Changes
in Farming Life: Part 1
by Michael Carey
[Editors note: This is presentation is an excerpt from a speech Michael Carey delivered to the Montgomery County Historical Society in Red Oak, on the occasion of the dedication of the Nims barn on the Montgomery County Historical Society Grounds.]
It seems that the descendants
of the European pioneers that once pushed out the Indians and dug up the prairie
are themselves now being dug up and pushed out themselves by the very same impersonal
economic forces that brought their ancestors in.
Somewhere, sometime
there will have to be a more people-oriented adjustment, but it is not yet on
the horizon. The recent push for smaller sustainable agricultural acreages is
a positive sign, but not yet an economically significant movement.
Wes Jackson says that
the ripping of human consciousness from the land is as great or greater a world
tragedy than the ripping of the prairie and the burning of the rain forest.
The less people there are on the land, the less people know it and have an intimate
relationship with it so that it will sustain them and them it.
As farms get larger, even the farmer's connections to every acre of his ground become more tenuous. Sitting in his air-conditioned computerized tractor, he is no longer really at one with the air currents that his crops are breathing. He is literally in a sense in a different world. One of human making. Still, I as a farmer can literally "go to the well too often";
I can literally "make hay while the sun shines";
my chickens can literally "fly the coop",
I can literally dig my roots around our house and find remnants of the possessions of my wife's ancestors. I am in a very primal way connected to the ground that sustains life and brought it into the world in the first place. As technology and modern life takes people away from the land, it takes them away from themselves, their bodies, even their own myths and language. What is culture literally but living things that die and decompose to become fertile ground again? Even the word culture loses its meaning when people leave the land.
Poet and farmer Michael Carey
is from Farragut in Southwest Iowa. He hosts our weekly sampling of poetry taken
from the state’s fertile literary soil. The Humanities Iowa radio program,
called “Voices from the Prairie,” can be heard Saturday mornings on
KMA 960 AM radio in Shenandoah and FM 90.9 KUNI radio in Cedar Falls as well
as translator stations throughout the state. Michael is also a member of our
Humanities Iowa Speakers Bureau. For more information about his presentations
contact our office at 319-335-4153.