Transition Culture

6 Sep 2006

Book Review – The Worm Forgives the Plough by John Stewart Collis.

**A Review of “The Worm Forgives the Plough” by John Stewart Collis. 2001. House of Stratus Publishing. 290pp.**

The question of how agriculture will adapt to life after the oil peak is one increasingly in people’s minds. Cuba is often cited as the paragon of urban agricultural inventiveness, rethinking their city spaces as intensive market gardens and their rooftops and balconies as productive spaces. While there is a huge and important role for urban agriculture in an energy descent culture, it is important also to remember large scale agriculture. After all, in the closest historical comparison to a national Powerdown, World War 2, every garden, allotment and open space in England and Wales was intensively gardened, yet still only 10% of the national diet was obtained in this way. The rest relied on agriculture and farms.

‘The Worm Forgives the Plough’ is a classic of English countryside literature. Collis was a writer and intellectual who had served in the First World War, and who was conscripted for the second, but posted within England. He asked if he could be transferred to work in agriculture, and this was granted. He spent a couple of years on a farm in Devon, and then the rest of the war restoring a woodland. Collis writes about a fascinating period in English agriculture, when mechanisation was arriving, but much of the traditional was still in place. Horses were used, hayricks were made, potato clamps built, alongside the newer tractors and fertilisers.

This is a book which is timeless in its relevance. Indeed his style of writing, divided into short essays of 2 to 3 pages on a particular topic, have far more in common with the blogging style of today than with the writing of the time. These short sections have some great titles, such as “Meditation while singling mangolds� and “Colloquy on the Rick�. Collis is clearly an educated man, with a passion for the classics and the philosophers of the time. Reading between the lines, he really had to earn the respect of his fellow farm workers, who took pleasure in reminding him of his inadequacies and his origins.

His writing about ploughing with horses is beautiful. While he does not romanticise it, he also shines with enthusiasm for it. He dispels the impression one might gain from afar of it being effortless work, yet for him, his days spent ploughing with horses were “the happiest days of my life�. He writes that when ploughing with horses, “you seem to be holding more than the plough, and treading across more than this one field: you are holding together the life of mankind, you are walking through the fields of time. This work has always been done. Whatever happens this can be done�.

‘The Worm Forgives the Plough’ is a passionate treatise on the joys of physical work. As someone from a more deskbound background, Collis delights in working hard, and is derisive of the idea current at the time of a Leisure Society. For him, the time when we most feel alive is when we are working with our bodies, doing something rewarding, something with resounds with my own experience. He dismisses as absurd the idea that the aim of a society is to reach a point where it no longer has to work, arguing that this would be hugely detrimental to a healthy society.

He writes about how most work available to people is repetitive and soul destroying, but that “there is an occupation which can engage nearly the whole man and which if there were time given for the development of the mind, would satisfy the psychological needs of hundreds of thousands of people. This is agriculture�. The combining of human labour and intellectual development was, for Collis, very powerful and urgently necessary.

Collis is a beautiful writer. Through his prose rises the sweet smell of freshly turned soil, the feeling of early morning mist on the skin, the exhilaration of successfully ploughing one’s first field or building one’s first rick. He captures the English countryside in a way I think few previous writers have, its changing face throughout the year, its moods, its colours. He also gives life to some of the characters now long gone, men whose lives were rooted in the land and who knew the land like few nowadays do. Every page of this book is a pleasure to read, more like poetry than prose. He is in many ways a kindred spirit from a bygone age.

What can we learn now, more than 60 years since Collis turned up for his first day’s work at the farm and was set to work piling prunings in the apple orchard? Firstly it serves to remind us of the importance of agriculture, that a low-energy agriculture is possible, but it needs a lot more people than agriculture employs nowadays. From Collis we get a sense of the wider community that existed to support the farmer, and the amount of people a farm needed in order to function. Today’s agriculture will need a lot more people in order to replace the labour presently done by cheap oil.

Secondly he challenges the myth that every step forward with technology has been of benefit. He was present on the farm when the first combine harvester arrived, and his musings on it are fascinating. His views pre-date in many ways the appropriate technology movement, when he argues that the potato planting machine the farm has is more acceptable, as it enables the rural labourer to do his job in a more comfortable way, while the combine simply displaces the work of dozens of people. He describes the older people reflecting on hay making being the high point of their social year, with picnics, music and dancing in the fields.

Finally, and perhaps most hope-affirmingly, Collis’s own journey from complete novice to competent farm hand took a surprisingly short period of time. He picks up the various tasks asked of him quickly, and by then end is very competent. He also, through working hard, discovers the exhilaration of physical work, and how much more alive, aware of and connected to Nature he becomes.

Agriculture beyond the peak will look very different. It will require more people, a more complex rural economy, and a great reskilling. While it will not be the same as the 1940’s, and permaculture and agroforesty will also have much to offer in the redesign of how we feed the nation, we will inevitably draw much from the insights of the last time British agriculture had any claim to sustainability. This book is a beautiful, poetic and insightful description of that, and I would invite you to take a walk among its 360 pages and not emerge enchanted and uplifted. A precious gift from a previous generation.

*The Worm Forgives the Plough is, I think, out of print, but can be obtained via. Amazon’s second hand books section, or probably through your local second hand bookshop. As you can see, it has been through a lot of reprints, and so should be quite abundant in 2nd hand book land!*