A Farm Toolbox: A Spinning Jenny

The spinning jenny is not a perfect tool. Nor is it a beautiful tool. But it is a tool that is a delight to use if you value your back as much as I value mine.

Our spinning jenny is admired by one and all.

Our spinning jenny is admired by one and all.

 

The problem with starting farming at age 37 (15 years ago now) is that all of the common sense things you’ve learned to date are no longer useful. Things like the best walking route through the neighborhood to get to Bill Meyer stadium for an evening baseball game, or the best time to get a seat at Harold’s Kosher Deli on Saturday morning…. All were now useless. All new knowledge was hard won.

So for the first couple of years farming we built fencing the old-fashioned way: with sheer brute strength, mostly mine. I’d pick up a 50-pound-plus roll of barbed wire to chest height and begin walking backwards. Hundreds of yards of the stuff, up and down hills, through woods and across sunny pastures, lift, step back and back, until the strand was stretched.

One day, talking with an old farmer, I pondered that it sure would be nice if there were some tool you could use to unspool barbed wire. He suggested I purchase a spinning jenny. I did that afternoon, for about $10. And that, as they say, has made all the difference.

Fencing is still hard work. But a spinning jenny makes the job easier, and that is what a good tool is supposed to do.

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Reading this weekend: Conspirata by Robert Harris. The second of his historical novels on the life of Cicero.