Jim Crace’s 2013 dystopian novel, Harvest, transports readers to a sixteenth century English village to experience a week of celebration, intrigue, and disturbance that marks the end of harvest. Area residents gossip and gather in the barley field but are more concerned with the recent arrival of several vagrants than the momentous events about to engulf them. The story is told from the standpoint of Walter Thirsk, who after residing there for a dozen years is himself a relative newcomer to a place. “We should face the rest day with easy hearts,” he muses, “and then enjoy the gleaning that would follow it, with our own Gleaning Queen the first to bend and pick a grain. We should expect our seasons to unfold in all their usual sequences, and so on through the harvests and the years.”
National Colonial Farm, Piscataway Park, Accokeek, Maryland
The strangers who camp nearby are refugees from enclosure of open lands, and their coming coincides with that of a man of uneasy silence the villagers call Mr. Quill for the peculiar instrument he carries for his work: “We mowed with scythes: he worked with brushes and quills. He was recording us, he said, or more exactly marking down our land.” Quill is making a map and compiling numbers, measuring locations of streets, houses, and fields. He informs his rustic hearers that such work is about “improvements” being done on behalf of the manor estate’s absentee heir who is zealous for improvements to enlarge the estate by enclosure and replace fieldworkers with sheep which will also render gleaning obsolete. “We know enough to understand that in the greater world,” Quill explains, “flour, meat, and cheese are not divided into shares and portions for the larder, as they are here, but only weighed and sized for selling.” The old order of Enough is being displaced by More. To be sure, pre-enclosure landscapes were not idyllic spaces since commoners depended on hard labor and the vagaries of the seasons for their welfare. But conditioned by faith and custom, daily anxieties were moderated by community fellowship and shared resources from the commons.
Kentucky farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry’s book A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (1998) is rooted in lifelong experience on the land and considerations of beauty, hard work, crops, and the natural world:
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the land is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap…. (No. X [1979])
One of Berry’s first public addresses on trends in consolidation of family farms and land care took place in July, 1974, at the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium held in conjunction with Spokane’s “Expo ’74.” The world’s fair was promoted as the first international ecological exposition and Berry’s passionate talk, delivered from scribbled notes on a large yellow pad, included a call for “a constituency for a better kind of agriculture.” The presentation inspired organization of the Northwest Tilth movement for sustainable farming, and also became the nucleus of Berry’s best-selling book The Unsettling of American: Culture & Agriculture (1979).
Barn and Fence Rails, National Colonial Farm
In his 1979 essay, “The Good Scythe,” Berry grapples with the meaning of progress in modern times. He recalls buying a “power scythe” for cutting grass on a steep hillside near his home, but soon found that the anticipated advantages of reduced labor were offset by the machine’s temperamental motor and considerable racket. The turning point came when a neighbor showed him an old-fashioned scythe that was comfortable to handle and efficient. “There was an intelligence and refinement in its design that make it a pleasure to handle and look at and think about,” Berry observed, and he promptly replaced the powered machine and gas can with a wooden-handled Marugg scythe and whetstone. Berry does not dismiss mechanical innovation; the scythe, after all, is an improvement on the sickle. But he found the episode to have “the force of a parable” about life, labor, and definitions of progress. He advocates a time-honored approach for judging claims of saved labor and short cuts, and warns against the embrace of technological solutions that tend to bring longer working hours with greater equipment expense.