- I wish for reincarnation, reincarnation. Wouldn't it be a sensation to come back to reincarnation? I
- love you and don't you know I always will. You're a girl, I'm a boy.
- a bird and you was a fish what would we do i guess we'd wish for reincarnation reincarnation wouldn't
- it be a sensation to come back to like reincarnation
- Maple Grove Road lies northwest of Bloomington in two branches, one running north to south, another
- east to west. Once upon a time, when almost anyone who lived outside of town farmed, the people living
- along say a road or across several roads within three or four miles called themselves a neighborhood.
- Neighborhood is a name for a community. These people joined together to share labor, share tools, trade,
- build schools, and build churches. Maple Grove Road was one of the earliest areas of Euro-American settlement
- in Monroe County.
- It follows Bean Blossom Creek while Bean Blossom further west joins the White River. In the spring floods,
- farmers shipped pork, corn, wheat, and flour down Bean Blossom on Flatbottom Rast. Near Westerly Maple
- Grove Road at Mount Tabor, John Burton built, in 1819, a gristmill and a sawmill in the area's first
- commercial center. Corey Elkhorn reports, in these early days, farmers slaughtered 5,000 hogs one year
- at Mount Tabor for the trade. As people from Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, Maryland moved initially
- to the area of Maple Grove Road,
- They settled at high areas near streams and springs. By the 1840s, men and families owned nearly all
- of the land. Farming proceeded from the highlands into the hollers and bottoms. By this time, Maple
- Grove Road lay too between the towns Bloomington and Ellitsville. Over the next 20 years, the neighborhood
- settled comfortably into improved horsepower farming. Agriculture became a significant means to prosperity.
- A farm was made of redtop and clover and Timothy pastures, of fields of giant Indian corn, oats, wheat,
- and barley, of big Belgian and Persian horses, of Durek and China hogs, of Jersey and Hereford cattle,
- of chickens and turkeys, of sorghum and cider. Like other farmers in this era, these Hoosiers further
- entrenched two distinctive tendencies of American agriculture. They adopted more and more labor-saving
- machinery, the mower, the reaper, the chilled iron and steel plow,
- They intensified also a tendency to work the land as miners while simultaneously and contradictorily
- becoming better agriculturalists in some things and for example crop rotation, maneuvering and fertilizing.
- Farming probably reached its height during the three decades following 1880 and this time mechanical
- changes in farm work grew apace. The age of power farming arrived in Maple Grove Road
- in the 20s and 30s. This video proceeds with pieces of interviews by farmers of Maple Grove Road who
- made the transition from horsepower to tractor power farming.
- symptoms of being cold, and you hear them breathing hard. A couple of them got too cold when it rains
- that hit them, and they're hot. Right now, it'd be like taking a cold shower. Well, I'm Joe Peden, and
- I'm discussing agriculture in the Maple Grove neighborhood with Mark today. My parents moved here to
- this farm, the Peden farm, in 1941 when I was two years old. And at that time,
- That's been about 51 years ago. A lot of changes have occurred since that time. At that time, there
- was no water and no real water supply and no electricity in this whole neighborhood. So when we moved
- down here from Greenwood, my folks had heated wood and coal and had kerosene lamps for light in the house.
- And they had a wood cook stove, as did most of the other people in this neighborhood. And then in a
- few years, the REMC came here and put in the electric current. The REMC said turn on the lights in the
- country. So then we had electricity. And once you get electricity, then you can have a grill well and
- have an electric pump to pump water or build a cistern, catch rainwater off the roof, and then pump
- that into the house with an electric pump.
- When my folks first moved here to keep the milk and things cool, they had a hole down here in the ground
- which was a spring. And they kept the things cool in that spring house, as did a lot of people, a lot
- of farmers. People in the rural areas used spring houses for water supply and to keep their products
- cool. So the developments in agriculture in the 51 years that I've
- kind of remembering some things. It's been really tremendous. When we first moved here, there was a
- few steel wheel tractors and very few rubber tire tractors that had been in the late 1930 model tractors.
- And most farmers had one or two teams of horses that they supplemented their farm power with the teams.
- And then the changes in tractors, we went from
- steel wheel tractors to rubber tire tractors up into the base tractor which is of course rubber tire
- diesel tractors, turbo diesel motors with cabs and air conditioning and power steering and FM stereo
- radio systems and many farm tractors today have a radio system in which they can talk to the other tractors
- in the field or out
- or to pickups or other farm headquarters so that you can keep in touch with the tractors and the operators
- and the drivers. When we first came here, of course, the corn yields were low. This was a badly eroded
- farm. Probably a corn yields 35, 40 bush-foot to acre. And with new technology and the no-till method
- of farming and good fertility programs, we've had as high as 175 bush-foot to acre corn yield.
