because ‘we’ have to work so hard to keep things going, we farmers are seen as dopes for the bargain we made. We, they suggest, didn’t need to choose farming (unless family circumstance forced it) and it certainly did not choose us. So, yes, I accept that farmers, at their core, are an old pre-hip breed of human, one that is fully invested in this coarse and lovely, essential and soaring bargain with nature’s care. Still and all, there is plenty of evidence pointing to some farmers frequently being inherently slipshod, myself included.

I can’t help but think of examples to point the other way. Kenny Russell in Mississippi, Jim Butcher of Ohio, Eric and Anne Nordell of PA, the late Parker Sanborn of Maine, Les Barden of NH, Lise Hubbe and Charlie Jensen of Oregon, Everett Hildebrant of Iowa, Ryan Foxley of Washington… I’ve got to stop otherwise the list will take up pages. For me these/those men and women represent care, safety and precision in farming. But then it dawned on me; a prevention mindset should belong in the same corner along with mechanical skills, respect for livestock, a knack for engineering, construction know-how, etc. Because a prevention mindset fixes things ahead of the fact. But, counting ourselves, the landscape is peppered with less than perfect farming operations

I remember wanting to make a case for those farmers who delegate much of their working life to preventing breakdowns, who work with safety uppermost in their minds, who try to have on hand the spare parts they will need during field work – planting and harvest, who temper haste with patience. Those farmers who are the best of their kind, the best neighbors and friends — and they, in turn, chose to be near the best of neighbors and friends, they are part of a nucleus of good folk of common values. Those farmers who are constantly asking questions of themselves and working to assure that their fields are healthy and always gaining in fertility. Those folks that see and regard poisons always as just that – poisons. And these kind folk treating livestock with respect. I have many trusted farmer friends who are not only good stewards but also excellent mechanics, welders, electricians, and problem solvers. As for us, we Millers do not fit in that camp of good and better farmers, and it’s because we have chosen to do many things as well as we can instead of a couple of things well as we should. Which means we spend too much time fixing things. There is that world of fixing things and then there is this other world of thinking and writing about fixing things. It’s messy in the overlaps. But I like it that way. It goes to a best sort of jumbled sufficiency, the sort which fuels a humor-filled and elbow-pumping capable. I guess I’m trying to say, I don’t want to confuse neat and tidy with fixing things. They aren’t at odds, these two things, they are quite separate. A man or woman keen on keeping their old implements working is naturally attracted to junk yard displays of machinery in disarray. Here then, spread before us, are countless ways to fix the problems.

Remembering back to that conversation all those years ago, while preparing to organize these notes, I wrote the paragraphs above as I drank my two cups of morning coffee, then I went out to move irrigation pipe with Eric only to find that our cattle herd had found their way into one of the two hay fields. Night before, a couple of elk had broken the fence down and the cows slipped in just as I headed out to meet Eric. Not sure this was what Jim Everett had in mind when he suggested the definition of a farmer but I certainly saw it as something broken that needed fixing.

There we were yet again, as on most Summer mornings preparing to move irrigation pipe; Eric on one side of the fence and I on the ‘tuther — talking over what had happened the night before, what was going on right in that moment, and ideas that we had come up with for making things better – making things less likely to breakdown, notions of how we might fix a nagging problem, and connecting all of it to this morning’s incarnation of a grand plan forward for the ranch. Our brains at work, minds like two wrenches tightening this, removing that, beating on those. Farmers as wrenches, as tools that fix things.

This particular morning, there was an added note of urgency as it was early Monday and I needed to get to the Journal office to mind the phones, my part-time volunteer gig. So the two of us scurried around until we got the fifty plus bovines back where they belonged. Remedy, but not a fix.

Kristi and I had decided we wanted to grow the herd, but time got away from us and before we were ready there were too many cattle. In the end it may be a positive entry for the year, but for now our regular division of land and labor – these fields for hay, those for pasture — had been jostled by appetites and practical realities. If our farming were perfect, (can you see my shoulders twitching with the humor in that?) fences, gates, crops would be matched to a plan that had a calendar of grazing moves, irrigation, tillage, plantings, harvest and maintenance. But our farming will never be perfect so long as day after day we are strapped to serve and volley. When we decide to open a gate to allow livestock to move we serve. When we scurry around to get them out of where we think they do not belong, we volley. We’d always rather serve.

