Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2010-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Buying a tractor at that time was not unusual. A lot of people were doing it. The young men who had been in the war were used to motor-driven machinery. The government was teaching a new way of farming in night courses for the veterans. Tractors and other farm machines were all of a sudden available as never before, and farmhands were scarcer than before. And so we began a process of cause-and-effect that is hard to understand clearly, even looking back. Did the machines displace the people from the farms, or were the machines drawn onto the farms because the people already were leaving to take up wage work in factories and the building trades and such? Both, I think.

You couldn’t see, back then, that this process would build up and go ever faster, until finally it would ravel out the entire old fabric of family work and exchanges of work among neighbors. The new way of farming was a way of dependence, not on land and creatures and neighbors but on machines and fuel and chemicals of all sorts, bought things, and on the sellers of bought things—which made it finally a dependence on credit. The odd thing was, people just assumed that all the purchasing and borrowing would merely make life easier and better on all the little farms. Most people didn’t dream, then, that before long a lot of little farmers would buy and borrow their way out of farming, and bigger and bigger farmers would be competing with their neighbors (or with doctors from the city) for the available land. The time was going to come—it is clear enough now—when there would not be enough farmers left and the farms of Port William would be as dependent as the farms of California on the seasonal labor of migrant workers.

It is hard, too, to say that anybody was exactly blamable for this—or anybody in particular.

Old farmers like Athey Keith, who understood or at least felt what was happening and what it would cost, were ignored, laughed off by young farmers like Troy Chatham. Young farmers who ought to have understood just didn’t. People followed their own ideas of their own advantage, and it was clear only later, and too late, that everybody’s idea led off in a slightly different direction from everybody else’s. After the Depression and the war and the years of work that they were now beginning to think of as slow and too hard, the country people were trying to get away from demanding circumstances. That was why I bought the Zephyr. We couldn’t quite see at the time, or didn’t want to know, that it was the demanding circumstances that had kept us together.

Troy went into debt and bought his new equipment because he didn’t want to be held back by demanding circumstances. He was young and strong and ambitious. He wanted to be a star. The tractor greatly increased the power and speed of work. With it he could work more land.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.