presence would be known by the conical pile of manure against the barn, its apex under the window of the tie-up. Most homeowners planted a garden, raised fruits and vegetables and berries, and put their harvest in jars against the long winter. Almost everyone had a few hens picking up the assorted proteins of yard and field. If you walked into a man’s barn, you found a team of work horses shifting their weight from one foot to another. This pleasing rural picture has been retouched until it is hardly recognizable. The family cow has gone the way of the ivory-billed woodpecker. Householders no longer plant gardens if they can avoid it; instead, they work hard, earn money, and buy a TV set and a freeze. Then, acting on advices from the TV screen, they harvest the long, bright, weedless rows at the chain store, bringing home a carton of tomatoes with eye appeal and a package of instant potatoes. The family flock of hens has also disappeared. I still have a flock secreted in my barn, but it is not considered the thing anymore if you are to enjoy a high standard of living. Hens, if kept at all, must be kept in multiples of a thousand. The largest building that has been erected in this vicinity in recent years is an egg factory—a handsome four-story ovulation arena housing about eight thousand birds. An elevator lifts boughten grain to a high bin, from which an endless chain carries it around the pens in troughs. The owner, one helper, and the Bangor Hydro-Electric Company can take care of the whole operation. The pens do not contain roosts and dropping boards, which are now old hat. The modern hen just sleeps around. I heard a TV comedian the other day make a crack about one of the early-morning educational programs on the air. “It’s O.K.,” he said. “Anybody who watches television at six in the morning is stupid and needs educating.” But I tuned in at seven one morning to watch a program listed as “Today on the Farm,” hoping to find out what is the matter. The thing started off with a hillbilly singer plucking away at my early cobwebs and then swung into a study of modern pig farming. The picture showed a sow during farrowing. She was in a white-walled hospital room, under anesthesia. The farmer, dressed for surgery and sterile up to his elbows, was removing her uterus and its interesting load
in order that the pigs might come into the world without being exposed to disease germs. I watched for a while, but I had chores to do and had to turn off before I found out what the man did with the uterus—whether he replaced it in the sow or used it for packaging potato chips. Anyway, it was a clear picture of Today on the Farm, and it stayed in my mind
while I was down in the barn cellar in a high state of sterility
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