Where’s the Implement? Fall Veggie Share #5 – 11/20/24

Where’s the Implement?

The film, “My Old Ass” is a lovely film about growing up, living in the moment, the power of love and the passage of time. I passed part of the gloomy Saturday afternoon watching this film. I would recommend this movie to anyone, but the farmer in me can’t help but share my one critique of the film: the portrayal of farming. Tractors in particular.

Just as ornithologists cringe when the call of a red-tailed hawk is used for the bald eagle’s call in films, this farmer is annoyed that Hollywood wanted to portray cranberry farmers with little knowledge of what that means.

The whole premise of the film is that an eighteen year teen can’t wait to leave the farm for bigger and better things. We meet her right at the precipice of this change. And while I could write a treatise on how problematic that storyline is (because who would want to stay on a working farm?!), I’m gonna by-pass that biggie and instead discuss the portrayal of the tractor on the farm.

For starters, a tractor is not a car. It is not used on a farm to get from point A to point B.  No. A tractor is a machine that does work. That’s its job – to complete tasks at a rate and scale than human hands could never emulate.

Before tractors, farmers used horses on farms to pull implements. Implement is a fancy word for tool. Just like you might have different blades and tools to use on your Kitchen Aid, drill set, or food processor, horses pulled different implements to provide power in farm work. Horse drawn implements were used to prep soil, cultivate soil, and to harvest crops. As horses were replaced with tractors, the measurement of power assigned to a tractor was donned ‘horsepower.”  On our modern farm, we have tractor implements that till the soil, undercut raised beds or root crops, cultivate the soil, deeply plow the soil, create raised beds, mow tall cover crops, aid humans in planting transplants, harvest carrots, and harvest potatoes… to name a few.

So imagine my cringe when the movie featured teenage workers driving around a green and yellow tractor with no implement attached. This would be akin to driving a car around the field. The tractor wasn’t doing any work, and yet its sole job on a farm is to perform work. My friend, with whom I was watching, kept laughing at me; I got so worked up at this.

Society so misunderstands what it is to farm and why people might choose to do it. The general societal thought about farming is that it is hard and you don’t have to be smart to do it. In fact staying in farming is a sign of a lack of intelligence, because why would someone do such physically demanding, low paid, stressful work except if they aren’t smart enough to get a job in an office? The farm is a place of romantic beauty, but always a place to be left.  So even when it’s depicted in a movie, they have people driving tractors around like cars because they don’t even care enough to portray what we do with any sense of accuracy beyond a Fischer Price toy set understanding of farming. And I’m not even a cranberry farmer… who knows how poorly they portrayed that stye of farming?!

Like an itch I can’t stop scratching, this detail annoyed me all weekend. It itches my sadness that we as modern Americans have become so incredibly detached from what it means to produce food on a farm. A process that we literally depend on – the very nutrients we consume everyday – has become one that most folks now little about.

And so, I want to thank YOU for willingness to learn about where your food comes from and what it means to produce it.

Thank you and enjoy your veggies!