This winter I’ve been cleaning out family files. In one battered envelope I discovered a clutch of my dad’s Project Account Books from the Virginia Department of Vocational Agriculture dated 1927, when he was 15. Labeled “Chickens, Heifers, Dairy Cow”. The booklet has columns for recording Date, Kind of Work Done, Man Hours, Horse Hours, and Self Hours. (The italics are mine.)
This find reminded me that my grandfather did not switch from horse-drawn farm equipment to tractors until the 1940s. In other words, Dad grew up in a world not too far removed from farmers centuries earlier who used the power of grass-fed calories to plow their fields and grow their food.
Here at Katywil, we do have a John Deere tractor, but our attention is really focused on growing food organically using hand power, not gas power. This artifact of Dad’s teenage years makes me keenly aware of several things:
• the brevity of the fossil-fuel phenomenon
• my visceral connection with land and animals
• my longing to know all he and my grandfather knew about life before
gasoline.