The Farm Guide

 

Mention a farm and images of great wheeled machines rolling across a field spring up. After two centuries of evolution, tractors have become a farmer’s most reliable tool and an icon of American agriculture. As inventors around the world slowly put ideas together, farm machinery grew from a useful novelty to a necessary workhorse. New inventions regularly replaced older ways as better methods and products pushed tractors to a position of unequaled importance on the farm. Modern tractors, though, look very little like their ancestors, and tractor technology faced a bumpy road before it reached its full potential.

Before tractors roamed the prairies like the mechanized beasts of burden they are, real livestock and the sweat of farmers were the primary sources of energy on the farm. The mechanical technologies they powered were crude and supplied mainly by local blacksmiths. While this was sufficient for small farms at the beginning of the 19th century, change was coming. The American expansion westward found vast tracts of land just asking to be planted, and an increased demand for produce provided incentive to do so. To meet the demands of the agricultural expansion, farmers were faced with a choice: work ever harder for uncertain results, or get clever.

 

During his two-year sojourn in the woods at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau raised beans, not necessarily for profit (although he did sell his harvested crop for a good return on his investment) but for more philosophical reasons: “They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus . . . I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work.”

Thoreau’s bean field was an ambitious project—2½ acres of rows totaling seven miles in length. This sounds like an exaggeration but is not. If one does the same calculations Thoreau must have done (he was a land surveyor, among other things), one arrives at the same seven-mile figure. 2½ acres = 108,900 square feet. He says the rows were fifteen rods (275.5 feet) long and were three feet apart. This gives a width of 440 feet (275.5 x 440 = 108,900) and 146.66 rows (440 ÷ 3 = 146.66). Total row length, then, was 36,298 linear feet (275.5 x 146.66 = 36,298) or 6.87 miles.

Real maple syrup is something I regard as both a necessity and a luxury. True, you can buy a less-expensive, maple-flavored product, but why would you do that when you know it won’t be as good? I am not an expert in matters pertaining to the manufacture of maple syrup, however, and so it was with some surprise that I learned of the existence of both blended and unblended syrups. Mount Cabot Maple, a company I discovered at a recent trade show, produces only single-source, unblended maple syrup.

If you’re not familiar with chutney, it’s a preserve of fruits and vegetables, with vinegar, sugar, and spices. Chutneys can range from mild to quite hot, and they can do wonders in jazzing up a meal or snack. You can use them as a condiment with all kinds of meats, poultry, and fish; likewise, they go very well with some cheeses and vegetables. You can find chutney in many supermarkets or ethnic food stores, but it won’t be like Marcia’s Chutneys.

That’s because Marcia takes pride in using fresh, local, and seasonal produce. She buys from farmers at her local Farmers’ Market as much as she can, and she has good business relationships with many of these growers. She uses absolutely no corn syrup in her products (look at the ingredients in a large scale manufacturer’s commercial chutney and you’ll surely find corn syrup among them), and organic produce is used as often as possible. By the way, if you don’t care for chutney, Marcia also makes preserves.