Making Hay (1997)
The following story was in the paper the other day:
Number Of U.S. Farms Smallest Since 1850
By Barbara Hagenbaugh (2/02/99)
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Technology and massive consolidation in agriculture has squeezed
the number of
farms in the United States to its smallest level since before the
Civil War, the
U.S. Agriculture Department said Monday.
There were 1.912 million farms in 1997, down slightly from 1992.
The number of
farms is the lowest since 1850 when 1.4 million farms were counted
in the United
States, Agriculture Department officials said.
I mention this in connection with Verlyn Klinkenborg's amusing memoir "Making Hay". Klinkenborg worked on his Uncles' farms during the summers when he was growing up. Now, a grown man, he goes back to help them with the season's haying.
Let's get one thing straight, right off the bat, Verlyn Klinkenborg loves hay; I mean loves it. Sometimes you actually get the feeling that he's sorry he wasn't born a bovine:
The smell of newmown hay is an agricultural talisman
that survives in our language even though
most of its speakers are now pent in populous cities
far from 'The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or
kine,/Or Dairy.' Alfalfa is not the antique hay
crop of peasant Europe, but its odor is rich enough to
compete with that of the freshly scythed mix of
grasses in traditional hays. Mowing into those
pockets of scent brought to mind long hours of vacation
driving when, in the early sixties, my
family came home to Iowa after fishing in Colorado.
Sleep was disturbed only when we slowed for
the Nebraska towns where they dehydrated alfalfa
in great flamelit plants and the night filled with
the overpowering heaviness of the crop. That this
was only the odor of cattle feed seemed
outrageous, then and now.
-----------------------------------------
As if to make some private point about means and
ends, God gave kine four stomachs and a diet of
hay, and he made them chew each mouthful twice.
To man he gave a single stomach and an
indiscriminate palate, but he made him take his
alfalfa as pre-macerated pellets or plastic-coffined
tussocks of sprouts. Man seems omnivorous until
you consider the things he can't digest, like tender
oak-leaf shoots or lime-green lichen or sweet-smelling
greenchop. It's one of those facts of life: if
you want to eat alfalfa baled in early bloom, you
have to be built like a fermentation vat on hooves.
That kind of amusing prose, a wealth of information about alfalfa and
a wry look at a vanishing way of life, all combine to make this a unique
and worthwhile read.
(Reviewed:01-Sep-98)
Grade: (C+)
