Bringing It to the Table (17 page)

The Amish have steadfastly subordinated economic value to the values of religion and community. What is too readily overlooked by a secular, exploitive society is that their ways of doing this are not “empty gestures” and are not “backward.” In the first place, these ways have kept the communities intact through many varieties of hard times. In the second place, they conserve the land. In the third place, they yield economic benefits. The community, the religious fellowship, has many kinds of value, and among them is economic value. It is the result of the practice of neighborliness, and of the practice of stewardship. What moved me most, what I liked best, in those days we spent with Bill Yoder
was the sense of the continuity of the community in his dealings with his children and in their dealings with their children.

Bill has helped his sons financially so far as he has been able. He has helped them with his work. He has helped them by sharing what he has—lending a stallion, say, at breeding time, or lending a team. And he helps them by buying good pieces of equipment that come up for sale. “If he ever gets any money,” he says of one of the boys, for whom he has bought an implement, “he’ll pay me for it. If he don’t, he’ll just use it.” He has been their teacher, and he remains their advisor. But he does not stand before them as a domineering patriarch or “authority figure.” He seems to speak, rather, as a representative of family and community experience. In their respect for him, his sons respect their tradition. They are glad for his help, advice, and example, but there is nothing servile in this. It seems to be given and taken in a kind of familial friendship, respect going both ways.

Everywhere we went, when school was not in session, the children were at the barns, helping with the work, watching, listening, learning to farm in the way it is best learned. Wilbur told us that his eleven-year-old son had cultivated twenty-three acres of corn last year with a team and a riding cultivator. That reminded Bill of the way he taught Wilbur to do the same job.

Wilbur was little then, and he loved to sit in his father’s lap and drive the team while Bill worked the cultivator. If Wilbur could drive, Bill thought, he could do the rest of it. So he got off and shortened the stirrups so the boy could reach them with his feet. Wilbur started the team, and within a few steps began plowing up the corn.

“Whoa!” he said.

And Bill, who was walking behind him, said, “Come up!”

And it went that way for a little bit:

“Whoa!”

“Come up!”

And then Wilbur started to cry, and Bill said:

“Don’t cry! Go ahead!”

(1985)

A
T THE 1982 Draft Horse Sale in Columbus, Ohio, Maury Telleen summoned me over to the group of horsemen with whom he was talking: “Come here,” he said, “I want you to hear this.” One of those horsemen was Lancie Clippinger, and what Maury wanted me to hear was the story of Lancie’s corn crop of the year before.

The story, which Lancie obligingly told again, was as interesting to me as Maury had expected it to be. Lancie, that year, had planted forty acres of corn; he had also bred forty gilts that he had raised so that their pigs would be ready to feed when the corn would be ripe. The gilts produced 360 pigs, an average of nine per head. When the corn was ready for harvest, Lancie divided off a strip of the field with an electric fence and turned in the 360 shoats. After the shoats had fed on that strip for a while, Lancie opened a new strip for them. He then picked the strip where they had just fed. In that way, he fattened his 360 shoats and also harvested all the corn he needed for his other stock.

The shoats brought $40,000. Lancie’s expenses had been for seed corn, 275 pounds of fertilizer per acre, and one quart per acre of herbicide. He did not say what the total costs amounted to, but it was clear
enough that his net income from the forty acres of corn had been high, in a year when the corn itself would have brought perhaps two dollars a bushel.

At the end of the story, I remember, Lancie and Maury had a conversation that went about like this:

“Do you farrow your sows in a farrowing house?”

“No.”

“Oh, you do it in huts, then?”

“No, I have a field I turn them out in. It has plenty of shade and water. And I see them every day.”

Here was an intelligent man, obviously, who knew the value of doing his own thinking and paying attention, who understood clearly that the profit is in the difference between costs and earnings, and who proceeded directly to minimize his costs. In a time when hog farmers often spend many thousands of dollars on highly specialized housing and equipment, Lancie’s “hog operation” consisted almost entirely of hogs. His principal outlays otherwise were for the farm itself and for fencing. But what struck me most, I think, was the way he had employed nature and the hogs themselves to his own advantage. The bred sows needed plenty of shade, water, and room for exercise; Lancie provided those things, and nature did the rest. He also supplied his own care and attention, which came free; they did not have to be purchased at an inflated cost from an industrial supplier. And then, instead of harvesting his corn mechanically, hauling it, storing it, grinding it, and hauling it to his shoats, he let the shoats harvest and grind it for themselves. He had the use of the whole hog, whereas in a “confinement operation,” the hog’s feet, teeth, and eyes have virtually no use and produce no profit.

At the next Columbus Sale, I hunted Lancie up, and again we spent a long time talking. We talked about draft horses, of course, but also about milk cows and dairying. And that part of our conversation interested me about as much as the hog story had the year before. What so impressed
me was Lancie’s belief that there is a limit to the number of cows that a dairy farmer can manage well; he thought the maximum number to be about twenty-five: “If a fellow milks twenty-five cows, he’ll
see
them all.” If he milks more than that, Lancie said, even though he may touch them all, he will not
see
them all. As in Lancie’s account of his corn crop and the 360 shoats, the emphasis here was on the importance of seeing, of paying attention. That this is important economically, he made clear in something he said to me later: “You can take care of twenty or twenty-five cows and do it right. More, you’re overlooking things that cost you money.” It is necessary, Lancie thinks, to limit the scale of operation, not only in dairying, but in all other enterprises on the farm because proper scale permits a correct balance between work and care. The distinction he was making, it seemed to me, was between work, as it has been understood traditionally on the farm, and processing, as it is understood in industry.

