John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part I
(Page 4 of 17)
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
So, once again and just to keep the record straight, while it's true that Mother Earth News is largely responsible for setting a trend in motion; and while I'm responsible for putting the magazine on the particular path in question, the credit really belongs to Dick Shuttleworth and the windplant he built over 40 years ago. I'm just my father's son.
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PLOWBOY: OK. We've now got hard work, self-sufficiency, the sharing of knowledge and Yankee ingenuity down as important concerns of Mother Earth News. Is there anything else?
SHUTTLEWORTH: Yes, we've saved the real biggie till last. And that's Mother Earth News' overriding interest in the perpetuation of the planet and its fragile ecosystem. The magazine's most basic philosophy is that what's best for Earth and the preservation of its delicately interwoven web of life is, by definition, what's best for humankind. We are part of that web, you know, no matter how grandly our species generally tries to ignore the fact.
PLOWBOY: Is this your contribution to Mother Earth News' philosophy?
SHUTTLEWORTH: I'd like to think so but, no, my conservationist tendencies were also imprinted on me quite dramatically by my parents. When I was seven, you see, we moved to a 144-acre farm near Redkey, Ind. And I use the term "farm" charitably.
That place was a wasteland when the folks bought it. The soil was so poor that nothing but pumpkins grew in the cornfield. Ditches big enough to hide a Farmall tractor were everywhere. The barn was falling down. The hog lot was saturated with disease. The only thing growing around a couple of fields were fifty-foot-tall Osage orange trees, and their main crop was stickery spines an inch and a half long. The house was at least sound, but so filthy that there was a layer of caked dirt, grease, spilled food and old linoleum in the kitchen six inches thick. The front yard had been picked bone bare by the scraggly chickens that kept trying to get in the door. It was a real Ma and Pa Kettle situation.
Dad called in the county agent and he took one look at the place and sent for a regional representative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). And together with my father, the two "experts" went all over the farm and took soil samples and made transit readings and drew up charts and otherwise analyzed those 144 acres.
PLOWBOY: And?
SHUTTLEWORTH: And, when they were all finished, the "experts" told Dad that there was simply no way he could rebuild that farm. That it was beyond saving.
Well, right about then was when we lost our respect for the USDA — because we all rolled up our sleeves and we did rebuild the farm. Dad rigged up a transit on the tractor, bought a roll-over scoop and a Graham plow, and made terraces around the hillsides that were washing the worst. He let the Canadian thistles grow and planted alfalfa and other deep-rooted crops that could reach down through and bust up the hardpan which was about all that was left in most of the fields.
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