been called a lot of names maybe so called isn't so bad.

So What Does it Take to be a So Called Farmer Today?

And do I really want to be one?

Part One

     I was recently accused of being a so called farmer and it kind of got me thinking, and I came to some conclusions that if I was supposed to be a farmer today that depended wholly on farm income to exist , would I want to be that person? I would say most assuredly not. With most professions, things change as technology improves and given enough years the profession of your choice barely resembles the same practice years before, when my great grandfather and my grandpa were farming. This is no different for farming than any other profession.

     My great grandfather was a road tender and farmer and a sawyer to make ends meet in Monroe County in southern Ohio. He had the first steam engine tractor in Monroe County and would travel from farm to farm threshing wheat. Back then one neighbor would help the other on major jobs like the threshing of wheat. Usually the owner of the power plant would be paid for his services and after the wheat was threshed, the thresher would hook his thresher to the steam engine and move to the next farm and start again. You knew who your neighbors were as you worked with them daily in the summer during threshing times and ate dinner at their tables and told stories till dark, then took team of horses, whatever family you had brought along to help with threshing and wagon and went home , did some chores and was in bed early to get up early the next day and be back  in the field throwing shocks of wheat that were heaped in piles drying in the sun on to wagons to be taken to the thresher.  The thresher would separate the wheat from the chaff or straw and pile the straw in a huge mound while the wheat would be bagged for seed next year or to be ground and used to make bread for the table or to be fed to livestock. This also worked for oats and other cereal grains.

these pics were taken at algonquin mill , petersburg landing.

    When the threshing was done then they would be milling lumber for building houses, barns , covered bridges , or stores, as wood was the most commonly used building material and readily available in the hills down there in Monroe county where money was tight and jobs even harder to find. Grandpa used to take a team of horses out into the woods and cut down a tree and haul it up out of the woods and back to the mill where the steam engine would now be parked on the hill above the old farmstead  at a sawmill it would power.  After a pile accumulated they would spend a day sawing them into lumber for sale to neighbors or the county for different projects going on.

covered bridge at lanternman's mill 

    All the while every farm had a couple of cows, a team of horses, chickens , pigs, and  a couple of cats and a lot of kids to help with all that needed done to keep a family going in those days just before the depression. The only major difference the depression had on those back then, was that you traded more labor for those things you didn’t have, money was tight an little to go around , instead labor was plenty as most were out of luck and in a hard place , so bartering allowed them to get by.  An old friend recently told me that he never knew they were poor back then as he said everyone was in the same shape so being poor was normal.

    My great grandpa also tended roads back then for the state of Ohio. There were very little paved roads and the automobiles were different and rugged, used to the hard dirt roads that would jar them till they would squeak and squeal as they went down a road bouncing from rut to rut with fenders a flapping. Today’s cars would hardly last if faced with driving on some of those roads back then. It was nothing to climb down in a creek and cross it as opposed to driving over a bridge, in some places down there in Monroe county, you can still find crossings like these people still use. High water would make the crossing obsolete and forcing you to return to where you came from, or forcing you to detour.

      Mud holes were a common place feature of roads back then and my great Uncle Dewey told me a story about how him and a friend of his thought they would play a trick on this old guy who would sit by a mud hole waiting for cars to pass by charging them a quarter to hook up to his team of horses before crossing the mud hole , or if you felt lucky you could venture on your own with your car into the mud hole and hopefully you could make it to the other side with your old tin Lizzy and pay nothing. But if he had to hook on to you in the middle the charge was a 1 dollar, a lot of money back then.  

      Folks kinda thought he was slow, including my uncle who thought he would play a trick on the old guy by asking him if he was going to be around later that night when he came back through. My uncle and his buddy had planned on doing some celebrating, and they were going over into the other county because Monroe had been a dry county for years. They really had no intention driving drunk, even back then, and had planned on spending the night in the town they were visiting. My uncle asked if he would be there at the mud hole to pull them on through.  

     The old farmer looked at him and spit a wad of backy juice on the ground and asked suspiciously how long it would be before they came back through as he was hooking their vehicle up to pull them through the mud hole.

    My uncle said “Maybe somewhere between 10 and 12 at the latest.”

   The old farmer took his quarter from my uncle and eyed it suspiciously as if he had just made it and after assuring it was real said; yes for sure he would be around. The old farmer at that said “Get up there Sadie.” And at that the horses took up the slack in the chain and the horses and car started slogging through the mud to the other side.

       As my uncle sat there comfortably in the seat of his car, he started wondering, just what it was that this old guy was going to do till midnight to keep himself busy.  After reaching the other side of the mud hole and as the old farmer was unhooking the chain and just before my uncle pulled away, he asked the old farmer just what he was going to do between now and later on tonight to keep himself busy till they supposedly returned to the mud hole to be pulled through again. The old farmer looked at them, and leaned his dirty sweaty body up against the fender of his car and smiled a backy juice toothless grin and said.

     “Haul water.”

      This joke was a time capsule of what the roads were like back then, and it was my great grandpa’s job to drag the roads with wooden drags smoothing out the humps and making it so that cars could pass as well as horses and carriages or the old farm wagon. The roads were still your main system of transportation in areas like this. It was the way to town. How the doctor came to your house when you were sick. Or how the neighbors would come to help at threshing time and keeping them passable even in the winter was still a very important job, as it is today.

     Even back then to be a farmer meant you had to do a lot of things to just make a go of life and have anything. Course back then almost everybody was a farmer to an extent as very few people lived in the city and even those that id still had a chicken coop or a pig sty in the back yard. What one farmer didn’t grow like hogs or cattle, another did and traded him for eggs or corn his family didn’t. Stores only sold the staples of flour, lard , sugar and items like that you needed,  or those things you couldn’t grow on your own , or tools and seed to grow them with.

    Farmers worked from the time they could walk till the day they died, and many times it wasn’t that long as compared to today. Farmers would come down with pneumonia or other diseases for which there was no cure then and soon the whole family structure was in peril. Many times kids were parceled out to other family members to finish raising them after the head of the family or the mother was wiped out from disease.

this pic and one above is of lanterman's mill youngstown , oh. 

      It wasn’t easy being a farmer back then any more than it is now. Only now it is whole lot different. Technology has allowed us to live longer and to plant smarter with machines costing hundreds of thousands of dollars planting seeds that are also of a smart technology. Tomorrow I will go into more of what it takes to be a so called farmer of today. In fact this will be part one of three part series I intend on writing , with the last part exploring why I could care less if I am a so called farmer.