I was born in 1948 into a farming family. My uncle, my mother’s brother, was the family member who had more cows than the rest of us. All the family farms were simple in their operation and completely rural in their location. My uncle’s farm was the largest at 180 acres, and in the 1950’s and 1960’s I spent a considerable amount of time being, and eventually working there.
Uncle was primarily a dairy farmer who also grew 60 acres of tobacco as his cash crop, which kept him afloat as a farmer for half a century, from 1930 until his death in 1983. In the early 1950’s traveling salesmen were already visiting and selling their farming products into the rural and often isolated farm communities in western Kentucky and southern Indiana.
By 1955, when I was seven years old my uncle the dairy farmer started operating a cow manure methane contraption he bought from one of those traveling salesmen. It was a simple 1950’s methane to electricity setup that anyone then, or now, could easily make up. In the 1950’s the electricity from the cow manure powered all the barn and house lights, outdoor lighting, trickle charged batteries, and by the 1960’s was enhanced to provide electricity for the milking machines that uncle bought to switch from hand milking because of lack of labor in our rural area.
The manure from the cows was composted, along with vegetable matter from the 20 acre vegetable garden, the small soybean field, and ditch cuttings along the road. This was spread by tractor on all the fields, vegetable, soybean and tobacco. Water for the entire operation came from two wells on the property, of which in the 1950’s the well for the dairy and farm animals drew its power from a combination of methane and solar. Yes, solar in the 1950’s. There was something on the barn roof that did something with sunlight, or something from the heat of the sunlight, that got converted to electricity. It too was very simple and was purchased from one of those traveling farming community salesmen.
Cows grazed in the fields as long as seasonal weather permitted, and during the cold winter months in Indiana, cows were fed in the shovel fed coal furnace heated barn, and went outside at their leisure, which by my observation was most of the time, playing and standing in the snow when they could be inside the warmer barn.
Uncle and his wife had a vegetable stand out front of their property on the rural county road where they displayed the vegetables from the garden, and sold them from mid-spring into the late fall. Sometimes my aunt stood there in the stand, but most of the time with the prices hand written and posted, you filled the bag or box you brought, and left the money in an old cigar box behind the counter.
Cream from some of the milk was separated from the milk by a hand operated cream separator, where you poured the milk and cranked the machine and the cream went one way out and the milk went the other way. In this way Uncle sold cream and milk to a local dairy products supplier and also keep plenty for himself. He made some simple hard cheeses and sold it in his vegetable stand. The cash crop that kept the farm going for over 50 years, the tobacco, was hand cut, pulled on a large cart by the farm tractor and hung in an old barn near the 720 square foot farm house they lived in.
This story of my relatives’ simple farms has a point to make. Uncles farm, the cows, the few pigs, the chickens, the soybean and tobacco fields were a three person operation, with sometimes help from a fourth person during harvest season. We often hear how ISKCON is struggling with its cows and farms to live simply and conduct the business of farming. But by 1955, sixty years ago, my uncle who was born into poverty, never completed grade school because he had to help his father on his family farm, had created a self-sufficient farm all by himself. He was getting all of their electricity from methane and the sun because there were no electric power lines where he lived. He was fertilizing his fields organically, growing organic crops, and spraying a detergent solution my mother invented on 20 acres of vegetables to keep bugs off them.
With a farm hand they were hand milking 85 cows every morning and evening until the equipment was purchased to milk them, which often was more work than hand milking with all the time it took to put it on the cows, take it off, and then clean it. But that was what the local dairy supplier demanded to keep buying milk. There were always bulls on the farm, and in the spring instead of a tractor on the twenty acre vegetable garden you could see my uncle’s wife behind two big well trained bulls, walking an old iron plow through the field. My aunt swore that plowing the vegetable garden with an iron plow was the secret behind her robust garden.
The tomatoes seemed to come from heaven. Soybeans were harvested using the tractor, but vegetables and tobacco were hand cut and hand loaded onto the tractor pulled carts. Vegetables and some fruit from trees were hand canned for the winter and the large amount left was sold, as were homemade dairy products, soybeans, tobacco, and as was the need during that time with small struggling farms, the old dairy cows were unfortunately sold too, mostly to be made into shoes, belts and other leather products.
Of particular note, these small farm families of husband and wife, and one or two poorly paid farm hands, worked from five in the morning until early evening every day but Sunday. They did everything themselves, from fixing the equipment, to improving the farm, to planting and taking in the crops, and looking after the animals.
ISKCON farms have some great successes, and some great failures too, but with the money ISKCON now has, and the large congregation of young devotees, it has tremendous opportunity for self-sufficient farms. The idea that the modern age has changed the opportunity for simple living and high thinking on farms is not true. Self-sufficiency as it was on 1950’s farms could be easily replicated today by any young and very hard working devotee couple.
I liked the no electricity and the kerosene lamps of my early childhood, and most of all I miss those luscious organic tomatoes from heaven.
Source: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=13011
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