As you all know, we are working on moving our garden and planting grass. A key step in the grass planting process is loosening the soil so that the little grass seeds can take root and flourish. Since we have had no rain, some of the ground has been compacted by a bobcat and there isn’t a small amount of yard to plant, we decided to dig out our old tiller and use it. I should remind everyone that our garden has been no-till for 3 or 4 years now, so the tiller has only been used when someone else borrowed it in that time.
As you can probably guess, it wouldn’t start. More specifically, it would turn over for about 2 seconds then die. We lost an entire evening of Jeremy’s time on Tuesday trying to get it to start. It then started and ran successfully for a while last night (Wednesday) but died when it hit a rock. It wouldn’t re-start after that. Another evening mostly lost. I say lost, we did have other things to do that kept us productive for the evening, but it wasn’t the job that really needed doing and it created incredible stress and aggravation.
So what makes me generalize this heartwarming experience to all machines? Why not just say that this particular machine through our own neglect (not using it regularly for 4 years) is particularly challenging? I blame all machines because it’s a pattern that I have seen repeated over and over and over. Allow me to explore some recent examples.
We used to have a motorized lawn mower. It was a craftsman push mower with a bagger and it ran just fine. It would cut through whatever you chose to run over and it always started up easily. Couldn’t ask for more, right? Not quite. The mower needed gas so we had to remember to buy gas and fill it up. Every time I used it, my hands would tingle for an hour afterward (I have pre-carpal tunnel syndrome). Then there’s the fact that in our small back yard turning the mower around and around and around required some significant muscle. It also made a lot of noise – far more than most of the machines in the factories I have worked in. I suspect that I should have been wearing hearing protection while mowing. It produced lots of lovely fumes too – just what a want to breath on a beautiful spring or summer day. Lastly, the speed of the blades means that it can easily throw a rock or stick with enough force to do serious damage to people or property.
Let’s contrast that with the manual reel mower we use now. The mower is light enough that I can easily carry it around – no problem to turn it in our small backyard. It makes virtually no noise – only a soft whirring as the blades spin. The blades will stop when they hit something instead of throwing it around and they don’t produce vibration in the handle. Mowing the yard does take a few minutes longer because we do have to pick up extra sticks as this mower won’t cut through them. I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing though. I find that after using the reel mower, I still have energy to do other things. In other words, I find using the reel mower to be LESS physically demanding than using the power mower.
Now lets look at the bobcat we used to move our garden soil. There is no question that using the bobcat allowed us to move far more soil in a week than shovels would have, but that benefit wasn’t free. The ‘cat compacted the soil which will now take extra effort to loosen. It left small piles of soil scattered around the yard that now have to be shoveled or raked out. It damaged the French drain in our side yard which will require some re-work before we can plant grass over it. It was also loud and vibrated and required renting a huge trailer to move it around. That was definitely not free. Would shovels have been better? I don’t know. It would have taken much longer and required a lot more muscle power. On the plus side, as we moved beds the ground would have been immediately ready to plant because we would have leveled as we went and the ground would not have been compacted. We likely also would have taken the time to build new planting beds on the farm as we went. Instead, we have a giant pile of dirt that will have to get moved again (with shovels) to create new garden beds. That time and effort has to be accounted for in the overall benefit to effort equation. Would that have made up the time difference? Maybe. It bears thinking about.
There’s a psychological component at work too. Having the machine for a small period of time meant that we were in a hurry to move as much soil as we possibly could during that week even though the weather was far from ideal (it rained off and on all week). That hurry created stress and interfered with our home life. If we were taking the shovel approach, we would have slowed down and let it rain while we did other things. We would have been comfortable flexing the schedule however worked best for us. Instead, we let the machine dictate our schedule and we got impressively burnt out by the end of the week. We are only just now coming out of that mental place.
All this amounts to is that I think we often underestimate the costs associated with using a piece of machinery to do a job and overestimate the benefits. Sometimes doing things the slow way isn’t actually any slower when you look at the other time required. I suspect that if we had taken the time to water the ground (its dried to clay rock now), then take a hoe or shovel to loosen it, we would have made more progress than we have right now with the tiller. If we hadn’t used the bobcat to move the dirt, we would probably still be moving garden beds now but we would also likely have had more beds built on the farm and more areas planted back to grass at home. The extra effort would have made us stronger too (that’s the nice way of looking at tired muscles, right?).
Consider that the next time you feel like you “need” a machine to do the work. Look at all the time associated with the machine and all the costs and by products. Then make an informed decision.
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