- When we moved here, of course, people picked corn by hand with a team of horses. And they'd walk along
- on each side of the wagon and pick corn and toss the ears into the wagon. And then now, you know, the
- farmers have corn pickers and picker shellers that they shell the corn and combine the soybeans. In
- the old days, what they had,
- machines that were driven by either a large tractor or a steam engine, and they'd put those steam engines
- to a farm and they'd thrash wheat. And everybody in the neighborhood would get it together on one farm
- and pitch in and help do all that work. And then they'd thrash the wheat and move on to the next farm
- and thrash that wheat. But then when the combines came along with that and enabled one man to do the
- combining for several people, it took a lot less men to run a
- combine crew to get a trashing crew. Used to everyone in the neighborhood filled silo and so we had
- big groups of people get together to fill silo. That took a lot of people and a lot of tractors. Now
- in the early days they cut the corn with the corn binder in the field and threw it on a wagon and hauled
- it into the field and threw it off into the cutter is what they called it, a cutter that set it to silo
- and would blow the
- silage up in the air into the silo. And then later on, we went to field choppers, one-row field choppers
- that were pulled by a tractor. And they'd chop the corn in the field and load it in the wagon. And then
- you had wagons running continuously to the barn to haul in the silage. And then you had a crew in the
- barn at the silo that would unload the wagons. And now they've got two- and three- and four-row choppers.
- No four-rows or three-rows in this neighborhood. But they do chop the corn in the field and bring it in.
- mechanically unloaded, instead of having to shovel it out or rake it out of the wagons as they did in
- the past. We've gone from one row planting to six and eight row planters in this community, which enables
- the farmers to farm a lot more land with a larger planter and get the crop in quicker than they did
- in the old days.
- went to high fertility programs, went to no-till farming, which doesn't disturb the soil. It just plants
- the seed in the ground and then you control the weeds with herbicides. Early on in no-till, it took
- a lot of herbicides, but as people become more acquainted with no-till farming, they've learned how
- to reduce the number and amount of herbicides that they use.
- Stubbornly but gently, the land rolls in hills.
- At creek beds, springs, and hilltops, limestone outcroppings climb out from the earth. The landscape
- urges the use of a lot of pasture, and therefore, daring or raising beef. Grain for all the livestock,
- the horses, and the market grew on the farm. The farmers changed their harvest as machines for thrashing,
- reaping, and binding grain arrived. Thrashing with a separator needed a large crew. For this, the neighbors
- made a ritual of their custom of swapping work, and from about 1870 to 1940,
- They had thrashing days at each farm. Everyone went from one farm to the other and thrashed out the
- grain. Some pitched the shocks, others unloaded the wagons, handled the grain, and stacked the straw.
- People remember these times as something special, and memories of the thrashing days today stand as
- a counterpoint to the weakening of the community and its agrarian aesthetics by suburbanization and
- over-businessization of farming.
- Do you know why they went in together to buy the separator? Why they went in together? Well, just to
- have it in the neighborhood to do their own trashing. See, back in them days, you had to have somebody
- that was in the trashing business come through, and they didn't always come through at the time your
- grain was ready. This is the way they could trash their own grain and get it done when it should be,
- so it wouldn't go to waste.
- grain to grain. Was this a new type of separator they're using? No, it's just a regular trashing machine.
- It's a smaller one than the big steam rigs used to come through. First the steam rigs come through,
- you know, with a steam engine. Pulled in a day with big ones. You'd feed it from both sides of the separator.
- This year he drove on one side and finished. Didn't need as much grain.
- How did they work the finances? Was that them all putting their money in together? I don't really know,
- but I just imagine they went in, all of them the same amount. Just bought it and then they worked it
- together. My brother pulled it with his tractor. Your brother Ray. Was that Warren's dad? Yeah, that
- was Warren's dad.
- now, McKean, that farm down there. Do you know if the people in the neighborhood considered buying other
- pieces of equipment together? I don't know if they had anything else. Yes, they did, too. They had a
- silo filler rig to fill the silos like we got over here at the barn. They bought a silo filler together,
- and they'd go from one place to the other and swap work
- They cut the wheat and oats with binders and then shocked it. Then the threshing machine made a tour
- of the neighborhood and go from one farm to another and each of the farmers contributed help to help
- do the threshing. And they hauled the bundles into the threshing
- with teams of horses and wagons. And I was real young, I'm not sure, maybe six, seven years old. And
- my father had an old mare and I took a sled and hauled bundles into the thrashing machine with it. And
- I threw my bundles up on the wagon
- of whoever happened to be in there unloading, and then they would put them on the thrashing machine
- for me. And I'd go get another load, and I thought I was pretty important with the thrashing crew that
- way. I don't remember what kind it was. That's when we all get together and cook a big meal for them.