Twenty years ago or more, Kristi purchased a handful of beautiful Red Angus cows and a gentle bull from her friend Gayle Baker. We had sold off our skittish, semi-feral, angry ‘commercial’ herd of crossbred horned beef and laid out a grand plan to redo fencing, improve pastures, and tighten up our corrals ahead of building a purebred herd. But before we got underway with all of that, the opportunity to get the Red Angus popped up. So we ‘overlapped’ opportunity over the edges of preparation and planning.

The herd grew with compound increases the ruling factor. First there were only six cows, then eight, then eleven, then thirteen — on and on until the entire herd numbered close to sixty. Now our fields and rangeland never seem adequate to hold their interest. Always more than enough graze, but these gentle cows are spoiled. All summer long I would watch for that comic tell tale sign — fat cows and their calves all lined up side by side gazing over the fence bordering the cropland. They weren’t hungry, standing as they were up to their bellies in grass and legumes; they were bored.

That was the background and history to this morning’s challenge; when bored too much our cow we called Red-Tag and our herd bull Creed would artfully lower the fence wires by popping loose wire clips. Either that, or they would just lean until they bent the steel posts clean over. Next they would step over and the remaining herd would eventually follow. We’d put them back in and fix the fence and it would work for a few days or a week or so, before the whole thing would repeat itself. So this morning, ahead of running the cows back in, Eric and I talked a bit about how we might makes this ritual problem go away.

The solution seemed obvious: make more and smaller pastures so that there was a lengthened string of possible changes allowing ample time for the little fields to regrow, our own variation on Andre Voisin’s rotational grazing theories. In this way we might keep the herds in a given small pasture for only two to five days or more before we opened the adjoining gate and allowed them to saunter in to the next pasture, one which had, in the string of six fields, upwards to five weeks to regrow. A pasture that would take the edge off any spoiled cow’s impatience.

These small fields would be scattered appropriately around the larger hay and grain fields. With this, there were other component concerns. How were we going to have water available in each and every unit without the extra work of hauling it in? And would there be any shade in each field? The solution was to design a patchwork of fields that used the lay of the land and available irrigation supply and runoffs as definition and to advantage. We needed a small pond or stock tank in each pasture or paddock and it should be located near the water supply and adjacent to a small enclosure where we would plant fast growing trees and shrubs for windbreak and shade. Every chance possible, we needed this field overlapping with the next field so the same trees and water could supply both. The design of all this needed to take into consideration the movement of herds and access points for farm equipment, workhorses and/or tractors. It invited creativity to see a whole design as goal long before it was completed. Such a grand scheme would constantly question the viability of any large, purely rectangular field for cropping purposes. And such a plan would be a grand expansion of our already ambitious wildlife habitat scheme. It would, doubtless, take time. But, plan in hand meant we could include this idea in the day to day repairs we did so that, slow as it might be, we were were always moving that direction. The grand overarching idea was to make ‘planning’ a tool, or wrench, if you will.

But meanwhile, we needed to fix the problem of the cows letting themselves in where they didn’t belong. So we sold Red-Tag, her bull calf and Creed at the stockyards. And that did the trick, at least for now. The ‘thing’ was fixed.

Fixing things. It’s so often a linear process that mixes serve and volley. A couple of years ago while mowing some tangled, moist, elk-bed clover (‘elk-bed’ because those darned, outsized, local ungulates had been laying in that low hollow grazing, snoozing and thinking they were hidden) when the old JD model A tractor pulling a JD #38 trail mower jammed up before the elderly farmer (me) could pull back the clutch stick. The result was that the thick, heavy, curved cast iron arm that carried the weight of the cutter bar snapped. Now that was a major dumb and preventable breakdown. I knew better that to try to mow in that swamp, one which should become a stock pond in our long range, grander scheme. But I was greedy and impatient. I blame the tractor for allowing me to think I might do it. Had I been mowing with a team of horses I would have avoided the area altogether. Notice how when a power-tool gives you license to bludgeon things your common sense says back away?

My searches for another #38 trail mower for parts had all come up empty. Lots of JD #5 trail mowers but they are completely different design. Yikes. A few years back before my cracked spine, blood clots, and blood infections, I would have chuckled, rolled my eyes, grabbed a team on horse mower and continued on with harvest by mowing around that hole. With old age comes both sense and nonsense.

So I decided I would get a suitable cast iron rod for the arc welder and see if I couldn’t rejoin the two halves of that heavy bracket. Double-checking the process, where the exact temperature and how the weld is cooled can be critical. I called some friends for reminders. Speaking with my buddy Sage, he asked the right questions then offered, “I’m between projects, bring your bracket over to my shop and leave it, I‘ll have a go at fixing it.” And, my-oh-my did he ever! Not only did he do a great job of a re-inforced weld, he put the old bracket’s angle right and for these last two years it has worked better than ever.

