Friday, November 14, 2014

Damn Farm Mechanization!

Farms are not just places. They are not land title or economic theory.

They are a continuum.

Dinosaurs and mammoths once roamed the farms I hunt, followed by native Americans, African Americans, and European Americans who fought, bled, cried, and died in the fields, forests and hedgerows where I now hunt my dogs.

The stones at the edges of my fields were not pushed there by a tractor. They were picked up or dug out by hand, rolled and stacked onto wooden sledges, and pulled to their current location by sweating men working teams of horses.

I dig my dogs in fields and forests where the Civil War was fought.

In my part of America, farm labor is not an abstraction. It is a wound that has healed, but the scars still remain.

I have been told that we used to treat our animals better than we do today and that our food once tasted better too.

Not true.

But saying it is one thing, while showing it is another.

And so I have decided to start an occasional pictorial series on American farms with each series showcasing one crop or animal, farmed or raised all over the U.S, with the pictures organized in chronological order.

We will start with cotton.


Cotton picking, Georgia, 1865-70


Cotton picking, Texas, 1907


Cotton picking, Oklahoma, 1916


Cotton, crop dusting for the new boll weevil , 1928


Cotton pickers and wagons, Tennessee, 1931


Cotton field plowing, South Carolina, 1932


Child cotton pickers, Arkansas, fall harvest, 1935.


John Rust and the first cotton picking machine, 1937


Cotton labor and wagon, Georgia, 1941


Cotton picking machine loads wagon, Georgia, 1956


Cotton weeding with overseer, Alabama: 1970


Weeding cotton fields, Mississippi, 1973


Loading cotton from machines, Mississippi, 1995


Cotton bales, North Carolina, 1990


Cotton, tractor spraying, Mississippi, 1991


Mechanical cotton picker, California, 1999


Spraying cotton fields, Mississippi, 2000


I do not begrudge farmers their air-conditioned cabs from which they can now plow, harvest and spray their fields to kill weevils and worms.

Nor do I beat my breast in anguish because genetically modified crops may soon make spraying pesticides a thing of the past.

I do not romanticize hoeing long rows by hand, nor do I worry too much about the impact that glyphosate (RoundUp) has on wildlife.

You see, America's farms now have more deer on them that at any time in the last 100 years.

They also have more turkey, fox, raccoon, duck and geese.

And the farms are strong.

They produce more hay, corn, soybean, wheat, chicken, pigs, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk and beef than ever before.

And because they produce so much, more land is now allowed to lie fallow.

Look at the pictures above.

What farm do you want to work on?

Which one is more productive?

Which one has more wildlife?'

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