Growing up farmer

I was speaking to a patient today who spent his whole life in the farmlands of western Oklahoma. We were talking about the change that have occurred in small Midwestern America. In the mid to late 40s and early 50s growing up his town, that is now a barren ghost town, had three car dealerships three clothing stores and a movie theater. Growing up back then farming, one would regularly have a sunrise to sunset day and meals took hours to prepare and every morning was riding the fence line, not with four wheelers towing trailers full of everything you need, but on horseback with multiple trips up and back in order to repair one aspect of a fence, and plowing, and tending livestock and on and on.

We both agreed it was a profoundly inefficient model, butut with decreased efficiency came increased quality in both of our opinion. The quality, not only in the work product delivered but in the human interaction required. The interaction was between neighbors helping each other finish jobs and fathers having sons follow him during the day helping and learning and between mothers from neighboring farms working together with daughters prepping meals and repairing torn clothes together teaching and talking.

Friday nights were a trip into town where they would get all the groceries they would need for the following week, being that most of their food was a grown in gardens or hunted. It was the entire community and surrounding farmers all driving into town, parking their cars wherever they could all down main street and people going to shops laughing and talking eating at cafés engaging with each other. He said his dad would leave the car with the keys in it and the windows rolled down with the groceries in it, guns on the gun racks in the rear window, and they would wander around town talking to friends laughing and playing, until midnight.

We settled on three things that undid this quintessential American society. The first was the introduction of bigger machines which improved efficiency but decreased the number of people necessary to accomplish a task and decreased the amount of human interaction necessary to accomplish a task. Secondly, the social revolution of the mid to late 60s which caused many of these farmers, who had sent their kids to college to give them a better life, being left by those kids who were not interested in returning to the country. Finally, the Vietnam War took a lot of lower middle-class kids from their homes in the Midwest and changed those who survived and those families whose children didn’t survive, forever. You could also add Johnson’s push for exporting manufacturing and farming to the then third world.

He mused that it was a more difficult time when it came to accomplishing tasks and getting things done but it was a simpler time that encouraged community and human interaction and familial interaction and we both concluded that made it a better time.

It seems that a decreased efficiency of life lead to an increased quality of life, in this example.