letter from a small corner of far away

Dear Lynn, dear Everyone,

Yesterday I lifted the last of the potatoes, the ones for us to store and eat over winter. Ideally, I should have lifted them last month, about three weeks after I had cut off the tops, so time enough for the skins to harden. But I was busy then, and the ground was very dry. If I had done it then there would have been fewer weeds which have been growing quickly in this very mild autumn, but because the soil was so dry, I probably would have loosened the soil in the furrows first to make it easier for Lucy to pull the fishtail plough through the ridges. The fishtail is an attachment to my ridging plough, specifically for ploughing out potatoes; to convert between the two configurations, the two mouldboards are removed, along with the share and the sole, and replaced by a wider share and the fishtail attachments. The first part to enter the ridge is the wider share, which has an attachment bolted to it, consisting of a number of steel fingers pointing upwards and backwards in a cone shape which pushes through the ridge, where the larger potatoes tend to rise up as the soil falls through the narrower gaps lower down. Then the part which does look like the tail of a fish bolts underneath, the steel rods tending to raise the larger potatoes. Although changing these parts is easy enough, it still takes about half an hour, so I actually use another plough body so I can leave the fishtail attachments in place. Nonetheless, there was still some work to do before starting, because the parts were rusty and I had taken off the share, so I needed to whittle down a wooden pin to hold the share in place and get out the wire brush and drill to remove the surface rust. When doing so, I noticed that the rear fishtail doesn’t actually belong to the plough, it being stamped ‘Howard,’ once a major British manufacturer of horse drawn farm machinery, second only in size to Ransomes, Simms and Jefferies, who made the rest of the plough.

The mix up with parts and the fact I have two such ploughs is a testament to my inexperience. I bought the first one when I had only just started to learn about work horses; I was driving through the flat, flat lands of the Fens in East Anglia, down ruler straight roads alongside the many drainage ditches that were dug 300 years ago to make arable farming possible on this peat soil, when, in a garden on the side of the road was this plough with a ‘for sale’ sign next to it. It looked OK, and since I happened to have the trailer on the car, I bought it there and then. What I hadn’t taken time to notice was that the mouldboards didn’t match, I didn’t look to see if the numbers cast into the back were the same as on the plough body or beam, or try to put on the mouldboards to see if they would fit. I only discovered the truth when I got it home and started to clean it up, but it did teach me two useful lessons – don’t buy what you don’t understand, and take your time thoroughly checking equipment before buying it. When I bought the second one, I made sure that the parts were right, and that is the one that I use to make the ridges. The first one, meanwhile, doesn’t get much use; last year, you may remember, I just used the normal ridging body to bust open the ridges to expose the potatoes, but it doesn’t do such a good job, leaving the potatoes embedded in the upturned soil, whereas the fishtail breaks the ridge up more and leaves some of the potatoes on top. So this week was the time to dig out the fishtail plough and put it to work.

Without doubt, busting open a ridge which has been together for six months is a hard pull for a single horse, made harder by the weeds which have increased in size over the last few weeks. To make it easier I could have got the wearing parts to shine like a mirror before starting, and I could have set the plough as shallow as possible, but last year, I did cut some potatoes in two with the ridger, so I didn’t want to do that. Putting Lucy in the furrow and the fishtail down the centre of the ridge also meant setting the hake [clevis] to the side, also increasing the draught, so after a couple of yards Lucy stopped, asking whether I really wanted her to pull so hard. This is a good question for a horse to ask, and I don’t mind a horse stopping in this situation because many times it prevents something from breaking and makes you question whether you have got something adjusted properly. Since I did want her to pull, I set her off again with impetus in my voice and reinforced it once more with an up-beat ‘go on’ when she hesitated again. I am under no illusion that if I had even an acre of potatoes to plough out with one horse, in her present unfit state, with the weeds and the dull plough parts, that doing it all at once would be over-taxing the horse, but for two short rows it was no problem.

Once through with the fishtail, I tied Lucy up at the barn while Molly munched through her morning hay and went back to pick potatoes. I picked them into a bucket and then transferred them into breathable sacks, taking the last few out with my hand to prevent the soil at the bottom of the bucket from going in the sack. It might seem like double handling to use a bucket and a sack, but a bucket is quicker than picking straight into sacks, but it still isn’t as good as a basket, because with a basket, whether made of woven willow or woven wire, much of the soil falls through the gaps. Once picked over, I got Lucy to pull the cultivator through the soil and Liz picked over it again for potatoes I had missed, and then we repeated the process before bringing the potatoes home on the sledge.

There are a couple of bigger ones baking in the oven right now, along with some slices of baked pumpkin from the garden. I do like having our own produce, even potatoes which are dirt cheap to buy, because ours taste so much better, even better than the expensive ones. But I can’t make an economic case for growing them on my scale because I would scarcely have been paying myself minimum wage, even for picking them, never mind the cost of the seed tubers, the planting and cultivating.

Today, being accused of being uneconomic is almost the ultimate put-down, an insult to our efforts, an indictment of time mis-spent, time wasted. Although I make no claims for my own efficiency, for the time spent growing potatoes on my small scale, where preparing the tool took longer than doing the job, it is not wasted time; it is time well spent. It is time spent constructively and positively because I enjoy it, I produce good food and I am doing it with resources of knowledge and muscle, which really should be the norm the world over.

So if people see me and what I do as being backward and inefficient, I don’t care, there are good reasons for living my life as I do. Anyway, should I take notice when the goal posts have been moved, moved so far they are off the pitch, so even the farms which were classed as large when I was a youth, for example, are now deemed to be too small to be serious concerns? Many of those farms, however, are still functioning, because their specific economies depend on many factors, including on how they are farmed and the ownership of the land. But looking at agriculture more broadly, most farms nowadays are still marginal in terms of today’s economic norms, making a low return on capital and on labour, victims of diminishing returns combined with too much work and degrading landscapes. And we all know it, the supermarkets know it, the oil companies, the chemical companies and politicians. And the farmers? Well, I don’t need to tell you.

But there is an essential question here, one that is rarely asked because you aren’t supposed to doubt the holy cow of modern economics. It was a question I started asking when I was thirteen years old, a year when the farm my father managed made a financial loss. I asked my dad why, ‘wasn’t the harvest very good?’

‘No, the harvest was fine.’ It was then that I started to realise that there were other factors at play, but nonetheless, I drew my own, then tentative conclusions, conclusions that have only been reinforced with time. That was nearly half a century ago and the farm gate prices have continued to diminish while the costs increase.

So, here is the real question – if the way we support our very existence as humans by growing food is uneconomic, or only marginally economic, what is wrong here – is it the farming or is it the economy? There is plenty wrong with modern farming, that’s for sure, but think about any aspect of farming which you don’t like, or think is wrong, and chances are the underlying cause is the economy.

But I don’t want to leave it at that because it is not helpful; although it might be useful to realise the economy is dysfunctional, it doesn’t put food on the table. But in amongst the mega movements of money, the global and national economies, are a multitude of micro-economies, within geographical areas, within friendship groups, within sections of society, and within certain methods and approaches in farming. So while the macro-economy may be pernicious, there are small economies that are holding their own or even flourishing, even in a time of Covid. Tapping into those possibilities may not be easy, but possibilities are a lot more hopeful than seeing yourself as a prey to a defunct and destructive economy. Because farming is a proactively positive activity, at its best it is a glorious activity [though it might not always feel like it]; it is still amongst the best things anyone can do.

Take care,

William

William Castle is a violin maker, farmer & SFJ contributor who lives in Shropshire, England.