Sometimes the right tool is a knowledgeable friend. Farmers fixing things for each other.

Not all farmers do this, but those of us who work with old relic equipment often do; we tend to horde junk duplicates of our regular implements for the parts. For half a century I have used McCormick #9 high and regular gear horsedrawn mowers and over those years have amassed as many as fifty broken down ones, with a dozen or so stowed in my equipment yard for readily available parts. Thirty some odd years ago, as an experiment and research background for the Journal and a subsequent book, I set about rebuilding the best of those old skeleton mowers to sell at auction and to private and public customers. Recording the process with photos and writings the end result was The Horsedrawn Mower Book. We mention all of this to warrant the conclusion that for Do It Yourself farmers there is real value in getting makes and models of implements which were plentiful enough in their time to guarantee a supply of derelicts of the same model to disassemble for parts.

Back in the early seventies, when I was farming in partnership with Ray Drongesen, I learned to run a binder helping him. He had a PTO binder he pulled behind his old JD A tractor. I would climb up on the binder seat and work the levers to adjust the bundle tray, the cutter bar heigth, the reel position, the bundle basket — all while watching to make sure the twine, knotter, and drapers were doing what they needed to do. Ray drove the tractor. Now, Ray and his team were championship working a ground drive binder, they did it each year for threshing bees around the state. But Ray couldn’t afford a GD binder and the PTO unit was given to him, as was the old tractor. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently as I work on my book on binders and binding. But, for the purpose of this essay, it brings me ‘round to thinking about Ray’s old A tractor. Besides the binder, Ray and I used the tractor to belt-drive his threshing machine. And Ray had an old JD 14T motorized baler he ran with that same tractor. I’d have to get old and infirm to realize I harbored a long fascination with that WWII vintage twin cyclinder tractor. When teamster help was no longer available and my blood disease made it impossible to do sustained work with our Belgians I acquired, for a few hundred dollars, an old JD A from our friend Jon Peasley. Taking my time and using my arms to pull myself up carefully I could work the stick clutch and run a trail mower with the tractor, but it was a short first season because the big tires needed replacing and the radiator gave out.

So I bought hay, went to researching two-cylinder mechanisms, and made a new friend, Dan Miller of Dan’s Tractor Parts. Peasley came to visit and we cannibalized a radiator off a parts ‘A’ Dan had and spent the time fixing my first old “poppin’ johnny”. My nostalgic affair with the JD two cyclinder tractor matured to a genuine regard for the simplicity and elegance of the design. Here was a machine I suspected I could understand, maintain and repair. One thing for sure, I could afford it. And affordability is what first got me into a, then, full-time dependence on working horses. Fifty plus years ago, poor half breed that I was, there was no way I could afford a tractor let alone land. So I hired on to work other people’s farms and one of my bosses, Bruce Leonhardy, fronted me some money to purchase my first team of Belgians from Bob Green of LeGrande. The plan was to use them to gather harvested Christmas trees off the hillside and make enough money to repay Bruce. Lots of stories there, suffice it to say I eventually made it to the goal and it set me to thinking, much as I enjoyed the work, that I might be able to actually farm with horses. The rest is history. Important to this essay is that a mix of mentors and examples and friends, with teamster’s craft the context, taught me how to”see and understand,” how to “recognize or find,” and how “to devise” remedy for any problems along the way.

Decades later, with this publication, several successful books, years of conducting workshops around the continent and experience with more good horses than I can count, I found myself at Carriage Hill Farm in Ohio as the announcer for the World Championship Draft and Mule Plowing Competition. Made many good friends there. One, Jim Butcher, figured out early that with my “leaky” sense of humor, I needed to make connection with one rascal plowman name of Mike Atkins. Coincidence: before the event I had been contacted by Wayne Wengerd of Pioneer Equipment and asked if I could assist during the event in assessing and adjusting their new prototype sulky plow design. Turns out the teamster who was going to compete with the plow was Mike Atkins.

We hit it off right away with a volley of soft-serve creative insults and braggadocio the underlay of which was genuine mutual regard and respect. Mike had teams of both Mules and Belgians, two separate exceptional entries, in the match.

