Slowing Down To Do Better Work

When my childhood friend Dominic made a heroic decision to try organic farming after a layoff, just a year after Nan and I moved to the country, I paid close attention. He stayed at it for the better part of a decade, using antique equipment. His experience taught me a few things that I have brought to my own gardening and tending rural land. 

Of all I learned, one lesson stands out most, a principle I call “slowing down to do better work.” I wish that Dom and I had read Wendell Berry’s essays sooner. Berry’s thinking about local culture, agrarianism, and the proper use of tolls would have saved us time and money while adding pleasure and better stewardship of the land. The scale of Berry’s economic model maps well onto my personal belief that Distributism can replace corporate capitalism in a time of declining human population.

First, though, some specifics before thinking big and long-term. Central Virginians, save during drought, must mow grass close to the house weekly all Spring, Summer, and most of the Fall. Fields get fewer mowings. Dominic noticed how the old-timers near him in Hanover County would mow their fields slowly with the throttles set high. This burns more fuel but means cleaner cuts when creeping over the fields at the pace of a slow walk. We have here the antithesis of “mow blow and go” suburban lawn “care,” nearly always farmed out to a company these days. I see the kids who do this on zero-turn mowers that race over a yard. I suppose the homeowners are too busy after work to tend the yard, off playing golf or chauffeuring the kids (who would be better off in a neighborhood pickup game) to kid-sports events.

Many suburban lawns are often a toxic nightmare, anyhow, so let’s move on to something sane. Most of us are not Berry with his horse-drawn equipment yet the same philosophy can guide our work. For the rural mower who aims to protect and improve the topsoil, the slow-speed, high-rpm method means that grass and weeds are cut cleanly, not torn by the blades (assuming the blades are sharp). Yes, it takes longer but when I gathered and stacked the hay, I found it clean and superior to what I had formerly done in haste. The hay goes to our garden or chicken run, where the birds scratch it around and eat the seeds.

Berry writes about this philosophy of farm work in his essay “Horse Drawn Tools and The Doctrine of Labor Saving.” He decided to forego the purchase of a used 8N Ford tractor and mow with a team of horses and an International horse-drawn mower. He found that his equipment made better hay than did his neighbors’ tractors. His story will perplex those farmers who consider even the 8N a bare-bones machine as outmoded as a horse and best seen in a museum. I can attest that my own 1952 8N is a bulletproof, simple machine that has needed nothing in the 20 years it has been in the family, beyond fluid changes, fuel, two tire tubes, some paint, and a few sets of spark plugs. I learned to plow and mow on the machine and it still does useful chores, including cutting where we gather hay to stack in our barn after it cures.

While I have no plans to farm with horses—we raise chickens, not row-crops—some of Berry’s ideas have influenced me deeply. We looked at expensive hay-baling gear for small square bales. For now, it saves us money to buy straw and store just enough hay that we can manage raking, tedding, and transporting manually; we might get a dry stack the size of an SUV on a good year and need 30 square bales of straw as well.

I contrast this to what our Deere dealer talks about: air-conditioned cabs, round bales so huge we would need hay spears and plastic wrappers to move and season them. No thanks. The last thing we want is more complexity and more unsustainable materials on the farm or going to the landfill. Speed breeds those things, and Berry rightly sees the debt-trap they set for a small farm. 

Some expenses are inevitable, of course. When Dominic was still farming, I encouraged him to find one reliable modern diesel tractor in place of his handful of sometimes unreliable gas-powered antiques. But even with new or nearly new equipment, a farmer should start small. A dealer often tries to sell “just in case” power and attachments. They can be added later. I did recently spend $500 to set our utility tractor and implements up with Deere’s iMatch hitch, so I can hook up the rotary mower in a minute, then drop it to get a different implement. As I age and have arthritis in my left hip, such accommodations have proven to be a godsend.

Yet I waited 14 years to upgrade the tractor, after 600 hours of service. We might all apply Berry’s philosophy that way. It works off the farm too. We are today using AI to enable us to do more work in a shorter span of time, but what gets lost in all that haste? How much poorly-conceived “good enough” work, like poorly-mowed fields, gets completed as a result? Berry states that instead of building good soil, hasty farmers impoverish the land. With generative AI and other purportedly labor-saving technology, what are we doing to improve our minds and spirits? What are we doing to make our clients’ lives and our work better?

The next time you are asked to hurry a job, reply that you want to do good work.

When drafting this post, I wrote it first by hand. Checking Duck Duck Go, I verified the location of an e-text of Berry’s collection of selected essays The World-Destroying Fire, then used that e-text to help me find and annotate passages in my paper copy. No contradiction here at all. Using the technologies of print and Internet together led me to work methodically and do better work. If you want to see what Berry advises, you can find the essays here.

I turned off the AI assistant too.