How do we find our way to these little plots of ground we till? And once there, how are we supposed to figure out what to do with them?
Chances are, if you live in this hemisphere and are not Amerindian, you came to this place fairly recently in geologic terms and only after a long and perilous migration. If you are happen to be making a success of it today it’s probably because you are standing on the shoulders of someone two or three generations back who worked your plot long enough to figure out what it was really good at.
My neighbour Oscar Jardine’s family lost their home farm on the edge of the village early in the Great Depression. It sat idle for 15 years, the orchard abandoned and boards blowing off the barn until Oscar’s father scraped together enough money growing Sussex meat chickens on his two acre lot nearby to buy the farm back for cash.
“That was 1947 and it was the proudest moment of his life,” remembers Oscar. Soon his father had twenty brooder huts sitting out in the old orchard and the entire barn converted to hold three floors of meat chickens. He ramped up production to 15,000 birds a year, killed and plucked them in the drive shed, stored them in a community freezer and sold them to vendors all over the county. It was a horrible, stinking business and his boys learned to hate it. They worked like pit ponies for the next six years, lugging five gallon pails of chicken feed up a rickety staircase that went thirty feet up the outside of the barn wall to tiny doors and ammonia-filled rooms.
After six years, the chicken market suddenly crashed. Chicken that once sold for 30 cents a pound dropped to 15. Nobody wanted them. The last 3,000 freezer-burned chickens went off on a railroad car to the city for 10 cents a pound and they were thrilled to see the last of them. Then they turned their hands to the beef business and filled the barn with steers. That turned out to be a break-even exercise, but then a funny thing happened. Oscar’s father noticed that the chicken manure from those brooder houses had brought all the apple trees back to life. The next spring he pruned the orchard, sprayed it and in the fall picked an enormous crop. He decided he could sell those apples if he built a bridge across the river that divided the farm and got them out to the highway. The boys built the bridge and over the first weekend they sold two thousand dollars’ worth of apples to the travelling public.
“That was enough to buy us a Chev car,” marvels Oscar. “Is there anything you could do today over a weekend that would buy you a new car? I mean anything legal?”
Oscar’s father developed a famous maxim from that experience. “It’s no hardship living on the highway,” he would say. And he set about moving everything he owned across the river. Soon he had a gas station, a lunch counter and regular seasonal sales of farm produce. In the summer of 1956 the boys started selling tires off a hay wagon. Over the next fifty years, that tire business grew to become one of the largest enterprises in the community. Driving past it today, no one would suspect that the path to tires started in a chicken brooder house and wandered through apple trees, across a home-made bridge and out to the asphalt road.
The key to all of it was observation. Oscar laughs and says that his father was never really suited to farm life. It was pride that drove him to buy that farm but once it was back in his hands he found it a constant frustration. He was impatient, hot-tempered and impulsive. And too proud to quit. But he was also very observant and always ready with a new idea when an old one failed. “He just kept making up his mind,” says Oscar. “And he did that until he was quite wealthy and not farming anymore.”
Today the old Jardine place has dwindled a little but its legacy carries on. Oscar’s brother is now retired out of the tire business and he spends his golden years keeping the orchard up and feeding a few Sussex hens. Oscar gave up tires and moved out here to the sideroad forty years ago, the year before I arrived, and we’ve been trying to make sense of the place ever since.
- Dan Needles