Two Farm Musings

I. Delicate Brutality: The Roto-Tiller

Machinery, in particular power tools of the farm and the woodshop, is both brutal and delicate; I challenge anyone to find other things that embody that unlikely pairing.

The roto-tiller's blades cut through the grass and soil, tearing them apart and turning them upside down with efficiency and brutality. The first garden snake to encounter the machine received a wound that did not prove immediately fatal, but gave me enough remorse to take the time to toss the second one into the brush pile, not trusting its instincts for dealing with the machine.

Despite this ability to so quickly destroy and overturn so much, the roto-tiller is also sensitive, like a poet or the fine-adjustment knob on a coffee grinder or a sextant. Roots, stones, and the fragments of brick and glass that remind me of the urban part of this urban farm can all cause it to cough and shudder, and sometimes jam the blades. Slight hummocks and valleys in the field drive the machine perceptibly off course, and the heavy spinning blades only reinforce the false directions. It seems incongruous: these are exactly the things that roto-tillers encounter in regular operation, yet these are the things that are its downfall.



II. Refinement: Espresso and Compost

Compost, I realized while sifting it into a wheelbarrow, is not unlike espresso. Before I continue, let me elaborate on compost sifting. After many other, longer-term processes, the compost is ready to be spread on a field. First, however, the larger pieces that have not decomposed (twigs, rinds, etc.) need to be removed. So I laid two boards parallel across the sides of the wheelbarrow and laid the sifter on it. The sifter is a square wooden frame with mesh nailed to the bottom. Once I've shoveled two shovelfuls of compost onto the mesh, I slide it back and forth along the boards. Any more than two, and it will jam; that is, there will not be enough space in the frame for the compost to shake about and settle the small pieces through the mesh. The wet hot compost rubs into the grain of the parallel boards and lubricates the frame's sliding. Once the wheelbarrow is full, it gets dumped into a compost hopper, stored in the heat of the day until it is needed.

All that to say that compost is like espresso, because both are a fine brown powder. On one hand they are different: compost is the lowest form; the beginnings, the primordial ooze from which plants, perhaps coffee plants, will emerge. Espresso is, on the other hand, the highest and most refined form: grown, dried, roasted, ground, and brewed, with any number of trans-continental shipments in between those steps. It comes served as a liquid in a tiny cup in a refined atmosphere in the artsy part of town, while compost fills wheelbarrows and is spread by sunburned men and women on an acre lot amidst Section 8 housing, across the street from an auto body shop.

But compost, too, is a refined form, its temperature is taken throughout the process. It is turned multiple times, mixed, and cared for. The sifting process and the process of pulling a shot have a similar number of steps. And the espresso grounds, the little puck that falls out of the filter between drinks, can, in the best of circumstances, make its way to compost pile, continuing the be refined.