Day before the actual competition was for warm-ups and tuning, a dozen or so pairs of overalls with old farmers inserted therein gathered around Mike and I as we took three abreast and plow out to test and tune. Mike went to the practice furrow and plowed a few feet. Something wasn’t right. I and the overhauled gang of farmers, shade tree mechanics and smart people slowly circled Mike and the plow. Mike asked me what I saw and thought and before I could respond, one of the other men took out a pocket crescent wrench and leaned over to adjust the steering arm while another two of the them shook their heads and a fourth went to the front and set to changing the height of the hitch and shifting the clevis front left to right at the beam. Mike and I looked at each other with our eyebrows. The man at the evener clevis stood up, backed a step, and spoke to the team to move ahead. Mike said a quick whoa and politely but forcefully said “Mister that was rude. Nobody talks to my mules that way, understand?” Meanwhile the other gents went to arguing with each other about what needed to be adjusted with a dangerous assumption welling up, “This here plow ain’t designed right.” said the one man with nothing more intelligent to offer. Mike started the hitch and drove to the other end of the furrow, leaving the overall gang behind. I followed the plow from behind and watched how it worked.

At the other end Mike said, “I’m glad I brought my other plow along as a spare.”

I said, “Ray used to say – Lynn, adjust just one thing, try it, if it doesn’t work put it back where it was before and adjust just one other thing. One adjustment at a time. Until you find an adjustment that has an effect on what’s not right.”

Mike said, “I like this Ray fellow already.”

So we put the plow back where it had been and talked for a few seconds til we agreed on which first adjustment we would make. We followed Rays rule, one adjustment at a time, until we finally got that plow working sweet as could be.

The ‘overalls’ gang wandered off and took to group adjustments on several other ‘poor’ plows until, when lunch break came around fewer of them would speak to one another..

Moral of that snippet is that you can’t fix a thing until you know what’s wrong with it. You have to “see and understand” and combine that with “recognize or find.” Or, one step at a time boys.

And then there are those times when we farmers can’t fix the problem so we devise a way to work around it. My good friend Ed Joseph told me a story this morning about a big farmer in the area who has a two year old monster hi-tech articulated tractor that had every expensive space-age thingamabob you could imagine – but it would not run. Repairing this beast was going to take a lot of time, money and patience. The tractor shop said “it’s in your computer module and a new one is mighty expensive, The computer module is not allowing your tractor to turn on.”

“NOT ALLOWING!” The old farmer had very little time and no patience. “I’ll fix it myself!”

The tractor shop said, “You can no longer do that. The manufacturer has set the computer up so that if you try to fix it it will lock everything thing up. Heard tell they even put some farmers in jail for messing with their on board computers.”

Squinty-eyed we might imagine, back home he took out his multimeter and tested wires going in and coming out of the computer and, using little alligator clips and short lengths of wire, he by-passed the computer for each function – running a messy web of wires over the face of the panel – hotwiring his tractor so he could do his field work. He succeeded at out smartin’ the “jail brake.” He “devised” his own solution.

As Ed told me this story I was thinking about my own work of the last three days, realizing how fortunate I am NOT to choose to afford the big new tractors and implements. As I look forward to the day when I can return to working my own teams of horses, I feel empowered for now knowing that 90% of time I can figure out what’s wrong with my old two cylinder tractors and their tag-a-long implements and fix it all right in the field.

Case in point: Four days ago I was mowing hay with the “A,” finished the land and was deadheading back to the top of the field when I heard a new rattle that sounded like the radiator was gonna fall off. I took her out of gear, set the brake, engaged the stick clutch at idle speed and went round front. Immediately I saw that the fan motor bracket bolt, coming off the front of the generator, had come loose causing lots of racket. Turning the tractor off, I took a half inch box-end wrench and inserted it between the voltage regulator and the bracket and went to tightening. My hand slipped and the wrench touched the regulator post and sparks flew. I went back to the tractor seat, lifted it, and took the negative wire off the battery. This allowed me to safely tighten the fan bracket. There. The tractor was fixed. My goodness. Simple as can be and for just the right price. Bonus? Bragging rights.

Second case in point: I use my JD 60 two cylinder to power Eds’ JD PTO baler. The throttle arm wasn’t working and I had to lean forward and reach under the cast dash to pull on the throttle linkage to accelerate. This wasn’t working for the baling because I couldn’t maintain 540 rpm for the PTO – as everything vibrated, the throttle backed off. So I checked my manual and saw that the arm worked a spring-loaded governing clutch that moved the linkage and held it in place. So, right there in the field, I took off the linkage by removing a cotter pin, and took loose three bolts which allowed me to back the throttle arm out of the tractor. Once out I could tighten the spring clutch, reinsert the throttle, tighten it and go to baling.