- For this type of threshing with a separator? Yeah. They'd all come in at noon and eat. The whole neighbor
- could help each place they went to dry. They'd all swap one and go to the other place and help them.
- We'd make 10 gallon of iced tea in a big 10 gallon container. And it usually was about all gone by the
- time they got done eating.
- And you had 20 or some people? Oh, how many would they be, really? Oh, 18 or 20, I expected. They crowd.
- I imagine. That big table froze, stretched out as long as you get them in the dining rooms. And then
- it could rain, and we had it all to be over again. No, no, I just, I told you about our big threshing
- dinners we'd get ready for. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.
- We had to dress our own chickens and make our own pies and pastries and everything the day before. Then
- it'd come a big rain, then we'd have it all to do again. We'd have a big table full. We'd make 10-gallon
- of iced tea in a very big jug, you know, earthen jar. Freeze ice cream for them. Yeah.
- Two freezers, ice cream. We enjoyed it. And when we'd go to the field to take the boys' water, they'd
- just work as hard as they could work and they'd see us coming. Especially him. Did you do that after
- you got her? I got her. Yeah, you got her. They were cutting corn, you know. They'd really like to cut
- that corn.
- that after you married or just before? No that's when she was trying to get us in. That's when they're
- coming out. Was that just nervousness? I don't think we'd even gone together then. 1930 my father purchased
- a Fordson tractor and he farmed with
- later, I think about 1940, traded that off for a John Deere General Purpose Tracker. From fresh machines
- and binders to comb-binds and stationary haybillers
- or you pull one field and I unbale them. That's just the progress on up through the year that's been
- made for us equipment-wise. But I don't feel that, you know, some of it's good and some of it's bad.
- Some of the rotation of crops has decreased with continuous cropping and it takes more herbicides and chemicals
- flavor of too much. It's replaced organic form, which is crop rotation. And your animal, we always had
- livestock, cows and horses and such as that, and used that to fertilize the manure. So in that aspect,
- I don't think it's, and the fellowship of the neighborhood is dwindled. It goes back during a period
- when you had the thrashing and silo felling and such as that.
- All the neighborhoods gathered together and did each other's. I really miss that part of it. You took
- place in the silo fillings and thrashing days? Yes, I did. When you're doing that, how did the neighborhood
- adapt to the changes, the different speeds at which farmers mechanized? For example, Russell's dad.
- had tractors all the way back to around the First World War. Other people like Carl Stenger didn't have
- a tractor until 1940. Well, no, we didn't have one until I'd say like around 1930. They always farmed
- with maybe six horses or something like that.
- But the old tractors weren't successful back in that period of time either. They just, they weren't
- built well and they always broke down. They weren't, the horses would go on the tractor, see it. That's
- the way it was back then. They hadn't perfected mechanized equipment to the point where it was really
- any better than what you had.
- North American farmers turned to mechanical implements almost immediately. It was a practical endeavor.
- They had an abundance of land and a scarcity of labor. First came the iron plow, then the steel plow,
- and Bailey's mowing machine of 1822. In 1833 and 1834, Obed Hussey and Cyrus McCormick invented a reaper
- with a reciprocating knife system still used today. After the Civil War, the manufacture of mechanical
- implements rose in great bounds.
- McCormick Deering, John Deere, and other implement makers introduced riding machines of all kinds. Riding
- plows, cultivators, grain drills, hay rakes, mowers, hay loaders, and grain binders greatly increased
- the work done by one man. Not only work in the field, but all phases of farming, machinery changed the
- pace of nature. Corn shellers and silage cutters, hay tracks, hay presses, and water pumps made work
- on the farm quicker and more profitable. Big steam-driven threshing rigs replaced machines belt-driven
- by horsepower. As well, combustion engines appeared.
- farmers began to use one-cylinder engines first. Supplied with kerosene or gasoline, indefinitely these
- ground corn, pumped water or cider, or did a sundry other jobs. After 1905, companies regularly began
- to manufacture tractors. While tractors appeared at all in the Maple Grove Road neighborhood only in
- the time of the First World War, by this time IH and other companies had available too thrashing machines
- and silage cutters, balers, to run from the belt pulley of a tractor.
- Levi Fife and Ray Fife experimented with a poly parrot in the IH 816 in the late teens and early 20s.
