A month or so ago I was perusing a second-hand bookstore with a friend of mine and we happened upon a book which instantly caught my attention. A hard-back book with a colorful farm scene on the dust jacket had in large letters as a title, “We Farm For A Hobby and Make It Pay.” As I looked at the copyright page, I noticed that it was published in 1938 and again in 1940. I had never heard of Henry Tetlow, but I decided that this was a book that needed some reading. Perhaps it was outdated, but perhaps there were some nuggets of information within it that we could use. Turns out, it is actually quite a timely book.
The book begins with the author explaining that he and his wife and 2 daughters moved to their farm, 20 miles outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the year 1921. Henry Tetlow and his wife had decided that apartment city living did not hold the quality of life they were looking for especially to raise 2 children. Mr. Tetlow, who was educated at Yale University, continued to work in the city of Philadelphia 5 days a week, but found that living expenses in the country were much more reasonable than living in the city even counting the commuting. The farm they purchased was a place which contained 40 acres with an historic house and various barns and outbuildings. For the first 10 years or so, they did not do any farming on the place, save a small summer vegetable garden. Six acres were in timber, another acre was a fruit orchard, and there was an acre in lawn and buildings. All the rest of the land had been left to grow up into second growth timber, and there was no livestock on the place at all. The Tetlows hired a man to help keep the place up, and he was employed 3 days a week the year around.
So when the economic disasters of 1929 hit, the Tetlows, like so many people then, were looking for ways to cut costs and spending, and to figure out how to survive, come what may. They thought about firing the hired man, but he was a family man himself, and they new he would have trouble finding work perhaps, so they wanted to find a way to keep him on. I will include an excerpt from this old book, for it eloquently states what persuaded them to take the course they chose: (from page 7)
“…and while it was admittedly a good idea to save all the money possible, yet what should we do if a time came when there was no money, or when the money we had was worthless? I was in Vienna in 1923, at the tail end of Austria’s post-war inflation and had seen something of the dire consequences of currency depreciation. Again, in November, 1929, I heard a stock broker say, in his office in Wall Street: “Thank God I still know how to milk a cow.” I lived to see him go back to doing just that. My concern was not only that we should pull in our financial neck but also that come what might we should not starve. There were plenty of other ways we could cut down cash expenses. Since we had forty fallow acres underfoot why not keep the man on and start producing our own food? Even should it prove more expensive than buying it ready-made, if the crash came we still would have three meals a day.”
Mr. Tetlow goes on to say that he was raised in the country and knew a little about what it involved, but he had still come to the vague notion that it was cheaper to buy milk than to keep a cow. He would now find out if that were true. The rest of the book details what happens when the family keeps several cows, lots of chickens, a couple of pigs, a three season garden, and the hired man as a full-time worker. When the reader sees how practical their experiment is, it broaden’s one’s mind of the possibilities. I turn my attention to our own little farm. We have more timber than fields. It is hard work clearing land, and I do not much enjoy it. It costs money to put up a proper fence. Animals have to be fed, and feed costs money. I know that if cows and goats and chickens are allowed to free range on pasture and brush, it cuts down on the amount of feed and hay needed, but chickens and goats have to have a little grain in addition to such a diet. One needs a place to store the hay, store the root vegetables, store the canned garden produce, make and store the cheese and butter and sour cream. It goes without saying that someone has to tend to the animals and the gardens as well, which means that either family members are going to have to work, or there will need to be hired help, or both. But if a family has a steady source of income coming in, and if the family has a few decent acres of land and a good fence and structure or two for storage and housing of animals, and if there is a trusted helper outside of the family that can take care of things while the family is on vacation or can ease the load of work in collecting the milk or eggs or vegetables, then is it possible that even today a family could perhaps grow or raise most of their food for less than they could buy it at Walmart? It is obvious that the food a family grows and raises is most likely going to be much higher in nutrition, no doubt. If you try to buy everything organic nowdays, it costs you an arm and a leg. Have you seen the price of truly organic and pasture-raised eggs at the supermarket lately? If you can find them? The price is getting around the $4.00-$5.00 a dozen range. Have you read the nutritional benefits of raw milk and raw cheese and butter? These are incredible healing foods, but you can’t buy them anywhere around here in the state of Alabama. And if you can find raw cheese, it is $6.00-$8.00 for a little block. I don’t know about you, but our family of 10 cannot afford to pay that much for good cheese. And we eat a lot of it.
So, yes, a little farm that seeks to grow its own food and be somewhat self-sustaining requires some good, hard work. But in the Tetlow’s case, they could afford to pay a hired man, who did all the milking of the few cows the farm had. But he then also got to take some of that milk home to his family, so he was provided with good, fresh, nutritious foods. Mr. Tetlow himself would make butter once a week or so, and could do it in about 75 minutes with very rudimentary tools almost 70 years ago. Nowadays you can get an electric churn and it goes much more quickly. The point is, the Tetlows were providing income for a family by hiring help, and also providing them with food. And the Tetlows found that when it was all said and done, they came out ahead in terms of saving money, had plenty of nutritious food, did not wear themselves out working themselves to death on their farm, provided income and food for another family and were very healthy and satisfied for it. They did not begin producing food on their farm to sell, but when they wound up with more eggs than they needed, they were able to sell some to offset their costs a little more. And when one of the milk cows had a calf they did not have room for or did not need for personal consumption, they sold it for pure profit.
There is another passage from this book I want to include, because many times difficulty with a garden or some other farm project will so discourage a person that he will give it up and go the easy route instead. I took great encouragement from this: (page 36):
The poorest year on a well-managed farm, diversified and dedicated to home comsumption, must inevitably be bountiful. The complainers are those who seek only money crops. Money can be made at farming, even though it is admittedly impossible for a wheat farmer-to cite a typical instance- to make a year’s living out of ninety days’ work: which is apparently what the wheat farmer expects and the government esteems his inalienable right. But if the wheat farmer could be persuaded to go to work, to raise his own food instead of buying it ready put up at the store, his condition would never become desperate.
The farmer who complains that everything goes against him betrays his own imcompetence as surely as the man who cannot hold a job. Of course things are going to go against you. But that cannot deter you. We have been struck not only by tornadoes but by late and early frosts. There was a July day when ten minutes’ hail cut the corn to ribbons, stripped the grape arbor and peach trees, and laid the half-grown onions down as neatly as though cut back with giant shears. In the subsequent half hour, while the sun got to work, we made highballs with hailstones: I could have shoveled a ton of ice off the lawn. Another autumn the cold rains rotted the corn stover before we got it in the barn. That winter was so severe it killed most of the bearing asparagus. In the last decade two new scourges, the Japanese beetle and the Mexican bean beetle, have come to plague us. One intent on his own misfortunes might say with England’s King Richard II: ” Of comfort not man speak…For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings.” But why do it? Why dwell on misfortunes? The way to insure defeat it thus to invite it. Yet the truth, so apparent it should be obvious to the most disgruntled farmer, is that in the long run nature must give man the breaks.”
Imagine if more people could do what Henry Tetlow and his family did! When you actually add up what you spend on a monthly basis at the grocery store, and imagine instead raising your own food with that money, do you think that it is possible? Perhaps for many people, it wouldn’t be. But for many people, perhaps it would. And perhaps it is more a question of if you could, would you like to? And if you would like to, why not give it a try?