Those two conversations stayed in my mind, proving useful many times in my effort to understand the troubles developing in our agricultural economy. I knew that Lancie Clippinger was one of the best farmers of the old school, and I promised myself that I would visit him at his farm, which I was finally able to do in October 1985.

The farm is on somewhat rolling land, surrounded by woodlots and brushy fencerows, so that it has a little of the feeling of a large forest clearing. There are 175 acres, of which about 135 are cropped; the rest are in permanent pasture and woods. Although conveniently close to the state road, the farm is at the end of a lane, set off to itself. It is pretty and quiet, a pleasant place to live and to farm, as well as to visit. Lancie and his wife, Verna Bell, bought the place and moved there in the fall of 1971.

When my wife and I drove into the yard, Kathy, one of Lancie’s granddaughters, who had evidently been watching for us, came out of the house to meet us. She took us out through the barn lot to a granary
where Lancie, his son Keith, and Sherri, another granddaughter, were sacking some oats. We waited, talking with Kathy, while they finished the job, and then we went with Lancie and Keith to look at the horses.

Lancie keeps only geldings, buying them at sales as weanlings, raising and breaking them, selling them, and then replacing them with new colts. When we were there, he had nine head: a pair of black Percherons, a handsome crossbred bay with black mane and tail, and six Belgians. Though he prefers Percherons, he does not specialize; at the sales, his only aim is to buy “colts that look like they’ll grow into good big horses.” He wants them big because the big ones bring the best prices, but, like nearly all draft horse people who use their horses, he would rather have smaller ones—fifteen hundred pounds or so—if he were keeping them only to work.

The horses he led out for us were in prime condition, and he had been right about them: They had, sure enough, grown into good big ones. These horses may be destined for pulling contests and show hitches, but while they are at Lancie’s they put in a lot of time at farm work—they work their way through school, you might say. Like so many farmers of his time, Lancie once made the change from horses to tractors, but with him this did not last long. He was without horses “for a little while” in the seventies, and after that he began to use them again. Now he uses the horses for “just about everything” except cutting and baling his hay and picking his corn. Last spring he used his big tractor only two days. The last time he went to use it, it wouldn’t start, and he left it sitting in the shed; it was still sitting there at the time of our visit.

Part of the justification for the return to the use of horses is economic. When he was doing all his work with tractors, Lancie’s fuel bill was $6,000 a year; now it is about $2,000. Since the horses themselves are a profit-making enterprise on this farm, the $4,000 they save on fuel is money in the bank. But the economic reason is not the only one: “Pleasure,” Lancie says, “is a big part of it.” At the year’s end, his bank
account will show a difference that the horses have made, but day by day his reason for working them is that he
likes
to.

He does not need nine horses in order to do his farming. He has so many because he needs to keep replacements on hand for the horses he sells. He aims, he says, to sell “two or three or four horses every year.” To farm his 175 acres, he needs only four good geldings, although he would probably like to keep five, in case he needed a spare. With four horses on his grain drill, he can plant fifteen or twenty acres in a day. He uses four horses also on an eight-foot tandem disk and a springtooth harrow, and he can plant twelve or fifteen acres of corn a day “and not half try.”

In plowing, he goes by the old rule of thumb that you can plow an acre per horse per day, provided the horses are in hard condition. “If you start at seven in the morning and stay there the way you ought to,” he says, “you can plow three acres a day with three horses.” That is what he does, and he does it with a walking plow because, he says, it is easier to walk than to ride. That, of course, is hardly a popular opinion, and Lancie is amused by the surprise it sometimes causes.

One spring, he says, after he had started plowing, he ordered some lime. When the trucker brought the first load, he stopped by the house to ask where to spread it. Mrs. Clippinger told him that Lancie was plowing, and pointed out to the field where Lancie could be seen walking in the furrow behind his plow and team. The trucker was astonished: “Even the
Amish
ride!”

In 1936, Lancie remembers, he plowed a hundred acres, sixty of them in sod, with two horses, Bob and Joe. Together, that team weighed about thirty-five hundred pounds. They were blacks. Lancie had been logging with them before he started plowing, and they were in good shape, ready to go. They plowed two acres a day, six days a week, for nearly nine weeks. It is the sort of thing, one guesses, that could have been done only because all the conditions were right: a strong young man, a tough team,
a good season. “Looked like, back then, there wasn’t any bad weather,” Lancie says, laughing. “You could work all the time.”

This farmer’s extensive use of live horsepower is possible because his farm is the right size for it and because a sensible rotation of crops both reduces the acreage to be plowed each year and distributes the other field work so that not too much needs to be done at any one time. Of the farm’s 135 arable acres, approximately fifty-five will be in corn, forty in oats, and forty in alfalfa. Each of the crops will be grown on the same land two years in order to avoid buying alfalfa seed every year.

The two-year-old alfalfa, turned under, supplies enough nitrogen for the first year of corn. In the second year, the corn crop receives a little commercial nitrogen. The routine application of fertilizer on the corn is 275 pounds per acre of 10-10-20, drilled into the row with the planter. The oats are fertilized at the same rate as the corn, while the alfalfa field, because Lancie sells quite a bit of hay, receives 600 pounds per acre of 3-14-42 in two applications every year. The land is limed at a rate of two tons per acre every time it is plowed. Otherwise, for fertilization Lancie depends on manure from his cattle and horses. “That’s what counts,” he says. It counts because it pays but does not cost. He usually has enough manure to cover his corn ground every year.