The Anti-Agrarian Timeshift
Most people think of the rooster as the harbinger of dawn. Chanticleer, perched on top of the barn greeting the sunrise with lusty crowing. Those of us who raise chickens know it is far less poetic. Roosters will crow all day and all night. In fact, the more roosters there are in any given 1/2 mile, the more crowing that takes place as they all try to outdo each other. Some of us can tune them out. Others cannot. If you were planning a visit to a quaint country farm thinking that you will be gently awaken by a cock-a-doodle-doo in time to catch morning milking, you might be in for a reality-check. Bleary-eyed you would rise at first crow, 3:30 am. Realizing Rex Goliath must be off, you would doze back into the duvet only to be aroused at 3:45, 3:50, 4:00 and on, until wide awake and pissed off you strain to hear the farmer head out to the barn, thinking it must be any minute. By the time he actually gets going, you’ve fallen into a deep frustrated slumber and miss the whole thing.
This is how Daylight Saving Time makes me feel. I’m not the most motivated of individuals, but I have my schedule and I stick to it. Bridget, the cow, does too. Get up at ten to six, head up the road and milk for an hour before coming home to do the rest of morning chores before breakfast. As Spring approaches, it is light enough in the morning to see with out a headlamp, and in the past few weeks as I return from evening milking it has been getting lighter as well. Walking the 1/2 mile to the pasture in the early morning light sharpens the senses. There is bird song and movement in the wood. There is the gradual creep of daylight over the trees–will it be a sunny and clear day or are those clouds a premonition of something worse? Above all, there is hope as light comes earlier each day in the natural course of things. The same is true of the evening return from milking. I love watching the bats hunt for the first time in months as dusk comes later and later. That is, until this past Sunday.
Since 2007, this shift in time has come earlier and later in the year than it has previously. Already a contentious topic, DST was changed to begin three weeks earlier and end a week later on the platform that it would save energy, reduce traffic accidents, and provide children with more daylight after school, among other things. While it may attempt to do these things, it largely falls short. In fact, rather than saving energy, up to 5% more is consumed. The results of traffic studies are inconclusive, and the only people who seem to benefit from the added leisure hours are the golf courses. And that’s where this whole twisted plan began–one man’s attempt to skyve off from work a bit early to get in a a game of golf. Sure, it took two wars and countless hours of leisure industry lobbying, but now we have it: DST–the anti-agrarian time shift.
People claim that Ben Franklin came up with the idea, but really all he did was write a satirical pamphlet on the slothfulness of Parisians sleeping in during the summer. Originally he didn’t even put his name to it. And, he was correct–city dwellers, people with no ties to agriculture, needlessly expend artificial energy in their day because they are cut off from the rhythms of nature. Some people are questioning whether DST makes sense in a non-agrarian society. I think that’s the wrong end of the stick. It certainly doesn’t make sense in an agrarian society, and while it may make some sense in an industrialized society, is that what we still have today? Really, in a 24/7 world of never sleeping cities, round the clock shifts, and houses full of clocks, do we need to pretend we are mimicking natural cycles? The mesh of the industrialized and agrarian has never been pretty. The hollow promises of industrialization have never been fulfilled. Instead generations of slaves have been created, tied to their masters, society, or slaves to material goods.
Man and machine, not nature, dictate how we live our lives. We fight natural cycles whether we know it or not, whether we want to or not. So Sunday morning I found myself forced to rise before first light to milk the cow earlier than “normal”. Why? I asked myself that many times as I stumbled along the path in the dark. The Spring time shift isn’t so bad. If I had left the cow till the new six o’clock, the new dawn, I would still be milking her early, not late–which is worse on a balanced system like a dairy cow. But, if I milked an hour early in the morning, I would throw off the twelve hours between milkings and within a day I would end up with a highly pissed off and confused cow. It is better to ease into these things, if into these things we must dally. So, I milked a half hour early. Which meant I got even less sleep than normal, which means I am even more out of sorts than the cow.
Not to make this piece cow-centric, either. The whole farmyard is in disarray. At feeding time, the pigs are still asleep, the chickens, who lay their eggs mid-morning, seem bothered that I’m shooing them out of the coop an hour earlier–egg production, just beginning to pick up in the spring light, has gone down again. Sure, I could try, like my brother-in-law did a number of years ago, to keep to standard time. Not set my clocks forward–I don’t wear a watch, it’s unnecessary where I live. Live a life of anarchy and abandon. But, I must catch ferries once and a while. I must communicate with people in other time zones. I have to play by the artificial and ridiculous rules. What Am I supposed to do with an extra hour of “leisure time” light at the end of the day? I don’t live a life of leisure. I work to live and live to work. I take time off with the seasons and find my pleasures at the odd times when the come.
What if we were to do away with DST? Would society collapse? Are we all awaiting that morning in Spring of confusion and forgetfulness of how to set the DVR clock, the car stereo, the microwave, the answering machine, etc? Would more accidents occur, or less–especially as sleep deprived farmers would be kept off the roads. . . .? The industrial and post-industrial eras are over. The current financial crises is causing more people to question how they spend their time and money. More people are looking to some form of agriculture to re-connect with the land, to reduce costs, to get healthier food. It is time to embrace a new age of Neo-Agrarianism and to dispense with ridiculous systems of time-control. I can hear the crowing of roosters and the sound of cow bells from my bedroom window. I awake with the dawn in the summer whether the clock tells me to or not. The rest of us should have that choice and the freedom to do with it what we want.
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