My great-grandparents raised their family on primarily food they grew themselves. It was fucking miserable. There’s still a whole host of shit my grandfather will not even permit in his pantry to this day, 75 years after he left home, because that was 90% of what they ate for one too many winters in a row. Because that was all the kids got for breakfast every day for a year. Because prepping it reminds him of the endless hours he spent dealing with everything that goes into drying things for winter storage, canning things, etc.
All the kids were put to work. Effective commercial pesticides becoming available and cheap was a red-letter day, because it meant they could go around fogging the rows of plants every so often instead of spending every day picking weevils and worms off the plants by hand to make sure the crop didn’t fail.
One time some PWA guys came through to clear a strip of public land adjacent to the farm, and all the local farm kids threw rocks at them until they left, because the patch they were clearing was full of wild blueberry bushes, and goddamned if those kids were giving up those fucking berries without a fight.
Another time one of my great-uncles decided to work smarter not harder and shook the fruit out of a tree instead of picking it. He was maybe eleven? It was the sort of stupid, impulsive mistake kids make. My great-grandmother basically had a panic attack because it meant all the fruit he got down that way would be bruised and rot instead of storing right, and they needed that fruit.
They never had to hit up the local charities or church to make it through the winter, but there were families he knew who were in the same situation that his family was in where charity was the only thing that got them through the winter after a bad harvest. That situation came with the extra awful choice on the parents’ part–how hungry do you have to get before you surrender your kids to an orphanage so they get fed? What about when you know that you’ll need those kids’ labor come spring?
(You remember how back when ancestry.com first started to be a thing half the stories were about senior citizens finding their youngest sibling who’d been adopted out as a baby or toddler? Not “secret half-sibling”–the kid their parents had, and maybe started to raise, and then had to give away because they were too poor to keep them? Yeah.)
When you’re growing food because you need it to literally not starve, a lot of times things like crop reliability and yield, the ability to store it well and for long periods of time, and nutritional density take precedence over things like flavor and variety and personal preference.
Hate beans? Too bad, they dry well and keep forever and form a complete protein with rice. Hate squash? Too bad, that’s going to be your source of a bunch of vitamins once it’s too cold for leafy greens. Hate tomatoes? Too bad, you’ll hate scurvy more.
You can plant whatever you like, obviously, but if that’s all the food you’re going to get… There are only so many hours in a day to tend crops and so much space on shelves for pickling jars and so long certain things will keep in a root cellar or a drying shed and sometimes these decisions get made for you by your need to not become malnourished and too sick to take care of the animals or sow once spring comes.
There were still cash-crops in the mix, because they didn’t grow 100% of what they ate (sugar and wheat flour and shortening were the big ones) and because they still needed to, you know, wear clothes and have furniture and repair equipment, and sometimes people survived the immediate aftermath of whatever horrible farm accident and needed a doctor. Sometimes fodder crops also failed, and you still needed to feed your animals over the winter. They didn’t raise turkeys on the farm, so one of the older kids would work at the turkey farm for a week in the run-up to Thanksgiving or Christmas and get paid with a bird.
The supplementary cash-crops weren’t any less fraught, because even if your crop made it out the door, the starch-testers could say your potatoes were no good for chips or fries and kick them back, and then what? The dairyman showing up late to collect your milk meant it sat there warming up on the side of the road, and then it was a coin-toss if it would get rejected as spoiled once it made it to the processing plant. The margin is razor thin with the “little bit here and there” model.
They had a sizeable, established farm. It was about as big as one family could reasonably keep in good working order with draft animals. Most families had been in the small town for several generations. They had a lot of neighbors they were on good terms with. They’d hire each other’s kids to help with harvests, which basically meant trading a bit of cash around because what a family made hiring out went back out the door when they had to hire on. When the maple sap was running, all the adults would take shifts at the boiler shed and all the kids would be hauling firewood. When the snowmelt had the stream going strong enough to run the wheel-powered sawmill, they all pitched in to get the lumber there and processed. We’re not talking every-family-for-themselves Dust Bowl displacement catastrophic circumstances.
It was still fucking miserable. Any given fuck-up or stroke of bad luck having the potential to starve you and your family understandably turns people into nervous wrecks, and when you’ve spent months of back-breaking labor on something only to have it go tits-up at the end and now you’re all going hungry, it can turn people into mean nervous wrecks. Rapid industrialization of the area and the farm industry did its part in the disappearance of the small family farm, sure, but every one of my grandfather’s siblings was desperate to get the fuck off that farm before anyone in town had even seen a Caterpillar in action.
When I was growing up, my grandfather always had a huge garden. Probably about half an acre, plus another two acres of hobby fruit trees. He took a lot of pleasure in growing stuff, and he enjoyed being able to just go out and harvest food. It was a source of pride that he could just turn his grandkids loose to go pick as many oranges and tangerines and peaches as we wanted. He was thrilled when a neighbor got free-range chickens and they’d show up to his place to get fed, even though the rooster was a territorial pain in the ass.
He did all that while he was still putting in forty hours a week at work. His experience growing up wasn’t the result of ‘some people just don’t want to be farmers.’ When he left home, he left home to work other people’s farms for cash until he was old enough to join the military. When he mustered out and bought a place, he planted on it. When he had the flexibility and freedom to grow what he liked and not have to worry about that being the only thing his family had to eat, he was happy as a clam.
The reason I know all the stuff about how awful growing up on that kind of farm was is that every so often, my mom or one of my siblings would ask his advice about growing your own food, and he would tell us in explicit detail exactly what goes into growing your own food in any significant quantity, or with the expectation that it’s going to replace a lot of purchased groceries. He never said “don’t do it” or “you’re going to fail,” but he was very explicit about how much labor goes into it and how much of a crap-shoot getting a real return out of it is.
Individual subsistence farms are soul-killing misery-machines unless you’re mostly looking for a bullet-proof excuse to do meth for a couple months a year to keep up with all the labor and power through whatever injuries you racked up doing all the labor.
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