- The Fordson, however, brought the tractor to Maple Grove Road. Within a few years toward the end of
- the 20s, a few people, among them Earl Stanger and Ray Fife, purchased Fordson tractors. The tractor,
- however, which really brought the neighborhood into the age of power farming, was the IH Farmall and
- its followers, the John Deere GP, the Dewald Oliver Row Crop, the Advanced Rumley All Crop,
- These tractors combined the power sufficient to pull a plow in a machine like a motor cultivator. All
- the jobs in raising a grain crop before the harvest, the dual-purpose tractor did, thereby making a
- tractor a much better buy. In 1819, International Harvester introduced a power takeoff on its International
- 816. Initially, PTO was an extension of the drive shaft. This device greatly increased the work of the
- tractor. It finished power with the tractor idle or in gear, but the farm all then
- the small farmer could run his old washing machine or a state-of-the-art pickup baler. It also gave
- the farmer closer control of machinery like mowers, rakes, and binders. In 1930, Alice Charmers began
- working on a PTO-powered harvester-thrasher combine for the farmers of the Midwest. Russell Fife brought
- an all-crop combine into Maple Grove Road in 1936. The machine does the job of the binder and the thrashing
- machine and thus changes the harvest.
- With this combine, Russell put an end to the big thrashing days. But this change did not disrupt the
- community. The negative effects of mechanization accumulate on a larger scale. And the cost of increasing
- production becomes affordable to most farmers. The value of farm products plummets. And this drives
- most farmers out of farming. When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head at it.
- You straddle the row. Your row is in here. And that covalates the soil around your plant to make it
- keep the weeds down and make it take water for the plant. So the working shovel scoops around those.
- Yeah. And it's just a matter of lowering it down. Yeah. This lever, of course, it's got
- Right, it's up there now. But that lets it down. And then that'll plow your weeds and what have you.
- And this seat, it has this chain that goes from each side. And your seat rocks. It slides on this bar.
- You can't tell too much about it. But when you move that, you can put your feet in those stirrups like.
- That shifts each side of those shovels around your plants as you go through there. You can sort of guide
- it with your feet there to make it cultivate where you want. That's a horse-drawn cultivator. They maybe
- had one around the turn of the century or before, but it would be probably just wooden beams with pegs.
- bikes, which were a little more crude. Maybe it wouldn't even have wheels on it, you know, like these
- do have. What do those two hand grip things do on the plow? Is it a lever and then two? That controls
- your depth.
- how deep your plow goes in the ground. This adjusts this wheel, which lets it down. Is that for running
- the furrow? Yes, uh-huh. Well, actually, no, I'm sorry. That one over there is the one that goes into
- the furrow. Okay. And this one runs on the land up on your... Okay.
- unplowed ground and it's made so this will adjust to let the plow down. You lift this wheel up, see?
- It'll come up off the ground, which will let that plow, the chair, go down in the ground that way. And
- then this one, it works similar. You can adjust it to level the bottom of your furrow to get it even.
- That other level.
- It works the same way. See, that'll let your plow go down when it's... If this wheel in the furrow,
- of course it has to be in operation before you can really tell it because it's sitting on a board there
- now and it'd have to be moved so that'd be under the ground in order to let this up, see? Right, okay.
- Your wheel.
- Do these devices move the wheel sideways? Yes, your town or your hitch. So you put your hook to this
- and this lever controls the guide and the back wheel here which makes this wheel that runs into the furrow
- to keep it straight with the, keep your plow adjusted straight with the length. But when your horses
- turn, that moves this lever and that keeps the wheel running right against the edge of the furrow to
- make it plow the same width. This is a 1935 general purpose John Deere that has been
- put up in running condition. This tractor was one that I plowed, or one like this, I plowed 200 acres
- of ground on when I was nine years old. I'm 62 years old now. These are two cellar tractor. They start
- on fuel oil and run on gasoline. After you got them started, they pulled two 12 inch plows. So it took
- quite a few hours to plow 900
- or 200 acres. The two-cylinder tractors were very much in use up until the middle of 50s. And then they
- stopped making two-cylinder and went to six-cylinder on the John Deere equipment. Back prior to this
- and during the time this tractor was used, there was using horses also.
- The time come along that you could use this tractor, then you begin to get enough production that some
- of the swapping back and forth of the farmers stopped. And each man could do a lot more work, obviously,
- with the tractor than he could with the horses. Therefore, he could handle more acres. This went on
- very good up until the 40s sometime, when during the war,
- The economics after the war got so bad that the farmer really had a lot of trouble making a full living
- off the farm. So he began to migrate to public jobs. And most of the farmers in this area would do their
- farming of an evening and work at public work in the daytime. The farming ratio has got to...
- in this day and age when you need the real large tractors and a lot of acres because the amount of money
- you can make per acre is a good deal smaller than it was back in the 30s when these was running. I'm
- holding in my hand a piston out of a tractor that John Deere made back in the 30s, a two cylinder tractor.
- And this is out of an A John Deere. As you can see, it's about the size of a gallon bucket.
