Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [23]
To remedy the problem, two brothers, both Minimites with a strict Old Order upbringing, decided to build a water mill. A farm they had recently purchased had some rapids running through it in a hollow spot that was big enough to hold a small lake. The principles of mill construction were a bit beyond them, so they plotted out a rough design on paper and brought it to a mechanical engineer. With his help, they were able to carry out the plan.
I beheld the result: the mill wheel, about eight feet in diameter and welded of sheet metal, spun beneath a small earthen dam that held back a pond spreading over about half an acre. As water trickled over it, it quietly turned and powered a rotary saw housed within the mill building overhead.
On a stroll through the neighborhood, I happened to bump into one of the mill-owner brothers and struck up a conversation. During the course of the discussion, Gideon recalled another more important technical problem he had had to overcome when he first arrived in the area ten years earlier. As he spoke, his eyes became animated and his gestures emphatic.
The former landholders, he cried, would “take a piece of land and farm it in corn five years, five straight years! The ground was hard and lumpy. All the worms and other things that live in the soil—the old worms, they just leave. They used chemicals to control the weeds and brought in all this heavy equipment. The equipment pounds down the soil. You get a six-inch-deep crust—what can you do?”
“The first time we tried a field,” added his companion, “ran a disk crosst it, you couldn’t even see where it had gone.”
“It was just so hard and lumpy,” repeated Gideon, shaking his head. “The way we farm it really makes a difference,” he went on. When he and his brother arrived, they introduced techniques their Amish forebears first used hundreds of years ago in Alsace, namely crop rotation and the spreading of manure. In a few years the soil was rich, loamy, and full of living things.
In the midst of a sentence, Gideon paused. He pointed to an intricate web stretched almost invisibly between two cornstalks. In the center of it sat a big yellow spider. Gideon grinned. “This old spider, if you just touch its web, it will come out and defend itself—sit in its nest and shake back and forth.” He did an imitation: mouth agape, hands clutching the air, body swaying back and forth. Then he touched the web, and the spider bore him out.
Organic cultivation might be called a way to humanize the soil. But these people were not above extending this craft with technology. In pursuit of a lead someone had given us, Mary and I took the Escort on a half-day drive. When we got to our destination in the next state, we beheld the cleverest instance of minimation we’d seen yet. A local blacksmith had taken the mechanical assembly of an old John Deere motorized baler, the 24-T, and customized it with special gears, drive-chains, and a steel wheel from an International tractor, the W-30. From all these ingredients, he had contrived a horse-powered hay baler. Unlike the balers used by most Amish groups, which are drawn along by horses but have gasoline-powered engines for the actual task of baling, this one was powered entirely by horses. Weighing less, it reduced compaction of the topsoil while the team of work animals added more organic matter.
The blacksmith who had devised the adaptation looked at me warily when I knocked on his door. But when I told him why I was visiting, he smiled broadly. Where were we from? he wanted to know. When I answered, he asked me if I knew of so-and-so Stoltzfus. I did, though