Farming for Self-Sufficiency-Independece on a 5-acre farm

Enlarge Image Image Gallery OLD SONG... Come all ye honest ploughmen, Old England's fate you hold!

HORSE ...

In spite of the teachings of the no-digging and no-ploughing school of husbandmen, people still go on digging and ploughing, as they have done ever since Neolithic times, and my guess is that they will go on digging and ploughing as long as men live on this earth. For there is really no other way of effectively growing arable crops-at least, without the impracticable use of enormous quantities of compost.

Cobbett says, in Cottage Economy: 'As to the act of making bread, it would be shocking indeed if that had to be taught by means of books.' I would like to paraphrase that: 'as to the act of digging'. The only thing I will say about it, realizing that the flight from the cities is likely to include people who have practically never seen a spade, is that you should nearly always dig a trench: that is, remove one spit of soil (a spit is the wedge of soil cut by the spade) out in a furrow right across your piece of ground and dump it, then turn the next row of spits upside down into the furrow you have left. Thus you always have an open furrow in front of you to invert your spits into. When you come to the end of your piece you should, in theory at least, load the first lot of spits you dug out and dumped into a wheelbarrow and cart them back to fill up the empty furrow that has been left.

One way is to split your work down the middle and dig from alternate ends. You can then throw the first spit of each long narrow strip into the last furrow of the other. It is often admissible, however, to dig by inverting the spits in situ and not 'digging to a trench' when you are digging land over for the second time, or just loosening the soil around soft fruit bushes, or digging with a fork. But the serious self-supporter is likely to be more interested in growing food than in such counsels of perfection. But, in my experience at any rate, the more you dig the better, and it is better to dig badly than not dig at all.

If we wish to grow food on a larger scale, then there are three things we can do effectively. One is to buy an agricultural tractor. The other is go in for one of those little garden cultivators: either a rotovator or a mini-plough. The third is to plough by horse.

TRACTOR ...

In comparing these different methods of cultivating I will merely draw on my own experience. We have now a Ferguson diesel tractor which cost us $180.00 together with a fore-end loader, a link box, and a mounted spring-tine cultivator. For $180.00 we could not have got much of a garden cultivator which you can comfortably lift off the ground with one hand. We can always borrow from a neighbor a two-furrow plough to fit on the tractor (a good secondhand one from a farm sale would cost us about 25 dollars), and we could certainly plough very deeply.and well five acres in a day (if we were willing to spend a whole day doing one job, which we are not). This tractor will break up rough ground and bury any amount of rubbish as it ploughs; if it hits a boulder in our boulder-strewn glacial deposit of a farm, it just stops the tractor, and if the boulder is no bigger than I am it will lift it right out of the ground with its hydraulics. The spring-tine cultivator covers a lot of ground, therefore it is easy to make many passes with it, and it will pulverize the roughest soil and make a seed-bed. Or almost make a seed-bed-it is generally desirable to haul a set of light harrows, or a ring-roll, over the land after it, to make the tilt fine enough for small seeds. The tractor will work in a small garden both with the plough and the spring-tine cultivator-so long as the garden is quite empty of crops and unencumbered. It becomes difficult when there are patches of crop left which must be undisturbed, for the tractor takes room to maneuver.