- were two of these running side-by-side. The John Deere G that we showed you last, they've got pistons
- in it a little larger than this. The diesel 4020, which we just saw, is a six-cylinder diesel tractor,
- and all six cylinders are about this size. The rest of these things have got that dog-gone Russell 5 in it.
- We're really pressing our luck having two images of Russell. This is a combine. I bought it in 1936
- and had my John Deere tractor then, my first farm tractor. It was an all-purpose, general-purpose?
- General-purpose John Deere, 36 model.
- and that done away with the thrashing machine. I went thrashing for all of my neighbors with that, with
- the combine. I'd run for a month. That first year I got it, thrashing neighbors and my own and so on.
- What did people around here think of the combine? They liked it. They didn't have to run their binder
- and shock their wheat. I just went in there and
- cut the wheat and thrash it for them. And you had a wagon? The wagon? You had a wagon next to the combine,
- right? You mean to dump the grain in? Yeah. Well, they'd furnish their own wagons and haul their grain.
- I'd just thrash it in the field and dump it in the wagon for them. Tell them about this corner field
- here on Carhead and Barley. Yeah, it was right there in the middle, honey, of this farm.
- The car had a barley over there, and it made, what was it, 60 bushels an acre? About 60 bushels an acre,
- and the car had to run with his horses in a trot to go to the barn to unload in order to get back, get
- more grain. So the tank held 18 bushel on the combine, and he could not keep the grain away.
- by making as much per acre. The car didn't go to tractors till kind of late. Well, he went to tractors
- about the same time all the rest of them did. Not quite as soon as Dad did, but Dad and Ray had that
- old polypare that they lost their marbles on because it was so big and awkward and break them gears.
- They'd get on a rock in the field and spin, and that would bust them big gears in the wheels.
- They'd have to replace them, and they were high priced. In the years 1942, that was the John Deere Combine,
- and that's my youngest boy on there with me. And that combine, what grains could you do with that combine?
- Same as the other, wheat grain and oats and barley and anything other with a grain. Small grains.
- their A-36s, one of them, like I used to have on the farm, but it's now in their antiques. That was
- a cultivating? Yeah, it was a cultivating plow and all, no purpose. Your dad and brother had tractors
- before they were all-purpose? Oh yeah, just four-wheeled. All you could do was plow with them and disc.
- Plow and get the ground ready.
- Did they ever have a motor cultivator? No, we calivated with horses. And calivators... Mules. Horses
- and mules. We rode them, rode the calivators. They were riding calivators. You'd sit on there and work
- your feet back and forth to guide the calivator with a corn rope. What did you, did you have any
- Was it news when they came out with the farm oil, the tractors, sort of combined the motor cultivator
- with the larger tractors? Yeah, it was about in 35 or 36 when they came out with them. That's what they
- called general purpose tractors. Farm oil and John Deere and all of them had them. The cultivators went
- on the front of them, and then at first they were hand lifted. I mean, at a big hand leverage you pull
- back to raise the cultivators and get them in the field.
- And in a few years they got hydraulic on the tractors and had a hydraulic lift on them. Tractors work
- on the farm constantly inspires innovations. Tractors began big and grew small enough to reach every
- farm, growing larger again as small farms withered. Over the years the industry has experimented with
- fuels like kerosene, diesel, and LP gas.
- They tried different types of drive systems, beginning with direct friction, to chain and open gear
- drive, to closed gear, and around a hydrostatic friction drive. A lot of effort was made to bring more
- power to the farmer, with, for example, the PTO, its improvements, and the hydraulic power system. The
- tractor's longevity stands out as one of its most important features. Farmers in Maple Grove Road actively
- use tractors 20, 40, and 50 years old.
- kept increasing, got up to about 40 young cows. At the same time, we'd have about 40 young stock. The
- machinery we used was 1932 farm oil and a team of horses built it with terraces.
- We used a team of horses and a slip scraper to fill in the low spots. That's what the terraces were
- built with. And we bought a corn picker that year, I guess, a one-row pull type corn picker. I picked
- the corn with.
- A few years we traded and got a two roll mallet paper. We got a field chopper to chop the hay and chop
- the silage. Cut the silage and hay right out in the field and blew it into the whitens. Had to blow
- up the barn silo to unload it.
- In 1967, I guess, we got our first combine. In 1974, we had a two-row combine. In 1974, we got a first
- four-row combine, which I still have. That was a combine for corn?
- I bought my first new tractor in 1951 and I still got it, still use it.
- 33 horse tractor. I got another old tractor, about 50 horse, 1958 tractor. And the last one I purchased
- new was a 1972 100 horse tractor. By 1982, I was kind of retired from farming.
