A Rugged History Part 2

A Rugged History Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about the history of farming and how farming today is a lot different than it was in the mid to late 1800’s. Bob Boze Bell is the Executive Editor of True West Magazine who fills the pages of his magazine with information and stories of that time period. He says it is interesting to look at the food that people ate.

BELL: The food preparation and just being able to have enough to eat is really incredible. The things they would have to go through and how rare food was. And then on the other hand it’s really quite extraordinary how well they ate. I was looking at an army diary from the 1850’s I believe it was and it was in Socorro, NM which was really primitive at that time and he wrote in his diary all the things they had for dinner. They had jams, they had pickles, it was pretty amazing – dumplings. Just a pretty extraordinary list that they could be that sophisticated out in the frontier.

Of course today farmers produce most all of the food we eat but then there weren’t these large commercial food producing farms.

BELL: No, no. You were just being able to subsist on your own and if you had a little extra to sell then that was just gravy but no it was really, really tough and the means of production were so small it’s really incredible what those people did.

True West magazine has been around since 1953 and I remember always seeing my grandfather reading it, now I’m an avid reader and subscriber.

BELL: Well we try to talk quite a bit about what was it like to be alive then and we have a new feature by Dr. Jim Kornberg on how they treated headaches or snake bites and once again it’s pretty amazing about what they did have but then on the other hand it’s kind of frightening.

Farming, like everything has been making the leap into the technology world. Tractors are now guided by GPS and as much science goes into making better crops as into trying to cure the common cold but yet we still like the old west.

BELL: You know I think Louis L’Amour nailed it. He said it’s really ironic because we live the life our ancestors dreamed about and yet we dream about the life that they lived. And you and I are talking about these very things that are just so extraordinarily brave and courageous and what they did out here and a lot of people really enjoy that and that’s why they like our magazine. We have subscribers from all over the world. They love the American west because they love this sense of pioneer spirit.

So as I grab my iPhone and hop into my car heading for the grocery store I take note of the efforts our ancestors went through to put a meal on their table. Maybe we’ll just call out for pizza.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

www.twmag.com