Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [75]
“Aw. What about for just one person?”
“A thousand dollars. That would be on the cheap side.”
“You must have to be rich people to live there.”
“A lot of them are lawyers. My friend’s dad composed musical scores for television shows and conducted Broadway musicals.”
3:26. Sixth load.
3:41. Seventh load.
4:02. Eighth load.
Elbert had heard a rumor about me, and began to follow it up. “Parents divorced?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“How does that make you feel?”
I didn’t really know and couldn’t say. Where feeling should have been was just an empty spot.
4:20. Ninth load.
Elbert said it would give him the jitters to live in the big city. There’s “no space.”
4:41. The supper bell. I shinnied up the wagon standard, got a good seat on the straw, and as the horses moved, began to sway back and forth like a pampered swami upon a divan. Up high there was a good breeze. (In the hollow where we had just been, there had been next to nothing.)
4:50. Back at barn. Waited as everyone assembled.
5:20. Supper.
6:00. Tenth load.
6:20. Eleventh load.
6:41. Ride back.
6:50. Unloaded last sheaves into the threshing machine.
7:15. Walked home, stopping at the Minimite general store to buy a straw hat.
8:20. Retired for the evening.
Thus ended my time-motion study. How did it all add up? (I performed the same exercise twice and got almost the same findings.) I had expected some mitigation of the day’s demands, but nothing had prepared me for this: while seven hours and fifty minutes were available for the afternoon’s work (mainly threshing), only four hours and forty minutes had been spent in actual physical work. One hour and fifty-seven minutes had been devoted to breaks (including two “accidentals” and one meal). An additional one hour and thirteen minutes elapsed walking to and from work, shopping at the store, and waiting for the crew to assemble at the beginning of the session. All this time was sheer cushioning—the benefits of camaraderie, conversation, fresh air, and natural scenery, without the labor.
This was a half-day’s work. To get a full day’s approximation, the four hours and forty minutes would have had to have been multiplied by two. If this were done, the equation would have yielded nine hours and twenty minutes net labor.
Admittedly I had been spared some equipment setup time, which I spent waiting under a tree. I was also unable to factor in time for daily chores, which could vary considerably from farmer to farmer. But even if all this had been added in, say totaling an hour, it may have been partly offset by lulls that usually occurred in the first half of the day: the extra meal and the ten to twenty minutes of daily devotions after breakfast. Lunch was considered the big meal, and this was omitted from the afternoon’s calculations.
Nine hours and twenty minutes actual labor in the peak season. Beneath the huffing and puffing I began to discern the outlines of a tolerable busy-season workload. My study revealed nothing of the free time during the long months of the off-season. The Minimite farm was no modern-day factory, where the work proceeded relentlessly year-round. Much less was it a New York law firm, where the typical partner spent sixty to eighty hours in mental millwork per week.
The threshing season lasted approximately two to four weeks.
But were these efforts sufficiently productive? Considering how leisurely the work was and how minimal the timesaving equipment compared to that of other farmers, was the ratio of output to input efficient enough for the Minimite farmer to survive? I collected no hard data on the financial status of the men I worked with, but I could make the broad observation that while their agribusiness brothers were dropping right and left from competitive pressures, not a single farmer in the community had gone out of business in the fifteen years since the settlement was established. And as I soon learned from a thresherman, the community taken as a group was debt-free. This may come as no great