One other possibility:
I know of several fields in these parts that have a shade tree or three which mark the spot where a house used to stand. The house is long gone, but the trees that once stood in its yard are still there.
Before this gets into an argument as to who is right, the reason is as varied as the people that owned the land. You would have to pick out a tree and ask the farmer why they kept that one.
Because the tree is holy. Delorean had them cut down a blackthorn in the middle of the field he’d bought for his factory and you see what happened to HIM!
Nope, wasn’t because the car was available in only one color nor was it because it was not as sporty as it looked nor was it because it took so long to get into production its styling was years out of date (back when styling could go out of date). It was because he cut down that tree.
I almost agree with that, but only because the farmers I grew up with are as good as used car salesmen when it comes to bullshitting.
No one wants to plow around an obstruction. Besides the hassle, the solitary tree and associated square footage is a waste of good cropland.
I also disagree with the shade for livestock/crop rotation idea. Crop rotation is moving beans to corn to oats to alfalfa. While it’s common to graze animals on crop stubble, acreage set aside for crops is very, very distinct from strict pasture - in fact, historically, pastureland is acreage that is too poor to farm. In low-lying areas where I was raised most pastures spend much of the year posing as swamps.
The “oh, the simple, hardworking, salt-of-the-earth farmer needs his shade” argument I find distinctly naive as wagon-like vehicles have existed for a good 3000 years and those who cannot find the shadow should maybe consider another line of work.
After you peel back the layers of bullshit here’s what you’ll find:
The solitary oak (or other drought-tolerant tree) has its roots wrapped around a large chunk of granite. The solitary willow (or other flood-tolerant tree) is sitting in a natural drainage pond.
Right on. Shade isn’t needed because the machinery’s cabs are air conditioned. Pastures are largely a thing of the past. Pastures were for milk cows and horses and farms today don’t have either so throw out pastures.
There aren’t big rocks, surface or submerged, in the part of the midwest with which I’m familiar. The only trees are along creeks, rivers or on the sites of occupied or abandoned farmsteads.
Not true in these parts. I know of several farms that have shifted from cattle to soybeans to wheat or corn and back again (and the soil is quite productive here).
You are probably right about this in most (but not all) cases. The trees spring up wherever the field is not amenable to plowing for one reason or another. For example, there is a field near me which has near its center a small limestone sinkhole. The sinkhole obstructs plowing or mowing, and a stand of hackberry trees has grown up there.
And beef cattle. Of which there are plenty. Pastures are in no way a thing of the past. Not around here anyway. I am currently in north Georgia, surrounded by pastureland supporting beef cattle.
Not quite what I was getting at.
100 years ago there were no a/ced cabs, but the (literal) horsepower couldn’t amend the obstruction. 100 years later there is plenty of (figurative) horsepower but, damn, isn’t that a nice oak? Would be a shame to take it down. And over the last 100 years that bit of granite which produced the oak has become a convenient place to dump filed rocks and old roller-washers.
I think you meant that but I wanted to be clear, myself.
At present in the midwest I’m familiar with beef cattle are fattened in feedlots, large and small, and fed on grain.
How familiar are you with the beef industry? We’ve had discussions before on these boards debunking the idea that cattle are raised in feedlots. (This came up before mostly in the context of vegans decrying “factory farms.”) In my experience, beef cattle graze for most of their lives (in pastures) and then are fattened in feed lots for only the few weeks before slaughter.
That was my point too.
In Wisconsin there are erratics throughout the soil and you have to dynamite them out if yo wish to remove some. You pick stones with a stone boat in the spring too. The stones go where ever you don’t plant, be it the field border, or a large boulder in the ground.
When the land was first being cleard for farmland in order to pull out the roots the pioneerign farmers would use an adjacent tree to anchor a winch to pull out the roots. When you got to the last tree in the field - nothing to anchor it to, so you left it.
Along with cutting the roots as you pull, a four horse team will do a pretty fair job of pulling out stumps.
They’re fairy trees. As dropzone says cut them down at your peril!
Using horses sounds like much more work than it would be to hook a chain around one tree and the other end around a stump and then use a wratcheting mechanism to slowly pull it out. No need for horses when you have machines that will do the job.
Sure, but just up the thread a way a poster by the name of DJ Motorbike said that reason there was just one lone tree in the middle of a field was that it was the last tree and there was no place to anchor the winch.
Ah, I see what you’re saying. The last tree could be removed by horse. OK granted that’s possible. But from what I know this IS the reason that there is often seen one tree standing alone in a field, which is the answer to the OP’s question. I don’t have a cite to back that up and have no idea where I would go to start researching this, but if it’s not the answer I’ll eat my hat.
I’m not sure how crop rotation would figure into it, but barring evidence, I think you dismiss the shade claim too lightly. I would tend to associate shade trees with pasture more than cropland, but, in fact, farmers plow around trees all the time in the Midwest. As to the availability of wagons under which one may seek shade: why would a farmer haul a hay wagon out into a field to provide shade when he was using a shadeless harrow or plow or planter? What is the point of hauling two pieces of equipment out (and having to keep moving one of them out of the way), when he can simply avail himself of an existing tree?
I have no problem with the notion of a granite outcrop–except that I know that there is no such impediment to plowing beneath the existing tree in my FIL’s front forty. The amount of land that is taken out of cultivation by a single tree is also pretty minor in the Midwest, where the general rainfall (and constant humidity) means that most land is sufficiently productive that 100 square feet of “lost” land is not going to harm the farmer’s bottom line. As I noted earlier, my FIL had an enormous tree (white oak) on the front forty. It stands on deep, rich soils with no stones around it and no substrate stone within five feet beneath it. He also had a (red) oak back on the hillside of the back forty that was surrounded by stones too large to be allowed to sit in a crop row. The oak in the front forty is close enough to the house that it is unlikely that it was left to provide shade for a farmer on a planter or reaper, but it was often used as shade by various cattle, sheep, and horses that were pastured there when the land was not planted to hay. The oak in the back forty appears to be simply the location of a volunteer tree at the point where the original farmer heaped his stones when they interfered with his planting or plowing.
Most of the trees in the middle of fields are pretty old. They pre-dated air-conditioned cabs by sixty years or more.
I cannot give a definitive reason for such solitary trees, but some of the dismissive comments do not address the reality of the farms of which I have knowledge. (Stones are pretty common throughout the Great Lakes region as the result of glacial moraines leaving behind hundreds of tons of detritus.)
My guess would be that at a time when plows were three- or four-bottom horse-drawn affairs and reapers were no more than eight feet wide, a single tree in a (fairly productive) Great Lakes field was simply not the serious impediment to mechanized farming profit that it might be to the current agri-businesses of the Great Plains and that, for whatever reasons, such trees were simply permitted to stand.
Y’know, you make a good point. Such trees are outside my experience and so I really had nothing to add. Nevertheless I discover, looking back over the thread, that I added posts that really didn’t add anything. It was a lapse in god form. Sorry.
{{{hugs David}}} Don’t worry, you’ll always be a god to us. 