- Just been doing it. Far more part-time since then. Rent most of the ground out. What kind of tractors
- have 100 horsepower? This dollar. All of them. All of them are all of them. OK. They call them lights
- now, I guess. When I purchased them, they were all of them.
- Why do you use Oliver tractors? Well, I had a good digger close by. Was that the most important thing?
- I had good service close by. Who was that? Well, it was Harold Gifford to start with. Another main reason
- I purchased that
- We didn't do all of them in 1951 because it had a live power takeoff. A live power takeoff? That's the
- P2 at the back, isn't it? Usually it's had a clutch that turned the power takeoff on and off. You didn't
- have to use your foot clutch. John Deere and International and several others didn't have a live power
- takeoff in 1951. Co-op and Oliver.
- had a live tire takeoff. So you could push a clutch in and stop your tractor. But your machinery is
- going to the tire takeoff, turn a bit, and go ahead and turn. That was helpful in using a particular
- type of baler? Well, a baler, a combine, a field chopper, anything. Otherwise, you'd have to put your
- clutch in and shove it out of gear right quick, if you wanted.
- piece she was using to keep turning. It was a live-fire takeoff, all you had to do was shove in your
- foot flat, and your tractor would stop, and your machinery would go head run.
- Farming changed significantly in the fact that 40 years ago, every piece of property out here was owned
- by a farmer that was in some way farming it himself. And then with the introduction of farm tractors,
- a man that could farm 80 acres by himself could build a tractor and maybe farm 140 by himself. And then
- as the tractors grew,
- in size and different types of machinery came along where maybe one farmer in his family could farm
- 1,000, 1,200, 1,500 acres. Many farmers, great farmers, they're children, son or two, and maybe one
- employee that works for them full-time while the children are in school.
- I was in the school and agriculture class and I built one of the first terraces in the county here on
- this farm. The old Fordson tractor and the plow. Combustion power allowed farmers to do more for soil
- and water conservation. With a tractor, terraced building became a one-man job.
- In the 40s, almost all the farms in Maple Grove Road were redesigned for better conservation. Everyone
- became involved with the Soil and Water Conservation District and Service and the Cooperative Extension
- and its offshoots like the 4-H. This man, Kenneth Freeman, became an expert terrace builder and did
- a lot of terracing as custom work. In the 40s, the erosion of this country was pretty rampant. There
- was just lots of erosion and Soil and Water Conservation Districts were organized to help
- educate the farmers on how to control erosion on their farm. And on this farm, we put in five and a
- half miles of terraces to control erosion. And then we build a pond that's up here back of us. It slows
- down the water. Many farmers did contouring and strip cropping. Lots of farmers today practice some
- form of conservation tillage. And on this farm, we use no till. My dad was a member of the Salt Conservation
- District board.
- He helped organize the soil conservation district in Meno County. And the soil conservation district
- along with the soil conservation service helped laid farmers to do more conservation methods of farming
- and help reduce erosion and improve their farm and to build up their fertility and get higher yields
- and overall try to keep pace with the changing agriculture.
- Extension Service, Agriculture Extension Service has also played a vital role in helping educate the
- farmers, not only in this county, but all over the state, in adapting new and improved methods of farming.
- For the soil conservation service, all my career, I worked in around 10 or 12 different counties in Indiana.
- been able to influence some of the farmers in the building erosion control practices such as ponds and
- waterways and terraces and diversions and water and control dams. One of the big things that we do in
- Monroe County, as you notice, is a lot of agriculture here is devoted to raising the livestock and getting
- a good water system for livestock is important in Monroe County. We develop a lot of springs that give
- a continual flowing
- good clear water for cow herds and we have four of those spring developments on our farm and plan on
- putting in the fifth one next week. Our farm here, the original farm is 120 acres and then we were able
- to buy another 110 acres and then we bought another 95 acres. All of it joins and we raise beef cattle
- and calves and have around 80 cows and calves
- And we raised some dairy calves on the back of it. Then I went to farm and rented the farm. We went
- down to the flat woods and rented the farm for a year. And then they come along and sold it. Didn't
- stay there long. They come back up here to dad's place and rented it for a year or so. And then we moved
- up north of Prattigan. The war came, and I was in the draft, but I didn't ever have to go to the war.
- We farmed up there for a year, and that man
- come back, he was in the Senas Island, and he came back carrying a butcher knife in his head pocket.
- I wasn't too proud of that. So I sold out, divided that partnership with him, went to Martinsville,
- went to work for Maxwell Hardware, the John Deere business. I put in pumps for farmers, worked on farm
- equipment, and then we
- Stayed there two or three years and come back to Bloomington to come back to this place, right here
- where we're at now. And I went to work for John Deere man here and worked pretty near the rest of my
- life there up until the later part. And then I went to Indiana University for 14 years. All that time
- I farmed out here with that chattel, milk, made in the hoax. Dairy sold milk.
