Tools. I love tools, and when you are farming you need really good tools and lots of them. When most people think about the tools used on a farm, they think tractor. Tractors! I love tractors, but when you are farming on a small scale, you really don‘t use tractors all that often. In fact, buying a four wheel tractor when you are farming on a small scale can be a fatal financial mistake. Big farms use tractors all the time because they have to. Tractor mounted equipment is the only way to keep hundreds of acres tilled, weeded and harvested. Buying a tractor (new or used) requires a large outlay of precious farm capital and the return on your investment is low if you farm a small amount of land. Tractors earn their keep by working ground, not by sitting in the machine shed. Profit margins are usually small on farms, and if you spend all of your cash flow paying off an equipment loan, you are not going to have enough income to meet other expenses and you will be unable to pay yourself a living wage. No one should work for free, including the small farmer!
I farm about three acres give or take an acre or two, depending on the season. Summer takes more acres than winter due to all the sprawling crops like melons and squash that eat up space and force the farm to get bigger in acreage. Winter crops are more space efficient: the very nature of the plants allows them to be grown closely together. To farm three acres, hand tools rule the day.
Here is a list of what I consider to be the essential hand tools to work the soil and control the weeds for small scale agriculture (e.g. one to five acres):
- A good walk behind tractor with a tiller. The best ones are made in Italy. I drive a Ferrari when I am out in the fields. Notice that I said “walk behind tractor.” Yes, you can change attachments on these machines and use them for as many tasks as you own attachments (anything from mowing to baling hay).
- Wheel hoe: I love this tool! What is it? Well, that is hard to explain, but basically it is a swivel hoe attached to a frame with a single wheel in front and plow type handles for the operator. These tools work really fast, taking out small weeds in the walkways between crop beds and for the areas between rows of plants. They have interchangeable attachments and allow one person to cover a lot of ground quickly.
- Swivel hoes (also known as “hula hoes”): these tools have a square shaped head that has a narrow cutting blade that swivels back and forth. There are lots of different sizes and I think you should have at least three sizes: a three-inch wide, five-inch wide, and a seven-inch wide head. I use these to kill weeds between plants in both directions: across the bed, and down the length of the bed.
- An assortment of small hand tools, ranging from masonry trowels with the point cut off for transplanting, to Nantucket welders that allow close in weeding of young plants, to Japanese hoes with razor sharp carbon steel blades for really fine weeding when you don’t want to move the soil around too much.
These are the basics, but like anything else, the basics are the essentials upon which everything else is built. I use these tools more than any of the other items in the toolshed.