Al Gustin

In 1955, R. J. McGinnis wrote a not-so-politically-correct essay titled, “A Farmer Takes a Wife.” Among other things, he wrote: “She should not mind the breeze from a trench silo, which wafts into the house, nor by the continuous parade of newborn pigs and lambs by the kitchen stove.”

“If she’s farm-reared,” McGinnis wrote, “she won’t be shocked by the little things that are always coming up, like finding a dead cat in the cistern or wheat chaff in the bed.”

When agriculture became mechanized and gas-powered tractors replaced animal power, that changed. Energy became an expense.

In March 1980, we went south of New Salem to Chuck Bahm’s farm, where he was demonstrating the use of sunflower oil in diesel engines. Bahm’s vision, and the vision of many at that time, was of an agricultural industry that produced food, fiber and fuel, just as had been the case when animals provided the power.