The connection of homestead and future farmers

I spent much of Saturday, Oct. 17 at Farmamerica, where I was one of dozens of volunteers who interacted with visitors during the Fall Festival. The day started out rather chilly, but by noon the temperature was pleasant and I was able to do without my handwarmer.

 

What I want to share in this column is the interesting perspective that came from providing information about the 1850s homestead at Farmamerica and the fast-moving harvest that was going on all around me as I drove home. 

 

Many homesteaders in the late 1800s acquired homestead property for free, or for a price so low it might as well have been free. A common amount of acreage was 160–more land than a European born farmer could have imagined ever owning, since farming practices on the other continent were already long established and land passed from father to first-born son, with all the younger brothers left out in the cold.

 

Of that vast tract of land, much was left as pasture because one family and their horses could only plow, plant, cultivate and harvest so many acres.

 

I spent the day telling people how every bucket of water had to be drawn from the well and carried to where it was needed. One interactive display allowed kids to use a washboard and hand-cranked wringer to “do the laundry.” I used the example that every on switch we use a day was a job that needed doing back in pioneer times. A light switch would mean a candle or lamp had to be lit. A heater would mean firewood needed to be carried. Turning a car key would lead to hitching up the horses, possibly after feeding them and giving them water.

 

To the homesteaders, even the vintage tractors volunteers supply to pull the passenger trams would have seemed miraculous.

 

After the day’s event at Farmamerica wound down, I drove home past pieces of equipment capable of harvesting more in an hour than those homestead families would have been thrilled to bring in for a season. Wagons and trucks with enough cubic foot capacity to be apartments rolled through the fields loaded to their tops with golden bounty. Thanks to the machinery, two or three people kept the processes of picking, loading, and delivering going smoothly, filling bins with more grain than my theoretical homestead farmer probably harvested in his lifetime.

 

Yet he and the modern farmers are also richly connected. He made the same decisions about what to plant, when to plant it, and when to begin harvesting. He paid attention to the heavy rains and dry spells, worrying how each would affect his yield. He worried whether the sale price of his wheat or oats or corn would be strong enough to keep him, his family and his essential livestock supported for the twelve months now standing between him and the next harvest. He weighed carefully how much of it he should sell right away and how much he should store in case prices would be higher later on.

 

They both planted their crops in the extraordinarily rich soil that is our heritage from the centuries of prairie grass that once grew in the southern part of Waseca County. Both sets of farmers took time to revel in the wonder of seedlings sprouting under the early summer sun.

That is the perspective I gained from being on a homestead site for part of the day and driving among harvest fields for another part. Isn’t life interesting, that we can be simultaneously separated and joined in so many ways?