Scythe Works Without Borders
scytheworks.ca
scytheworks.ca
A scythe you have to sharpen every 5-10 min or so, normally you keep a scythe stone in your pocket to do this. The sickle you can just sharpen at the beginning of the day and that will be good enough.
The sharpening process takes some practice to get good at, particularly if you start peening it as well.
https://scytheworks.ca/knowledge-base/chapter-4-preparing-th...
I wish someone invented an easier and safer way to sharpen a scythe. If you make an error, it's pretty easy to cut yourself pretty deeply, and even cut into finger joints (did it one time, cut was deep but so clean it healed essentially in a day). "Dull" scythe is still as sharp as your average knife. Sharp scythe is sharper than a razor.
One thing you might try is an oval-shaped diamond coated sharpening rod. The handle keeps your fingers safer.
It's also immensely more relaxing than the alternative, extremely sustainable and a pretty good workout
For example, it's one thing to have an idea of the Grim Reaper, but it's another to viscerally experience the reality of what a scythe does to grasses. Thousands of beings anonymously ended, their lives cut short.
https://www.sheffieldmuseums.org.uk/visit-us/abbeydale-indus...
https://scytheassociation.org/english-scythe-making-traditio...
I don't understand how it's possible that there are regions that don't use scythes (for crops that warrant them), when scythes have been around for over a thousand years?
I would venture to say that if they haven't transitioned yet it's because they don't want to (for whatever reasons--no idea what those might be).
* Scythes need to be sharp, a machete will work even when poorly maintained.
* Machetes are cheaper to make.
* Machetes are easier to use
* Scythes are a specialized tool, where as I can buy a machete for ten dollars at Canadian Tire. Economics of scale are different.
> There are still several remaining scythe factories in the world. In recent years a competitive, market-driven economy is making it difficult for scythe making factories to retain the quality level that was once a standard.
I saw this still in use today when I went to Egypt. That blew my mind.
At least looking for ones here in the US, a decent quality sickle seems to run in the $30-$60 range while places that sell scythes seem to cost $100-$300, so I can't imagine it's some massive price barrier either
But I think that with a proper apparel such as the one we see in the video on the website, the fall can be made gentler while still keeping the significant efficiency gain that the scythe offers over the sickle.
NB. In high-school, I worked one summer cleaning and otherwise maintaining the local after-school building. It had a huge lawn behind it, which I had to trim with a scythe once every few weeks. So, I thought I knew how to do that reasonably well...
And then, one day, some years later, me and few friends of mine went on a trip into the mountains, and we put our tent, as we later discovered, on some farmer's field. He got mad at us, and wanted us to cut the grass for him, as a form of compensation. Using a scythe on an incline, as opposed to flat surface is a... whole different story. I lodged it into the ground a few times, and then the farmer almost killed us :) In the end, we bought him some alcohol and left.
So, the moral of the story: scythe might not be always the best tool, and in some situations it's far from obvious how to use it efficiently.
You just took away all the fun from the process :)
Scythes are amazing for cutting on an incline. You need to work along the incline, not down the incline, and will take shorter strokes.
In my company, another leader forced his division to stop using a manual tracking spreadsheet because it was wasting time. People HATED the idea of stopping it, expecting there to be huge issues, but the manager was right, all the information was already reliably recorded in other systems and this was just a wasteful manual copy. When people stopped using it, literally nothing went wrong or changed, no one needed it, but now everyone got back 15 minutes of their day. But people resisted because "we've always done it this way."
As another poster said, grain loss is more likely with these less-hand-labor-intensive methods, and people can overvalue the loss of that small amount despite the time and energy savings of scythes. So people might think, "I'll lose 3% of my harvest doing that, I can't afford that" except they'd expend 15% of the energy harvesting and thus that 3% loss is more than balanced out by the 85% time savings and the reduced work load. You can spend a fraction of that saved time making up the 3% difference in a hundred other ways.
People are very resistant to change. A lack of education produces lapses in logic and critical thinking and thus people won't evaluate the change in the right frame of reference.
Old people don't like to adopt new technology or ideas
Countries with demographic cliffs likely also try to extract more labor out of older people. So decision makers for adoption of new technology and techniques which would go with management or some other analogue, have reduced neuroplasticity and won't adopt change as readily.
Second of all, I can’t imagine any of my neighbours (live in countryside and have a lot of manual tools in shed) buying these things new. Far better to buy old ones for basically nothing at garage sales.
