Monday, October 15, 2007
Independence
A lot of people that feel the call to work the land, including myself, have a romantic notion about what this lifestyle entails. Many of us think back to a simpler time when you loaded up your family in a covered wagon, drove west until you found unoccupied land, staked a claim, and got busy making a life for yourself. It appeals to our sense of self-reliance and independence, our desire to tame the wild and to create something out of nothing. If only we could get back to that simpler time....
The problem is, that’s not actually how it was. It’s taken a concerted effort on my part to educate myself about the reality of the situation, and to face that reality rather than to work toward a dream that never really existed.
The Little House on the Prairie series of books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, recounts the experiences of the author’s life in the late 1800s, from growing up in the woods of Wisconsin, to being among the first settlers in Oklahoma Territory, through several subsequent moves finally ending in South Dakota. It is a fascinating recollection of the times, written for children but informative enough that adults find value in it too.
The first eight books of the series were written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The ninth was compiled after her death, built from her notes. It is in reading this book that one gets a sense that the all previous books in the series have been sanitized, to make them more palatable for popular consumption. In the first eight books of the series, the reader learns about scary but largely harmless run-ins with bears, panthers, Indians, locusts, and harsh winters. Illnesses are mentioned but largely glossed over. Even when scarlet fever causes Laura’s sister to go blind, it is merely a challenge to met and overcome by the good-natured family. In the final book, set in South Dakota after Laura has gotten married, we learn of dysentery crippling her husband, her infant son dying from an unknown illness, and three straight years of crop failures causing near bankruptcy. After having the harsh reality laid out explicitly in this book, it is much easier to read between the lines in the rest of the series.
Life on the frontier was not easy. One gets the impression that even then there was a romantic vision of what life on the frontier was like. If memory serves me, in order for a family to secure their ownership of a land claim, they had to live on the claim for the majority of each year for each of five consecutive years and they had to raise a significant crop in three of those five years. A huge fraction of people failed and went back east. However, a flood of people from the east seeing the opportunity for wealth immediately took their places. Many who did succeed lived in squalor and hardship as they scraped a living out of an unknown land. As more and more people moved in, even the wild sources of food, game and edible wild plants, were driven out or consumed.
Within fifty years of it’s settlement, the entire area would be devastated by the droughts and windstorms of the 1930’s, a consequence of heavy settlement and tillage in an ecosystem and climate not exactly suitable for the farming techniques that the settlers brought with them. The white man was completely new to the area, and had no institutional knowledge of how to live in their new surroundings. There is a reason the region never became densely populated by Indians.
Neither were the settlers truly independent. Independence from one another was not even on their minds. They helped each other build houses, took care of each other’s families and livestock during times of illness, and pooled food stores in times of scarcity. Dependence on imported goods was a fact of life, including machinery and parts, lumber, and food.
All of this, as well as this post by Kim and the subsequent comments, have made me reevaluate what I mean by saying I want to be independent. True self-sufficiency in our modern world is incredibly difficult to accomplish, if one intends to maintain something resembling our current standard of living. Look at fuel, or example. For transportation, one could conceivably produce one’s own fuel by growing grain and distilling ethanol. However, that requires land, a tractor that also runs on ethanol, equipment, spare parts for that equipment, and a tremendous amount of time. Heating one’s home could likewise be done with wood, if one has the time and is willing to put up with the inefficiencies. Electrical independence is likewise possible with a proper water, solar, or wind apparatus… until something breaks.
The independence I desire is less than that. Certain aspects, such as food independence, are driven by the great expense of acquiring food produced by others that is up to our standards. Other aspects, like haying with horses, is driven by the inability to hire someone reliable to do the job for us, and the simple economic fact that horses are cheaper and easier to maintain on a small acreage than a tractor. Still others, like the strong desire to be self-employed and out of debt, come out of my desire to be beholden to no one.
What I don’t expect to do it learn to smelt, cast, and machine to make my own mower blades. Among other things.
Individuals in our economy learn to specialize, because there is much to be gained by doing so. I have skills and equipment that allow me to produce item X with less effort than you can, so you trade me item Y that you produce more efficiently than I can, for item X. We both gain.
Several things push me to buck this specialization trend somewhat, to make investments in equipment and time to do and produce many different things. Two related items are my enjoyment of a wide variety of work and a rather low monetary value on my leisure time, thus making me more willing to spend my own time to produce certain things rather than paying someone else to do it for me. Rather than being a pure economic calculation, I weight certain processes toward doing things myself because of a non-economic factor - the enjoyment I get from doing it. Another is the fact that items of the quality that my family insists upon, particularly food items, are luxuries in our current marketplace, meaning the price is high and there is even more economic incentive for me to produce those things myself.
Not everyone is going to make the same decisions I am, because some people would rather watch football than till their garden, and others would rather change the brake pads in their car than mend a fence. None of these choices are wrong.
