Farm Artifacts

I'd say an artifact is something of a former time that has persisted through the years that, when viewed in the context of today, allows us to understand something of that past era... or something of a place that shows something of what that same place was like in a different time. Of course, most artifacts originally were hardly worth noting in their own day, being so thoroughly normal and not offering any comment at all on their current setting. On the farm, the artifacts I find are often just oddly shaped pieces of rusty metal, nearly meaningless on their own—but there's always a larger story to be found once somebody can figure out what it is and why it fell to the ground in this particular place.

Things lost on a small farm always turn up eventually, no matter where they were lost. As a worker here during college summers, sometimes I would discard a long-sleeve shirt on a warm day, lose it, and it would appear again weeks later. Even my indestructible Nalgene water bottle was lost track of, written off for good, and then it too turned up again—with a big dent in it. I always assumed it had fallen into a field and then got tilled up.

Everything lost can't have gone far on a vegetable farm, and, after enough work weeding, or enough tillage passes, or enough time pulling up drip tape, someone will view the exact spot where it happens to be. Even items like the small gas cap from my International 884 that I left sitting on the tractor fender while refueling and then promptly drove away, leaving it to fall off into a field (and forcing me to sheepishly turn up at the parts counter to buy a new gas cap like an idiot)... several years later someone working here walked up and handed me a little rusty round piece of metal—I knew exactly what it was.

One of the more common items that turns up here—we find one or two each year when sticking a pepper plant in the ground or digging up potatoes—are the spring clamps that I used, until a few years ago, to hold up the plastic on a long hoophouse. The hoophouse no longer exists, and even though nobody ever lost a clamp on purpose, still they keep appearing in that part of the farm.

Sometimes more interesting pieces of metal come to the surface. I think it was 2016 when we found this pointed piece of metal, clearly manufactured in a specific shape but for what purpose I had no idea. Years later, at a farm auction, looking at the old rusty equipment, I saw a part that was was exactly the same shape as this piece of metal—it was the guard on a sickle bar mower, through which the toothed bar slides to cut the tall grass to let it fall over evenly on the ground to be dried and raked into windrows for making hay. I never saw a sickle bar mower as a worker on farms, and nobody has used that machine on this ground (or even made any hay here at all) within the memory of anybody I know.

Around the same time that mower part came to the surface, I was discing up a patch of ground at my neighbor's flower farm and found this heavy triangle of rusty metal. I knew exactly what this one was though, although to somebody else it would be as foreign as the sickle bar guard was to me. All of the ground here, her flower farm and my vegetable farm used to be farmed by the people I worked for and learned from. And their key piece of machinery was the spader, a game-changing one-pass tillage machine that replaced the old plow and disc. Being a mechanicallyinclined ninteen-year-old, I was one of the workers assigned to replace the spades when they wore out twice a year. I'd know those plow bolts anywhere, with their difficult deformed-thread locknuts. The piece I found is not just the replaceable spade, but the fixed part of the machine it bolts onto—the remains of a poor quality (“meets farm tolerance”) weld are visible, where it would have been attached to the arm of the tillage machine.

Just as that sickle bar guard tells me something about what happened before my time here, 50 years from now if somebody found a spader spade (and could identify it!) it would tell something of what happened here before their time—the only people in this area who would have ever had a spader would have been the few small-scale vegetable farms here around me now.

I've been farming this very ground for nine years now, tilling it up every year, making beds, laying plastic, transplanting down every row, and I thought by now I would have found anything of any size—and honestly, the finds I've recounted here are just about the sum total of what has turned up! But digging potatoes last week, I pushed my hand into the loosened ground and felt something thin and pointy, about 18” long and curved in a gentle arc. I couldn't believe it, but it had to be. A tine from the part of the spading machine that leaves behind a flat fine seedbed. It's hard to miss—and dangerous! How on earth had nobody come across it before? But it's been here the whole time! I remember new tines being repair welded back on to the finish harrow from time to time, which means they must have broken off from time to time, and here was one of them—found 13 years after the last time anyone used a spader here. It's been down there, underground and unnoticed, only now brought to the surface.

These bits of rusty metal tell something of their era—a sickle bar mower used to be the standard way to make hay, now going out of fashion, and it's neat to find a piece that came off of an old machine. But the bigger story is that an old machine piece tells not only something about the old equipment it came from (and the fact that these parts fell off, requiring a careful repair to get going again), but also about the past story of this particular place.

Sometime, long before I was here, before the 50-year story of the farming here in Wheatland as I know it, there is an earlier part of the story of this farm that I would never have known—that it was at one point a hay field grown tall. One day, somebody came to mow hay, a thoroughly normal activity, and they brought a tractor not unlike the old ones I drive on the farm today (except in that day it looked modern and normal), or perhaps even a horse, if it was long enough ago. And as they drove that sickle bar mower back and forth, looking west at the same treeline I look at, looking east at the same horizon of the ridge between here and Leesburg, following the same contours I drive over in my own tractor and in the very same place where my field is now, a mower guard just dropped off into the grass, the only record of what happened here that day, really the only record of anything at all that happened in the past right here, separated from my own work only by time, but not by space.

And some day long after I'm gone from farming here, I will have unintentionally and unavoidably left a record of my own particular farming, artifacts all common to my shop-built farm equipment and nobody else's, but which few people would know to put together into the full picture—4 1/2” bolts, 5/8” hitch pins, 1/4” clip rings, and a few greenhouse clamps scattered around a 15' x 270' rectangle.