I once knew a man who immigrated to Canada after WWII from Latvia and went to work in a machine shop in southwestern Ontario. He soon saved enough money to buy a small plot and start a market garden. At first he had to borrow most of his equipment and his neighbour across the road was kind enough to lend him a set of disk plows.
But dragging the discs across the road left quite a mark on the highway and my friend was embarrassed by the damage he had done to a public road. So he rigged up an axle and a hydraulic cylinder and invented what many of his neighbours claim was the first hydraulic lift disk plow on the continent. The machine shop promptly sold the idea to one of the large farm implement companies and within five years it had spread across North America. My Latvian friend never got a dime.
Max Planck, the famous quantum physicist, once said that the best new ideas never originate from a committee but rather “from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.”
That idea has always resonated with this lonely researcher, labouring as I do in solitude and without a four wheel drive loader tractor. Loading pigs by yourself has a way of uniting your thoughts on a single point. Pigs sense treachery the moment the door of the house opens. When a pig comes up the ramp and sees the guy with the glasses it identifies a weak spot and, for an awful moment, this becomes our whole world.
Thirty years ago I invented a system for loading pigs that incorporated the principles of the lever, the pulley and the inclined plane. Family and neighbours would gather to witness this wonder of modern agriculture and marvel that it had been created by a soft-handed economist and a scribbler. One of the ancients on the sideroad even pronounced it “the slickest way of moving pigs I ever saw.” But it never gained traction in the industry.
Jethro Tull’s invention of the seed drill in England in 1740 is widely regarded as the beginning of modern agriculture. Actual farm practices did not change drastically until a century later when pioneers in the New World entered the bottomlands of the Ohio River and tried to turn the heavy clay soils with iron plows. Suddenly, a host of new patents were granted for the chilled steel plow and all of the mechanical processes of cultivating, reaping, baling and threshing that we recognize today. (It is no coincidence that Pittsburgh became the centre of the U.S. steel industry in the process.) Technical advances moved so rapidly that by 1880 the Amish and Mennonites called a halt to protect their families and communities from disruption. The rest of us have been trying to catch our breath ever since.
I was thinking about all of this while following the instructions from a computer expert from Albuquerque on how to install the latest version of the software package I use to write this column. Nothing worked. He was just as puzzled as I was but not nearly as irritated. At one point I practically shouted into the phone, “If you put in bread and it comes out toast, you have a toaster. If it doesn’t you have a boat anchor!”
This is where writing and farming are so closely linked. I have been pounding a keyboard for fifty years now and I find I don’t type a whit faster on this PC than I did with an Underwood in 1978. There has been no giant tech leap forward for me. This business of shaping a sentence in the English language resists mechanizing the way certain crops like mushrooms and ginseng refuse to be mass-produced, the way a pig refuses to be loaded.
People forget it was the lonely writer who forged the gap between hardware and software in the computer industry. Computers could do a lot of things but they were at a dead loss when it came to handling the subtleties of the English language. The blinking lights and whirring tapes needed a special ‘soft’ program to supervise the works, and that program in turn needed supervision by a human operator. It still needed husbandry, the vigilance of the shepherd and the attentiveness of the gardener.
And that gives me hope that there is still a place for us.
— Dan Needles