The early 1970s found us almost completely mechanized on our farm in the rolling hills of central Mississippi. At the end of another long, hot summer day, we typically came rolling in on our tractors, tired and dirty, but still filled with a sense of accomplishment after working fields for the last ten or twelve hours or more. Farming produces that feeling with surprising regularity, perhaps more so than any other profession. It’s not a Monday through Friday occupation; never has been.
I marvel at the changes that have cascaded through the industry of agriculture since I was a boy. Today’s world of farming is dominated by technology that allows a farmer to crawl into the cab of a $200,000 tractor and be as comfortable as he is in his recliner at home. Surprisingly quiet cabs, air shock seats, air conditioning, satellite radio, and GPS positioning technology capable of guiding the tractor arrow straight down a field without the touch of an operator’s hands; all of these combined allow more work to be done in one day by a single person than dozens could accomplish a single generation ago. I am privileged to work in this industry and I’ve seen these advances play out over the last four decades.
But long before mechanical power took over the farm, animals played a critical role in food production. For the last 5000 years, fields were largely plowed with oxen, horses, and mules. Millennia crawled by, and the only real innovation in draft power was breeding bigger mules. Only in the last century has mechanical power on the farm come into play. Seventy-five years ago? The majority of farms still depended mostly on animal draft power and caring for them was a big part of farm life. As tractors became more practical, they quickly displaced animals as a power source. Even fifty years ago, a small percentage of farms still used mules and horses, albeit largely in a nostalgic sense, to pull walking plows and wagons and mowers.
By the time I was old enough to pay attention, mules were quickly fading into a role as occasional garden power for those who had patience, persistence, and a pasture. Even at the end of those long summer days, often on a Saturday evening, my dad would crawl off a perfectly good tractor, walk down into our pasture and catch our mule named Ada. He slipped a bridle and bit over her head and led her up the hill to our tool shed, where the rest of the leather harness hung on a wall.
I watched as he attached the gear necessary to work our garden, fitting a collar around her neck and tying it on with hames string, then adding plow lines and trace chains. A “single tree” mated the collar and trace trains to the Georgia plow stock, a versatile wooden beam with handles that allowed him to change out the “sweeps” according to what kind of plowing he would do that day. He might use a turning plow, a “gee whiz” or a double shovel, depending on the time of year or the size of the vegetables.
Then he led her down to the garden and hooked her to the plow of his choosing and the battle of wills began. We learned early on that he really preferred to be alone in the garden when plowing since Ada was easily distracted by children. Mules don’t understand words, they simply understand repetitive tones. The words “Gee” and “Haw” were used to designate turn right and turn left, respectively, along with a tug on the right or left-hand plow line. “Get up” and “whoa” were used to start and stop an animal, again with a tug on the plow lines.
However, those weren’t the only words my dad uttered while he stumbled down the long rows behind our mule. “Gee, Gee…dammit…. get your big feet off that row! Turn, turn, turn….Hawwww…you sorry excuse for a…@(^$%+&$#%&$”… with an ever more colorful opinion of her equine ancestry floating above the garden in a blue cloud of profanity.
As kids, we usually sat on the bank in front of our house and watched and listened from afar, watching my dad with his shoulders bowed and head down, guiding the plow stock down the rows on a sultry summer evening, hearing the slap of leather harness and the tinkle of trace chains, the sound of the earth tearing as the plow ripped through roots and weeds. If you closed your eyes and listened, it was as though millennia had never passed, man and beast yoked together again so that the earth could be encouraged to give up her fruits, the same way a farmer might have done it a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years ago.
At the time I didn’t examine or question his decisions, but when I was older, I often wondered, Why? We were farming with tractors, had been since I could recall. My dad could have bought a small garden tractor like everyone around us used. Why would he bother to go to all the trouble of chasing down our mule, hooking up all that harness, hitching to a plow, and then fighting an obstinate creature up and down our garden rows, all the while yelling profane instruction that was rarely heeded and never appreciated by our mule?
The answer may be as simple as economics, of not wanting or needing the expense of another tractor to maintain, or preferring the nimbleness of an animal that could navigate a narrow row middle amid other vegetables better than any four-wheel tractor. Sometimes a mule is just a mule.
But I suppose it may have been more complex, a strange form of stress relief, or a task that was driven by nostalgia, or perhaps even a reason to say all the things to our mule that he had wanted to say to his family all week. Wry smile. At some point, I decided that Ada had to be hard of hearing. However, the term “stubborn as a mule” came about through the real experience of a physical argument with an animal that would rather be elsewhere, from tired arms that felt like they were being pulled from their sockets by the end of the day. It wasn’t imagination.
Northern farmers rejected the mule, preferring the horse or ox as a draft animal. But mules ate less, were less prone to disease, and could handle the heat of southern summers and southern farmers used them almost exclusively.
My dad told us stories of his older brothers and then later of himself spending long days from the 1920s through the 1940s behind a plow, following a mule. In the hills of Mississippi, progress moved at a slower pace than in the Delta, and even in the 1950s, a few small farmers were still using mules. Back and forth across a field they trudged, plowing row after row, acre after acre. They stumbled down freshly plowed row middles, walking 20 or 25 miles in a day. A good day meant that a man and a mule might plow an acre of ground. The monotony must have been maddening, but it was necessary work, a requirement to wrestle a living from the land in those days.
After that, farming with tractors must have seemed ridiculously easy to my dad’s generation. Of course, it wasn’t really, but from that generation’s perspective, the physical toll was so much less, it’s very likely that mechanization literally added years to their life.
Still, the memory remains of watching him follow a mule up and down those garden rows, always wondering which one of them was really in charge. Does he miss farming with animals? Perhaps not now, but I believe that the transition for farmers in his generation from farming with animals to mechanized farming wasn’t as simple as it seems.
Animal husbandry, whether it was formally called that or not, was an integral part of life on his own dad’s farm as he grew up, as it was for many in his generation and several generations before him. Having horses and mules and cattle, pigs and chickens and dogs around underfoot was as natural for him as breathing. My dad likes animals, and always has, and we grew up with many of them on our own farm. He keeps a few cows even now, reluctant to give them up. He always enjoyed the routine of checking on them, the two of us searching the fringes of our pastures for baby calves when they were inevitably born during summer thunderstorms and sleet storms in winter, feeding them hay and corn in the winter time and “fixing fence” when they strayed. And they always strayed.
Even now, as he stumbles outside late in the evening to feed his dogs, he always takes longer than necessary. He will tell you that he lingers to prevent them from fighting over the food, though nearly all of them are chained individually. If you step out on the back porch, though, more often than not, you can hear him talking to them in a gentle voice. He’s out there in the dark with them, taking care of them the way he’s done it for over sixty years, unknowingly following an age-old practice that began ten thousand or even twenty thousand years ago when dogs became the first domesticated animals of early man.
Perhaps there will come a time when we are forced to again rely on animals to help us produce food and survive in this world. But by then, the lessons learned from the generations that came before us will surely be difficult to recall..
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(Photo: Tennessee Virtual Archive)
- Gee, Haw, Dammit! by Larry Ganann - February 16, 2023