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 tools 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 century that will see, thank goodness, 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 in 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.

Thinking Little With Wendell Berry

Last year, I picked up my first volume of Wendell Berry's essays. I'd read some of his poetry, but until recently, not the prose.

I found a kindred tractorpunk, even if Berry and his son work their land with animals. I'll point you to one essay in particular, "Think Little," that can be found free of charge at the Web site for the Wendell Berry Center. In particular I want to note a couple of his premises, ones that could be adapted to a Distributist lifestyle even in a big city:

• "The Confucian Great Digest says that the 'chief way for the production of wealth' (and he is talking about real goods, not money) is 'that the producers be many and that the mere consumers be few…. ' ”  To me this means that in a Distributist economy, rather than a Corporatist or Socialist one, we all are makers. We trade, barter, and yes, pay in currency when we must. Above all, we avoid credit.
• "Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato." Stunningly true, even if I struggle to grow white potatoes still. Barbara Dalmrosch said something similar in her wonderful book The Garden Primer: we can make change happen by growing just one thing we like to eat. That could be the potted basil on your apartment balcony. Start little, think little, but imagine big as you influence others.
• "[T]he remedies are not always obvious, though they certainly will always be difficult. They require a new kind of life-harder, more laborious, poorer in luxuries and gadgets, but also, I am certain, richer in meaning and more abundant in real pleasure. To have a healthy environment we will all have to give up things we like; we may even have to give up things we have come to think of as necessities." It's a small task to learn to repair or hold on to common items; I just refurbished my old phone rather than give into Verizon's seductive texts (now blocked) to upgrade it (at more than $250 per month).  A $20 case, some hours removing photos and apps so I could update the OS, and now I have a phone that will last me a few more years without incurring more e-waste or personal bills.
• "Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world." Not odd at all, and certainly less odd than when Berry wrote the essay. Most folks I know keep some kind of garden now, often with local varieties of plants and some food crops. 

I've gotten too critical of urban and suburban life at times. I still could never imagine living in suburbia, though I know some suburbanites who are minimalists and avoid the rat-races of conspicuous consumption and look-just-like-the-Joneses conformity. Moreover, the 'burbs of the 2020s are not those of the 1950s or 70s. You'll find local markets and businesses aplenty, from a halal grocer I frequent next to my locally-owned Yoga studio, to a locally-run bakery or three. I have found cobblers who still fix shoes, tailors who mend clothing, a great local bar, and places that repair small electronics or engines. 

 I'll end with Berry's prescription for change:

"We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility that we have parceled out to the bureaus and the corporations and the specialists, and we are going to have to put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods. We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own."

Can we do this? We have to. The philosophy should appeal to Libertarians of the earth-loving rather than broligarch sort, too. 

You may, like me, have already started. I'll be at a Board of Supervisors meeting next week to mention the economic madness of building soon-to-fail giant data centers in our county. We are involved in a law suit against this plan, a concept voted down by supervisors in the counties north and east of us. If we don't try, we lose by default. Yet if we lose, we keep trying. Onward.

 

The Last X You Will Ever Buy

Sobering, isn't it? At age 65, I confront a strangely comforting dilemma: Many of the thing I buy or do will outlive me. That Deodar Cedar in between us and the road? It will be big when I'm in my 80s, but if climate-change and future residents allow, it will still be growing bigger in the 22nd Century.

If my tree-planting is for the next generation, as well as an "up yours" to the greedy idiocy of denying human-driven climate change, then buying things that last a long time constitutes a statement about economics and frugality. 

Every time we acquire a vehicle, and I'm addicted to clean used vehicles, I say "this one will be here when I ain't." And now when a tool wears out, I start shopping for something that will be in my estate sale. I've written here about the wisdom of getting only vehicles that are friendly for DIY work. That philosophy applies to many things, big and small.

Last week, the first circular saw I'd every owned, a basic Skil purchased in the early 1990s for under $50, gave up the ghost. I could have ordered a new trigger (the motor works still) but stands far from my late father-in-law's Porter-Cable belt sander, a Gibraltar-like device that commands reverence and weighs about 40 pounds. I got a new trigger for that one. It should last another 40 years. The Skil is a cheap tool that lasted a long time because I am careful with my tools, cleaning them and never, ever loaning a tool or vehicle to anyone unless I use it for the borrower.

The saw's replacement is a DeWalt saw. Instead of an $80 Skil, I spent another $100 and got a saw that rips paneling like a hot knife though butter. The handle fits my big hands well, and the trigger design is sure and solid. These features matter after you work with a saw for a few hours.

I really like the DeWalt's corded tools, but I've sworn off the cordless ones because the company changes battery designs regularly and I had to find third-party batteries from China (when I can in these crazy times) to keep a set of 2008 tools running. 

Planned obsolescence violates every fiber of my being.There was a time when a good tool meant a lifetime investment; that's the case for the sander I noted, as well as some of the shop tools we own. My Bosch Miter-box and Delta table saws should survive me (I bought the latter from an estate, in fact). I attended a farm show where a craftsman used a spoke-shave from the middle of the 18th Century; George III was boss here when that tool was made. He told me it would go to a child with an interest in woodworking, as it has been passed down for over 250 years.

I just wonder: if we thought of purchasing as much as possible items that would outlast us, how much healing would that do for the environment? Moreover, how much would it rebuke the purveyors of cheaply made, disposable goods? We would have to save up for a quality item. Wendell Berry made that this sort of durability and longevity tests for a sustainable economy.

When the current stupid era ends with an inevitable economic crash, I wonder if we might return to the Distributist principles of localism, frugality, and durability.

I'll be cutting boards and waiting to see.