Mowing

When we arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, we were curious to see what our living situation would be like. Colleagues had discovered a two-bedroom townhome near their home that was to be made available to us at very reasonable cost. We had visited them in October, so we had some idea of what their neighborhood looked like and we anticipated a very livable place. But we had not seen so much as a photo of the place we had committed to live in for two months.

As it turns out, the real estate agent for this neighborhood (or this ‘muu baan’ as they say in Thai) moved in with her father in a nearby town so that we could rent her townhome. And it turns out that the place is very comfortable for us and meets all our needs. And a very positive aspect of this place is that, even though it is a small place tightly packed between other small places, it is near the end of a cul de sac and our bedroom window looks out over a field of thirty to forty acres.

The field is used for agriculture and at first we thought it was rice paddies, being very flat and subdivided by many small irrigation ditches and footpaths. But the field is growing some kind of grass that is now being harvested, apparently for animal fodder.

If this field were in my native Colorado, I am almost certain that it would be harvested by a tractor with some type of mowing attachment. I have, in my youth, participated in such harvests. The tractor with a sickle bar mower would drive all over the field and the mower would clip the grass off down low and lay it flat. The mown grass would be allowed to dry in the sun for a day or two so as to reduce the chance of mold forming. Then a rake attachment would be drawn behind the tractor to sweep the mown grass into windrows. A third machine would scoop up the windrows and pack the grass into tight bales. The heaviest work of the harvest involved picking up those bales and throwing them onto a truck or trailer and then stacking those bales where they would be protected from the elements. A typical bale would weigh upwards of eighty pounds and the harvest was often done in the heat of the sun.

In my travels around the world, I have seen grass being harvested by many different methods. Not everyone can afford a tractor. And some fields are so small that a tractor cannot turn around. In southern Mexico I have seen grass being harvested by machete. In Tajikistan I have seen men harvesting with hand-sickles, much like the one in the international symbol of communism, the hammer and sickle representing the laborers. And a few times I saw men in Germany harvesting modest sized fields using the old-fashioned scythe, that allows them to stand upright.

I remember one time in particular watching a German man mowing grass around the castle at Greifenstein, not far from where I lived at the time. The grass was hardly long enough to be considered fodder; perhaps he was mowing it just to keep the grass short, as we would mow our front lawns. But he was mowing it with a scythe and he presented the very image of peace and recreation as he walked quietly along rhythmically swinging his tool of wood and steel, almost silently clipping off the grass at a uniform height. He was smoking his pipe as he worked, and he did not appear to be working. He was making rapid progress, but it did not seem to be costing him any significant effort. Each swing would clip off an arc of about 24” into the taller grass and he would step forward as he brought the scythe back around for another swing. After about a dozen swings, he would stop and take a few puffs on his pipe and then progress through another twenty or thirty feet of the field. Every ten minutes or so, he would stop and take a whet stone out of his hip pocket and tidy up the edge of his scythe with a few deft strokes before returning to the rhythm of cutting and smoking.

The field outside our bedroom window here in Thailand is being harvested in a very different manner. We had been here about a week when one morning I heard this annoying, rhythmic two-cycle motor sound going, “Waaahhh, waaahhh, waaahhh,” over and over again After about half an hour, I got up to go see what was going on. There were two men working in the field, one swinging a motorized weed-whacker and the other was gathering up the fallen grass by hand. The work has continued now almost daily for two weeks and they are not halfway done with the field. In fact, the part of the field that they harvested first will probably be ready for a second cutting before they finish the entire area with the first cutting. Usually once a day, a truck will come by and the two men will be busy for a little while carrying their harvest in armloads to the truck. Other than those breaks and an occasional break for lunch or a cigarette, the noise of “Waaahhh, waaahhh, waaahhh,” goes on and on and on.

Over and over I have asked myself why such a machine would be chosen over a scythe for this harvest. It makes no sense to me. The noise is sometimes a great annoyance to me; how much more annoying it must be to the harvesters. They are so much closer to that buzzing motor! And I would be very surprised if they are wearing any sort of hearing protection. And besides the noise, the operator is feeling the vibrations in his hands and arms and through them, the vibration is transferred to his whole frame. I don’t know which would weigh more, a scythe or the weed-whacker, but I doubt that the weed-whacker is significantly lighter, especially with a full tank of fuel.

The choice of tool might make sense if the modern tool were more efficient than the scythe, but I can’t believe that it is. Each stroke of the scythe would cut about 24” while a stroke of the weed-whacker probably cuts no more than half as much. And a stroke of the scythe cuts cleanly while the rapidly spinning cutters on a weed whacker likely damage the grass by hitting each blade of grass multiple times as it is falling. Add to that the cost of fuel and the cost of maintaining any motorized mechanism, and it seems clearly to be a huge step backward in harvesting technology. More annoying, more tiring, more expensive and less effective… Who comes up with these modern ideas???