- Dairy at Blooming Johnson's. And that's just part of my history. Well, after you got rid of the dairy,
- you went into beef cattle. Yeah, I did have some beef cattle a while. What's the first thing you did
- farming here at this farm? Well, I would just raise some corn and fill the silo, put up hay. That's
- about all I've done because I work in town.
- And I had to take off a little work to do part of it. Built your own milk house? Yeah, I built a milk
- house on vacation. Weeks time I laid the blocks and one day I laid 300 blocks and mixed my own mud.
- I laid the blocks. And I was about ready for my coffin at the end of the week. But I laid it all right.
- You plowed all through the time that you put in crops? Yeah, I did. I plowed the ground, worked it down,
- come big rain, and washed it about half of the way. I'd go right down the creek. Is the soil on the
- farm now worse than it was 60 years ago? Better, I think.
- You used to have this field up here, but back in the barn, that was ditches you could bury the tractor
- in up there. Now there ain't no ditches up there. We've got them all filled in in grass. We've got terraces
- around the field that let the water go off and down over in the old roadbed and don't wash down the
- hill, don't tear the field up. When I moved here, that had, Robert pretty much turned to Farm Oil 20
- over in that
- We had terraces built after that. Yeah. I've got that field terrace, and it ain't any worse at all since
- then. Ruth, what was the soil in the land like when your grandfather Elmsley farmed here?
- Well, it was pretty good when Grandpa formed it. He raised old China hawks, red-stripped ones. Was the
- plowing with the tractor causing more soil erosion than with the other? Yeah, because they plowed more
- with that. And I think it did cause more erosion. But then eventually, people got wise.
- put in terraces and stuff, and tended them. My father was one of the first to put in terraces over on
- one of Larry Joel's homes now. Larry Joel's singer, my nephew. And that was when we first married. I'd
- go over and help him. He had a crater. We'd dig the old horse crater, pulled a tractor to make the terraces.
- problems that we have here in this county is the rolling terrain which you're seeing some photos of
- now. It washes quite bad when you plow the ground it and rains the water will carry off the top soil
- down as deep as you plow. If you plow five or six inches deep it'll wash it off that deep and the field
- above the barn which you might want to swing around to your right a little bit that field up there when
- moved back on this farm in the late 40s, had ditches in it large enough to drive a tractor up the bottom
- of the ditches, the tractor the size you saw out there for erosion. So the ditches were plowed in, there
- was terraces made to control the water, and then we went to grass farming rather than some grain farming.
- The grass farming in this part of the country is
- done so much for soil conservation. The people who are still grain farming, some of them are using what
- they call a no-till system. This is where you go in and the seed is actually planted without disturbing
- the soil other than a very small track. Soil is packed down around the seed and they use chemicals then
- to kill the weeds. The field is sprayed and heavily fertilized and there's no
- tilling of the topsoil. Therefore, we have a lot less grass or a lot less topsoil washing off because
- of the grass roots. Even though you kill the grass, the roots are still there. And that keeps the topsoil
- from washing. They feel that beyond the cattle that you're looking at now has been, in my lifetime,
- in trees, corn trees mostly, been cleared off and put back into pasture land.
- In that field, there's a number of sinkholes in this part of the country. A lot of water goes down those
- sinkholes. And that also helps with the washing. But a few days ago, we had a very heavy rain here.
- And this whole valley that you're looking at was running better than two foot deep with water. So we
- still have, during heavy rain seasons, a problem with the water running off and washing of the topsoil.
- So that is another reason that there's been a lot of conservation done and probably less farming as
- far as grain farming is concerned in this part of the country than you have in some of the flat country.
- Well, we moved here in 1948, March 1948. And the farm was pretty well run down.
- a lot of ditches in it. I think it was right here above the house. It had corn rows up down the hill,
- and there was a ditch in between the other corn rows. And so I had soil conservation boys come out and
- lay out terraces. So we terraced the 30 acres right up here above the house the first year I came here.
- up most of that washing because we found everything on the contour in between the terraces. It had very
- little grass on the farm. Most of it had been cropped. Some of it had gone away. It wasn't cropping
- at all. It was too far gone. So we plowed in a lot of ditches.
- So a lot of alfalfa and orchard grass that first year. And the second year, 1949, we laid out the back
- part of the farm. It was about 90 acres back there. And they laid out the strip crops. We had a strip
- of hay and strip of corn, strip of hay and strip of corn.
- all laid out on the contour.
- The other people speaking in this video obviously belong to one community, a community which spreads
- over several miles of joined farms, one which lives in a common experience in agriculture. History and
- tradition thicken and strengthen it. The ancestors of some of the families here homesteaded these farms
- and stories about them, their sayings and ways of farming remain part of the life of the community.
