Wallace Grain & Pea Company, Palouse, WA, September 2014.
farm
Bull.
In April on the Palouse, you might look south and see a staggering sunny day, then turn around north to dark, threatening skies. The winter wheat by this time is vivid and green, but the fields still awaiting garbanzos and lentils remain in cake-brown furrows. You can still smell winter when the clouds pass over you and the wind hits your chest, but when they float past, the sun makes you sweat and pull off your jacket.
“EXPERIENCE in carpenter work need not be extensive in order to build an open-front poultry house. Anyone who has any aptness for learning how to handle tools can soon master the essentials of house building—and will not find the work of construction very difficult.
Right here, in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, two city girls have started in the “poultry business and are making a success of it. They had had no experience with poultry or in carpenter work, but they determined to build their own poultry houses and they did it and did it well. If two inexperienced city girls can frame, board in, and shingle a building and make a good job of it, others can certainly learn to do it and the man or well grown boy who thinks that he can’t, ought to brace up and try.
”
“But even more difficult, our age’s individualism greatly decreases a farm’s chance of long-term success. In historical America, the farm was a family-run enterprise. It was more of a generational lifestyle than a “full-time job.” Land was a highly coveted commodity, and a farmer’s children were expected to carry on the work after their father or mother was too tired or old to continue.
But today, children are no longer expected—nor are they usually encouraged—to follow in their parents’ footsteps. Children are not, modernism tells us, to be saddled with the burdens of their forbears. What does this mean for modern farmers? Simply that, unless one of their children takes a liking to the tedium of farm work, today’s agrarians are on their own. They must conjure up a successful, fruitful farm in their few decades of limber life, or else content themselves with a frugal, arduous future.
”
Field burning.
The death of Andrew.
Jones family shop, Genesee, Idaho.
Old Ford, Jones family shop, Genesee, Idaho.
Turnaround.
Three chairs in the shade.