Video "Root Hog or Die"

Greeting us in the mail yesterday was a DVD copy of a 1973 film “Root Hog or Die”. It made for a great evening “in” last night. It is a documentary about small horse powered farms in Franklin Co. Mass (one farm in Guilford, VT with a lady teamster :). Our friend Sam White sent it knowing that it would be greatly appreciated and because one of the farmers featured is a close friend who still takes to the lines frequently.

Here is a link to more about it http://www.recorder.com/home/6005627-95/farmer-shapes-the-land-and-the-land-shapes-the-farmer.

Quote from the movie: “We’re a timeless people. We don’t try to do things by 8-to-5,” says farmer Charlie Culver of Ashfield, as a team of workhorses plow their way uphill for what seems like forever. “We do it as we go along. We pay no attention to the time, the clock. We just do what’s got to be done when it’s got to be done. And our work’s not that objectionable to us. We don’t ever stop.” (The young man plowing in the movie is alive today and still enjoys getting his hands on the lines on a regular basis.)

Quote from the film maker Rawn Fulton: “But the sad irony, Fulton explained to the GCC students, was that the self-reliant way of life implied a freedom to labor in your own way without interference in a community-oriented barter system of neighbor helping neighbor, yet “What these people got caught in was the gradual collapse of that other way of life that wasn’t based on money. … These people felt deeply betrayed by the fact that just having a few cows and chickens and your own piece of land wasn’t enough anymore.””

Copies of the high-definition version of the film are being sold at Greenfield Farmers Cooperative Exchange, http://www.greenfieldfarmerscoop.com/.