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.