One thing that has frustrated me for a long time, though reading Little House on the Prairie and other books have tempered it somewhat, is the fact that land prices have been driven up to the point that supporting a family via cash farming is virtually impossible on a small scale. Simple economics dictate that once industrialization takes hold, commodity prices adjust to the level of the new most efficient method of production. Therefore, anyone unable to farm thousands of acres with equipment costing in the hundreds of thousands of dollars is unable to compete. Rightly so, if that method of production is creating a product that is in demand.
To me, farming comes with many non-economic benefits to one’s lifestyle. I want my children to grow up in a rural environment, minimally exposed to the pressures of pop culture, and heavily exposed to the virtues of hard work and the fruits of one’s labor. The economics of that lifestyle do not drive that decision, but they do remain as constraints. We must still be able to feed, clothe, and house ourselves.
Between population growth and rising incomes due to families with two working parents, land prices have risen dramatically. With industrialization, farm commodity prices have fallen dramatically. The combination of these things have made it extremely difficult for a small farmer to make a living on their land. I suppose in aggregate nothing has really changed, as it was never easy to make a living off the land, we just face different challenges now than what people used to face. I’ve heard it said that one can either pay a mortgage or a salary on a small farm, but not both. I can say that in my experience this is true, as the only people I’ve seen with even moderate success making a small farm work are people that have inherited land, thus eliminating the mortgage expense. Even then, they have to be willing to live within extremely limited means for a very long time. Possibly permanently.
The ultimate dream of independence held by many people that want to get back to the land may be modeled on something that never was and likely never will be for all but a few exceptionally lucky or skilled individuals. The first step in making peace with the world is to understand how one’s expectations conflict with reality. The second step is to take the good and leave the bad, to accept reality as it is, and to adjust one’s expectations. I’m working on it.
Comments
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Having spent two years on a very small (1 mile x 200 yards) island in one of the more remote places in the Pacific I can tell you that being totally self suficiant is a MAJOR pain in the ass. Fun, rewarding and challenging? Hell yes, but two years was just fine. I have become very fond of doctors, TV and the internet and a lot less fond of reef fish, breadfruit and home made fish hooks! The Peace Corps does not lie when they say it’s the toughest job you will ever love.
Dbltap | 10/15/2007 12:29 PM CDT -
The notion of living off the land independently is a fantasy. It never did happen. Just like the cowboy stuff never happened that way. Cowboys and robbers were not absolutely good or absolutely bad… one day the bad guy was the sheriff and the next he was a bank robber again, or had his hand in the till.
Sure it is possible to live off the land, if you want ALL that was included in that: no doctors, no medicines, no electricity/power, no running water, and the disease, starvation, and morbidity rate stats that go with that choice.
Run, don’t walk to your local video store to rent/watch or buy Heartland. That is probably as close to accurate as you’re going to get with respect to the “romantic times” of living off the land.
There was a reason why people moved off the land and into towns/cities. There was a reason people chose industrialization. That film brings it home. Then watch the The Emigrants (1972) or Babette’s Feast for takes on what the people were like and what normal life was all about. For the contrast of popular fiction, which romanticized the time, compare The Yearling (1946) with Cross Creek (1983).
We’ve have similar discussions with respect to modern medicine. Modern medicine is awful, except when compared to the alternative. Death was common. Death in childbirth was frequent. Pain and illness is the norm… healthy lives are the new and abnormal and I’ll choose the latter, thank you! Celebrating your child’s first birthday, a miracle.
There is no magic place. There is no way to escape it all, and we all make little trade offs of growing our own veggies on one extreme to enjoying the convenience of Bird’s Eye on the other. We decide to cook at home or eat out. We decide to repair our own cars or read a book instead. We decide to fend for ourselves or work cooperatively within a larger group for the safety and security it provides. Three guesses as to who lives longer/better (and the first two don’t count).
Life is full of those trade offs and as long as we’re aware that every choice we make has pros and cons, and there is no “pro only” choice… we can still place our names in the sane column.
I often ask people, when they say that some new political ideology, some other panacea, some life style choice, or miracle philosophy will save us all… “OK, show me once… show me where in the world, for 20, 50 or 100 years where that worked and was as you described, not as you imagined it to be… you have 10,000 years of recorded history from which to pull your example.”
There isn’t one. No matter what period or example is chosen, it never really existed.
We are, in our mixed up, pop culturally overloaded, busy, stressed out, in debt, crime infested, reactions to good medicine and bad, the happiest, healthiest, and most prosperous people in all of history.
We forget that and we should not. Independence and freedom is a state of mind, not of being.
Mrs. du Toit | 10/15/2007 01:35 PM CDT -
The “smelting iron” point is really the key. As Mrs. du Toit points out above, no one can be truly independent unless, in Hobbes’s words, his life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” There just isn’t time, without division of labor, to produce the iron to make the tools to make the tools to make the mower blade, axe head, or even axe handle.
You mention “take the good, leave the bad.” I personally believe there are some absolute goods (e.g. personal responsibility, honesty, honor, carrying your own weight, etc). Other things I may find more beneficial to me than you do.
What I really want is an independence of choice so I can determine which good to take and where to specialize or not.
Weetabix | 10/19/2007 06:03 AM CDT
