Now that I have said enough about the laborer's tools, Tornik, I will start on the plowing and the sowing and the other kinds of work. Our village people of Van plow the ground in two ways. If the ground is unbroken fallow, they plow it with the gutan.1 If it was plowed last year and the soil is loose, they use the light plow, the haror, yoking one pair of buffaloes or oxen. The light plow mostly comes out around springtime, for sowing barley and other grain. Sometimes at the end of April, when spring comes early, and sometimes from the middle of May, they set the gutan going. The first round they call the milk-plowing, when the soil is soft and plows easily. After that it hardens little by little, and great clods come up as you plow. That is why our villagers hurry to yoke the gutan early, so the milk-plowing season does not slip past them. But on the shore of the sea of Van, the districts of Artske and Arjesh2 plow their ground a different way, and a more fruitful one. They call that way of farming dir. They break their ground twice. The first time, at the beginning of spring, they plow deep with the light plow and drag it level, and it lies like that until the beginning of autumn. Then they plow it a second time, again with a kind of light plow that has two boards fastened behind its share, a cubit and a half long and a span wide, standing open a finger's breadth along their whole lower length. The seed-man walks behind this plow and drops the seed in small handfuls between the boards, the grains fall neatly into the furrow, and the soil from both sides of the furrow falls in and covers them. You should see how handsome they look when they sprout, coming up out of the furrow in a straight line. In a good year they yield twenty and twenty-five for one. The farmers there save on the seed as well. Where we sow one measure, they sow half a measure, and every grain they sow comes up, while a third of the grain sown our way is lost, as I will tell you in its place. The harvest of these two districts is so abundant that it fills the land of Vaspurakan3 with wheat. In any year when their harvests fail, that is the sign that a shortage of bread is coming. Now that I have written this much about the farming of Arjesh and Artske, let me turn back, Tornik, and go on with the order of our own.
The milk-plowing does not last long. After a few weeks the fields still waiting to be plowed start to harden, and then you should see how hard the gutan has to work to cut its furrows, and what big stubborn clods lie lump on lump along them. Our villagers still do not know the easy remedy for this, but the man of Kharberd4 knows it well. The fields that have grown hard and stiff, he waters first and plows afterward, and then no clods form at all, since at gutan-time the water is still plentiful.
How good it would be, Tornik, if we followed that example too, set up an order, watered the hardened fields one after another, and plowed them that way. Do you see how it pays twice over? The field plows easily and throws up no clods, and the water also gives the soil strength and adds to its growing power. And there is more. When a field is sown while the plowed ground is full of big clods, part of the seed falls under those rough clods and is lost. Another part washes away when the field is watered. Add in how many grains the waterman's foot carries down the slope, and then, when nobody has picked over the seed, the thin and profitless grains never sprout either. Put all that together, and of one measure of seed-wheat barely half comes up. The other half is lost.
We also have to count the watermen's day-wages, which run much higher for fields like these, above all where they water the sown ground without drawing the guide-furrow, the way they do in the fields of the townsfolk around Van and of other villages. On this point I am very glad, Tornik, that our Archak villagers are well practiced at drawing the guide-furrow. Our fields are level, so one waterman does the work that would otherwise take four. He can let a whole millstream of water into a field and still keep it under control.
The clods of the plowed ground bring one more dreadful hardship, and it comes when the laborer harrows with the manker5 after the sowing. You have seen the manker. It is a thick beam of hard, heavy elm, four cubits long, with ten or more wooden teeth set in a row along it, and the laborer stands on it, holding one end of a rope whose other end is tied to the yoke. There, they are harrowing a sown field. Come and see it with your own eyes, Tornik, so you will believe me that of all the work of the fields the manker is the most dreadful. Watch how it slams into the great clods and grinds over them, now leaping and flung forward, now stopped dead head-on by the biggest clods of all. And the pitiless laborer's whip drives it on again, until at last the dumb young buffaloes, in torment beyond describing, finish the manker's work.
Ask me, Tornik, how this unbearable part of the work can be made easier. I said above that one way is to water the fields left over after the milk-plowing and plow them afterward. There are other devices too, which the ingenious European has invented for the very purpose of breaking up the clods in the fields. But what good is that to us? Our poor village people have no way to get hold of such tools. Better that we think up ways of our own, with our own natural wit.
Here is what I say, Tornik. Why should our gutan-work drag on so long that the last fields harden before we reach them? Since the new plow works with two yoke, the answer is simple. We yoke two plows, do forty days' work in twenty, and finish our spring plowing within the milk-plowing season.
But take the fields we plow this year. If we let the winter pass over them, in spring you will see that the snow and the frosts have crumbled the clods to flour. Plow them over again with the light plow at the beginning of autumn, then sow them, and they come up far more fruitful.
I have heard something about this, so let me tell you, Tornik. They say that VIRGIL, in his poem about farming, gave the Romans this advice. I have kept the lines in my mind.6
Let me explain it to you. The plowed field that satisfies the farmer's desire is the one that has stood twice against the summer heat and twice against the winter frost. Two summers of heat bake the soil better, and a second winter breaks the clods of earth apart and crumbles them.
Are you going to say, Tornik, I am the one who comes from school, and you are the one quoting Virgil? Ah, Tornik, a few years of sitting in a school and you imagine you know as much as Papik. I have been learning for fifty years now, by listening, by watching, and by trying. I never went to school the way you have. But the things of the world and the people of the world are my school, and I am learning still, at my age, while you, fresh out of school, think you know everything. You have a lot of bread to eat yet before you know as much as Papik. Your Papik has a good memory. Who knows how many years ago it was that Hayrik7 explained those lines of Virgil to his pupils, and I listened, and kept them in my mind.
