To the editor:
When I was a boy in the 1950s in St. Agatha, there were 70 or more small farms up Flat Mountain (Montaigne Platte) and even more in the surrounding community. Today there are none. They are all gone! The kids from Flat Mountain alone used to fill up most of our schools. What happened?
Most likely we can blame technology for that one. Prior to 1900 and up to after World War I, most farms were small, 100 +/- acres. Most of the work was labor intensive, self-sustaining, horses and oxen being used for the harder work of planting and clearing land.
Farming 100 acres was more or less adequate to sustain and feed a family; but the labor was intensive and no one was actually rich! Life back then involved working 12-16 hour days, 365 days a year. It wasn’t easy.
But then slowly, silently, after World War I, technology reared its head. Tractors and trucks and their implements, like bigger plows and harrows, started to appear. More land could be tilled and planted. The horse and oxen slowly disappeared. Lots began to increase in size as older farmers sold their cropland to more successful farmers — the old way of life, like self-sustaining small farms, simply could not compete with the new one.
Another factor was the mass migration of the children born and raised on these farms to points south, like Connecticut and Massachusetts, to work in the booming factories (it didn’t help much when the transplanted sons and daughters came to visit in brand new Buicks and Oldsmobiles, with lots of cash! Why work a small farm when one could make 20 times more at half the labor!) This continued with increasing speed until the late 1960s and ‘70s, until there were no longer any small farms left.
I remember physically picking rocks (for 25 cents an hour!) until the rock picker came along; picking potatoes until the harvester came along; picking weeds until DDT came along, in other words, until technology displaced my labor. And so it did for millions of other Americans and small farmers.
Technology inherently changes one’s environment in ways never contemplated when first introduced. Who 100 years ago up on Flat Mountain would ever have believed their way of life would disappear forever, to be replaced by what we have today, just by introducing trucks, tractors, and even chainsaws!
In the wake of this technological wave, jobs were created and destroyed. While farm work and subsistence slowly disappeared, one could work in the booming factories and mills that were cropping all over the place in America — one way of life being replaced by another. Life was good, for a while.
Now even this has disappeared in turn. Like the many small farms, the factories and industries that employed millions are closed, shuttered and gone. The jobs are few and the future a bit bleak for many.
The Maine wood cutter also has not been spared as that way of life is also disappearing. What was once a thriving way of life for many is also nearly all gone. Ever wonder how many tree cutter jobs have been displaced by the mechanical tree cutter/trimmer? And so on. Plus the decreasing demand for lumber and closed mills have not helped.
Another potential game-changer that is looming on the horizon is mass automation. Again as a boy, I used to watch on TV the massive automobile assembly lines of Ford and General Motors, with their thousands of workers assembling the cars and trucks we would eventually drive. Today, we have the same assembly lines but no workers! All you see are robots doing the assembly: the workers are gone.