Third case in point: Understanding the way your implement should work can be half the solution to fixing it when it goes down. I use old JD ground drive hay rakes, whether with the horses or with the 75 year old tractors. I have five of them around the place that I rob parts from and three that are operational. Raking what little third cutting grass alfalfa the Elk left me, I heard something wrong, then looking back could see I was scratching up lots of dirt with the mown hay. Closer examination showed that the rear lifting chain had snapped and allowed the entire back end of the rake to drop, jamming up the strippers. First look and I knew all aspects of the problem, it had happened before, a couple of times over the last twenty five years. I drove the old Chevy pickup back to the shop and gathered a rusty length of the same gauge of chain I had saved, some bolts, a hi-lift jack and my tool satchel. Heading back I chuckled remembering the first time it had happened and how it had taken a day and a half to repair because, first I didn’t know what had happened, second couldn’t figure out what to take apart, and third I hadn’t a clue how to reassemble. Back then, I made several trips to the parts rakes, mostly disassembled, until I could teach myself how the chain was threaded through the pulleys. Then there was the trial and error to learn where to lift what part to untangle the mechanisms without further breakage. All that I had learned over the years, cemented in my old brain because, though different units, each and every breakdown had been with the same make and model of the rake.

This time around, two days ago, I was thinking about this essay so I took pictures and timed myself. Repair completed in 45 minutes including travel time to the shop. Out of pocket? Zero. Deposits made in the memory bank? Priceless.

You might ask: Why do you keep at this farming business? It sounds so frustrating. Breakdown after breakdown, setback after setback, the hard-won gains seem both hidden and intangible.

You ask me this now? Had you asked fifteen years ago I could have given you a concise, useful, even smart answer. My brain used to work pretty darn well. Now my brain stumbles, skips beats, reaches for support, and walks into empty rooms where it sits for long periods. My brain parallels my own self. What remains undaunted, undiminished, unrestricted is my mind and this spirit which lubes it, aided as it is by my long friendship with good labor and gratitude.

Don’t get me wrong. What we farmers need, regardless of how old we might be, is a brain that works when it is required. A brain that recognizes each moment that it might be called upon for participation. Maybe you know some old person who when disengaged seems just that, ‘disengaged.’ But put them in their element, put them in the work they know and love and every fiber of their being switches on, they know what to do in each moment. They know how to fix things, how to keep them running, how to avoid situations headed towards breakdowns. They are thinking, real time, with every ounce of their being.

Me? I would rather be one who thinks than one who thought. For, paradoxically, one who thought was often thoughtless — lost, beholden as they so often are to past tense. Give me my tool satchel and something to fix and then please step back. Don’t worry that I take things one step at a time. Take your impatience with you when you go home to measure your own lives.

We small farmers keep at it because it is who we are. We are farmers. It is the life we wanted from the very beginning of our existence. It is the life we sought and fought for. And this last half century it has been better than anything we could have imagined. Setbacks, breakdowns and all. NO amount of thinking about it, imagining how it might have been or might be, allowing ourselves to imagine a memory of a childhood immersion in a farming family, reading about it, or even writing about it could begin to match the weight, heft, smell, itch, sound or effect of it. The worn-as-clothing good dirt of farming is not something inherited, it doesn’t come out of your parents closet, it’s something that comes from you rolling in it.

So I offer to my friend Tygh, being born to something may reference the gate you came through as much as when you came through. I was born in an apartment over a small store in Kansas City in 1947. Born to be a shopkeeper? I don’t think so. At a few months old my parents took me in tow to the French quarter in New Orleans, to Havana, Cuba, and then for a few years to Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico to my mother’s family. Lots of gates to pass through in that wandering. From there to Southern California where my father built us a home center of a commercial orange grove and I tasted and smelled the heat squeezed definitions of farming from loquats, to date palms to eucalyptus, to citrus and beyond. I was five years old and I wanted to be a farmer. Born in that moment and many afterwards. My father’s love of his youth on the farm in Wisconsin had held and protected him. Even so WWII had broken my father, he wanted to fix it so it didn’t break his family. It meant we moved around in search of hope, a few of us found our farms.

Do for yourself, your family and your friends with what you have and what you have will do for you. Do this for an entire lifetime and you will find you did inherit farming, you inherited it from yourself by the fixing of things.

– LRM