If only we could farm our fields the way the old Romans did! Virgil's advice teaches us this. The soil has to be turned more often, because the more the soil is turned over, bottom uppermost, the more fruitful it becomes. Then the soil bakes evenly in the sun, and the soil underneath is not left raw. In cold climates above all, this matters a great deal. The villagers of Van know nothing about it and have never tried it, while the village people of Kharberd, of Karin, and of Basen8 know better and have more practice. They never begrudge the labor. They plow their once-plowed field over with the light plow twice, three times, even four times, to turn the soil. Food stirred on the fire cooks evenly, and in the same way the clever villager has learned by experience that the more the soil is turned and aired in the sun, the more growing strength it gathers. That quickening strength passes into the seed sown in it, and the field bears twice and three times the fruit.
But ask me, Tornik, why the villagers of Van plow their field only once and do not follow the proven example of the other provinces. The reasons are very plain, Tornik, and I want to give them to you in full, because this lesson is the weightiest of all my lessons.
You can see, Tornik, that our land of Vaspurakan is very wide. It has pasture-plains in plenty, mountains, valleys, glens, and soil fit for the plow, and water in abundance too. So our village people are very rich in land, and every house holds great allotments of it, portioned out to each family by the old village law and according to the crown registers.
But now look at this, Tornik. The peasant folk are greedier for land than I can tell you. Just as the rich treasure-holders of this world will heap up gold mountain-high and still not say "enough," so the farming folk, however much land they hold, never say "that will do." They are never filled. They are always after more land. If a house has twenty or thirty fields, look at the villager's reckoning. He says to himself, every year I will sow ten fields and leave the rest fallow, so that they will yield more. There is the first reason, his greed. And the pity of it is that our villagers know only one way of strengthening a field, which is to leave it fallow. His mind is dull. It never occurs to him that there are many other ways of fattening the soil. Never mind what science teaches. He does not even know the use of the dung heaped pile on pile in front of his own door and all through the village. And there is more. Along with the greed for land, our farming people have a fierce craving to plow much, to sow much, and to take a great yield. The poor man is no economist and no arithmetician. He cannot work out that once the labor is multiplied, the costs multiply with it. Let me count them out for you, Tornik. The labor of plowing, the labor of sowing, the punishing labor of the manker, the labor of watering in autumn and in summer, the labor of reaping, the labor of carting from field to threshing-floor. And on top of all these labors, pile the day-wages of the laborers. Strangest of all, the farmer who is master of the house never puts the labor of his own household and his own children into the account at all.
If the villager thinks this way and acts this way, it is no wonder, Tornik. But what about the monastic brothers of our Armenian monasteries, who can read and write, and who have wide lands to farm? They have no advantage over the village folk at all. Their farming runs on the same wit and in the same fashion. It was their duty, at the very least, to move the work of the fields some little way forward, and set an example for the villages of their diocese. Though it has to be admitted that to this day there has never been a standing monastic council for the monasteries, one that could set an order and give direction.
But enough of all that. Have you understood our villagers' principle, Tornik? He always wants to spread his plowing and sowing wider, and that does great harm. He does not know how to pull it in, and he will not, though pulling it in is exactly what would let him farm his soil well. Instead of working ten fields with backbreaking labor, isn't it better and more profitable to work five fields only, and work them well, so that the five yield as much as the ten? That way both the labor and the cost come down sharply.
Do not tell me, Tornik, that Papik is contradicting himself, that when the labor of ten fields is heaped onto five, what with double-plowing them, what with dunging them and all the other work, the labor comes out the same in the end. No. It is not the same. There is a great difference between farming spread wide and farming drawn in. The labor differs in kind, in how long it lasts, and above all in how much easier it is. I do not need to explain it in detail. You will see it and learn it in the doing.
Now ask me, Tornik. If we are content to work five fields only, and work them well, must the other five lie untilled and useless? I will write about that in its own place. For now let me say just this much. Is there any shortage of things a villager could sow? Let him grow grass. Let him sow lucerne, sow sainfoin, sow oats (yulaf), sow potatoes, sow turnips, sow beets, sow beans, sow lentils, sow onions, and melons, cucumbers, watermelons, and many other things besides, all of them things our life needs. And what a waste it is that the villagers of Van are used to sowing wheat, barley and millet and nothing else, and think the other, most useful crops are beneath their notice.
That ends the lesson on working the soil. Now I will talk about choosing the seed, which for a good farmer matters as much as anything.
Notes
- Gutan, the great wooden ox-plow of the Armenian highlands. The haror is the light one-yoke plow used on soft ground. ↩
- Artske (Adilcevaz) and Arjesh (Erciş), districts on the northern shore of Lake Van, "the sea of Van." ↩
- Vaspurakan, the historic Armenian province around Lake Van. ↩
- Kharberd is Harput. ↩
- Manker, the heavy toothed harrow-beam of the Van country, ridden by its driver to break the clods. ↩
- Virgil, Georgics I, 47-48. The field that answers the greedy farmer's prayers is the one that has twice felt the sun and twice the frost. Papik quotes it in a classical Armenian verse rendering, then puts it into plain speech for the boy in the paragraph that follows. ↩
- Hayrik, "Little Father," Khrimian himself, abbot of the monastery of Varag near Van, in whose school Papik heard the lessons (see Chapter I). ↩
- Karin is Erzurum. Basen is the Passin plain east of Karin. ↩