(I watch a lot of homesteading YouTube from US and am always amazed at how many power tools are purchased just for the one next job (or perhaps for the upcoming monetised video?). Power augers particularly. Far quicker and cheaper to just roll up sleeves than drive to town and back. It’s just a whole different view on consumption.)
I have spent a sizable portion of my time in developing nations.
There are deep rooted cultural differences that sometimes are counterintuitive to westerners.
One of the great strengths of some memetic frameworks is the easy and rapid adoption of processes and technologies that lower effort or raise efficiency.
As a result these cultures are also subject to rapid change on many fronts, and may become unrecognizable in just a few decades. These dynamic cultures thrive in name only, since they are not really the same memetic creature after a scant few generations.
As a note in the margin, the aforementioned, production oriented cultures often have a history of large scale wars, conquest and often colonization. War is a strong filter for valuing efficiency over other considerations.
Other memetic frameworks endure by virtue of valuing tradition and communal experience with past generations. These cultures change slowly, as their value structures resist change. This type of memetic symbiant has other kinds of value to humanity that are not measured in GDP or other economic metrics.
As an example, let me describe a common scenario that I have personally experienced multiple times:
Happening upon a person apparently having difficulty with a task, I show them a “better” way that stems from my cultural experiences. Usually, they are receptive and enthusiastic about the “new” way, which they themselves demonstrate as “better”.
Later, I may happen upon the same person doing the same task, in the “old” way. When I ask them why, they say something along the lines of “because it’s the way my father and his father did it”.
At first, I found this vexing. Now I understand that in these cultures, doing it in the “new” way was a fundamentally distinct action, which removed the meaning from the task. The original method was valued because it was communing with their family and heritage. The new method was effective but lacked a sense of meaning, effectively making it a hollow act in some way that I will probably never understand even though I can see.
Only when productivity is a goal unto itself is “progress” intrinsically valued. Not all cultures value productivity in the same way. In some cultures, being able to do something difficult at high proficiency is much more valued than being able to achieve the same outcome using a different method with much greater productivity.
This is visible in nearly all cultures in sport. Sport is typified by rules that make a trivial task difficult, and useful innovations using technology are typically frowned upon.
The skill of the difficult task is valued for its difficulty, as well as its ties to tradition and the way it is woven into the memetic tapestry.
As an oversimplified and caricatured example: Someone who can harvest a dozen animals in a day with a sling is a great hunter and respected provider. His brother that can do that in half an hour with his 22 rifle is a slacker who doesn’t respect his ancestors or the spirits of the forest.
I’m not trying to say that these cultures are retrograde or immune to progress. Rather they are not perpetually looking for new and better solutions with the same enthusiasm that some people might expect, and the innovators within their communities may encounter a degree of social friction that many people might find counterintuitive.
Adoption of new processes in these cultures often springs up but reverts to its prior state when even a minor friction to continuing adoption is encountered. The benefits often need to meet a surprisingly high bar for an innovation to be sticky.
What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run it?
There used to be an easy answer to this, now it's not politically or morally acceptable to support: colonization. Colonization is what brought modern farming practices (and their accompanying massive yields) as well as the development of the infrastructure needed to support it and other developments.
[1]: fossil fuels, with poetic license
You can't just handwave the term as a synonym for "I think it's better!" - it actually does imply inputs, outputs, and depending on what you want to optimize for, you may get very different results.
If a scythe is genuinely better for the job than a sickle, great!
But in a country without a lot of infrastructure and without modern supply chains, I'm pretty sure a tractor is the wrong solution to the problem. Unless, of course, your problem is "how to burden nations with loans they will never be able to pay back so you can come in and take over."
I'd love to have everyone have no labour to do and be served by robots but let them eat cake doesn't work in reality.
You certainly don't need to hit all the economic steps, but using capital to reduce labor doesn't make sense when labor is much less expensive than capital.
Yes, this is exactly what the Luddites were about (iirc). But you can't just barge in and make people's jobs obsolete. I'm sure even the scythe is seeing resistance because it can make a single person do the work of three others.
That said, something needs to be done to improve quality of life and reduce poverty. There need to be a lot more better paying jobs in the global South, but it seems that only China is willing to invest in e.g. the infrastructure required for that.
From a "Built out of locally available resources, with minimum energy, and robust repairability," it's hard to beat a scythe or other similar tool.
And I guarantee a well built scythe will still work, if tolerably cared for, long past the last of our over-complicated tractors rusting in fields because the right software to update the firmware to allow you to start the engine after changing the oil was trying to talk to some server that no longer exists...
Unless you're making this argument. I can't actually tell which way you're arguing for.