- Since the founding of the community, farming changed ceaselessly. Machinery for farming especially grew
- into new things.
- Combustion engine tractors created a revolution in farming. This technology changed the source of power
- on the farm. Replacing horses is the basic instrument of work. A tractor needs no rest, and its fuel
- comes from the depths of the earth, not the surface. The tractor allows the farmer to port more of his
- land and crops, and it gives him all the hours he needs to till his extra acres. Changing the power
- source brought far-reaching consequences to farming.
- Instead of allowing small farmers to compete with the large farmers, mechanized farming produced an
- excess. Profit from farm products fell, and the acreage needed to make a living grew. With this came
- a tendency to specialize. People no longer raised cattle, hogs, sheep, and chickens, and oats, wheat,
- barley, and corn. Corn and soybeans and beef or dairy cattle took over the farm. The revolution the
- tractor wrought was a long time coming. North American farmers led the world in mechanical innovation.
- Most of the machines emblematic of modern farming first appeared during the 19th century powered by
- horses. The idea of the combustion engine even spans back several centuries. Putting a plow behind a
- tractor changes little about the idea of farming. But the new power source consummated, in a sense,
- the mechanical development to that point and began the true age of mechanized farming. How mechanization
- damaged Maple Grove Road seems unrelated to the machinery and rather a part of the modern forces which
- can improve and erode the community.
- Farming with combustion engines certainly makes the work noisier. But adding a farm all or a John Deere
- A to the farm changes the farm in no dramatic way. For the individual farmer, machines make
- a good investment. They make work easier and raise profits. For the collective, however, they create
- a trap. Individual success repeated 1,000 times becomes individual loss. To stay competitive, farmers
- need to invest more and more in machines to run the larger operations, which allow a profit.
- The consequences of mechanization are not the only forces which push on the community. New development
- takes part the community year by year. Developers pay a higher price for land than what farmers can
- afford. Lack of profit closes farms, but development actively pushes farmers off the land. Farmers in
- Maple Grove Road see a day of reckoning coming in this county and this country as the land left for
- farming shrinks to less and less. In some sense, the community is a victim of its own logic. The settlers
- came in following the army.
- buying conquered land from the United States. Violence won the land and money entitled ownership. Through
- the years those able to pay for farms and make them profitable bought them and kept them. In the steady
- rural exodus during the 20th century hired hands and tenant farmers preceded the farm owners off the
- land. People who failed to make a profit lost their farms. New people always came into the community
- eager to bring an old farm into blossom.
- Perhaps it is time to break these customs. Attitudes about farmland and rural communities need to change
- in this county, state, and country. Small farms are worth saving and indeed will play an important role
- in the future. We must confess and affirm our dependence upon the fruits of the earth God created for
- our living and make sacrifice in our immediate rewards to build a more stable and spiritual society.
- country just the other day to see my Uncle Bill and sort of pass the time away. I asked him how he'd
- been since last it passed his way and he rubbed his chin and here's what he had to say. My wife's been
- sick and the young'uns too and I'm darn near down with the flu. The cow's gone dry and them hens won't
- lay but we're still a-livin' so everything's okay. The hawks took the collar and they've all done died.
- The bees got mad and they left the hive. The weevils got the corn and the rain rotted the hay, but we're
- still a-livin' so everything's okay. The porch rotted down, that's more expense. The darned old mule,
- he tore down the fence. The mortgage is due and I can't pay, but we're still a-livin' so everything's
- okay. The cow broke in the field and eat up the beans.
- And during rabbits, they got their turnip greens. And my maw-in-law just moved in to stay, but we're
- still a-livin', so everything's okay. My land's so poor, it's a hardened yeller, you have to set on
- a sack of fertilizer to raise an umbrella. And it rains out here nearly every day, but we're still a-livin',
- so everything's okay. The well's gone dry and I have to tote the water,
- up from the spring about a mile and a quarter. My helper, he quit for the lack of pay, but we're still
- a-livin', so everything's okay. The house, it leaks, it needs a new top. When it rains, it wets everything
- we got. The chimney fell down just yesterday, but we're still a-livin', so everything's okay. The cornmeal's
- gone and the meat's run out,
- Got nothing to kill to put in the smokehouse. The preacher's coming Sunday to spend the day. But we're
- still a-living, so everything's OK. The canned stuff spoiled, else the jars got broke. And all we got
- left is one old billy goat. We're going to have a new baby about the first of May. But we're still a-living,
- so everything's OK. My crop, it rotted in the ground.
- I asked for another loan, but the banker turned me down. But we're still a-living and we're praying
- for a better day, so after all, everything's in pretty good shape.
- Pull that step up to 42 tire.