The LawnMowerMan ------

One of America's favorite pastimes has always been complaining about the "rising costs of getting by." We fill up our coffee shops and talk about how much it costs for this, that, or the other thing. Frequent topics of conversation are utility bills, automotive expenses (gas, repairs, new vehicles), and greedy landlords who raise the rent. Despite having the cheapest grocery bills in the world, some Americans even dare to question how much they spend on food.

The city dweller has a lot of money left over after buying groceries (and taxes, utilities, etc.). Economists call it "disposable income. It fuels discretionary spending and most of the modern economy. Virtually all of what we call "progress" is a result of man's free time away from the farm fields. We can invent faster computers, bigger jet airliners, better roads, and more power-generation plants. We can also pamper ourselves with a manicure, professional football game, snow skiing vacation or fishing excursion in Canada. Some Americans have enough money left over that they buy farmland from the very farmers who feed them. They seek the Dream of a "white-picket fence in the country." Sociologists call this "urban sprawl."

Consider the great tradition of lawn care. The nation's lawn industry gobbles up an area equivalent to the State of Pennsylvania. Tens of millions of acres are set aside from food production and used in residential lawns, cemeteries, and golf courses. Though we resent paying $3 for a loaf of bread or gallon of milk, we will gladly spend it on aesthetics and recreation.

Homeowners are really just farmers. They WANT to come home from the office, put on an old pair of jeans, and farm their yards on little tractors. I find it highly ironic that some of them scoff at the lowly farmer. They play golf with their buddies and chuckle at how much better off they are than poor old Grandpa who spent his whole life in the dirt, growing crops.

Mr. LawnMowerMan is a curious sort of character. He can never have a big enough or green enough lawn. City fathers buy up water rights from area farmers, mark up the water, and sell it to him by the gallon so he can have this ideal lawn. The homeowner's tax dollars go to into university research that makes better and better (?) turf grass varieties. Major corporations like John Deere, Toro, Snapper, and Ortho chip in a couple mil toward the effort to make grass.

The little farmer forks over his cash to have the latest variety of Super Grass. Typically, this species can grow 3 feet high on solid concrete. The LawnMowerMan must have DARK green grass. After spending $100 on SuperGrass he goes to the store and buys $200 worth of fertilizer. (He spends many times more dollars per acre in fertilizer alone than ANY food farmer does in a whole year.) This fertilizer gives him his "fix" of DARK green grass. It also produces much MORE grass. And so cities buy up more water rights to feed this ridiculous process of lawn insanity.

Now any LawnMower knows that you cannot have 6 inches of grass height. It must be precisely 3 inches tall. Mother Nature has varieties that ARE this tall (buffalo grass, bermuda, etc.), but these just will NOT do. He has a primal, innate drive to control Nature. Since the neighbor across the backyard fence has a 3-foot lawnmower he buys a 4-foot lawnmower ($2000) in order to control this SuperGrass. He doesn't "have the time" to send Christmas cards or visit relatives because he spends his weekends fighting the stuff. A good lawnmower has lights on it so the little farmer can farm his grass at all hours of the night, waking his neighbors. Nature has an effective system in place to conquer all this grass too (grasshoppers, gophers, aphids, etc), but the LawnMower will not hear of it. He plunks down $200 in pesticide so that he can mow the grass himself. After all, he cannot afford to let his lawn machines collect dust.

Because he is mowing at night (or because his klutzy teenaged-son is not very adept with machinery) he will inevitably scar his lawn with his mower. This is so disgusting to the LawnMower it is almost criminal. Nature is perfectly capable of solving this problem. She introduces temporary soil stabilizing plants (crabgrass, dandelions, "weeds") and later replaces them with native grasses. This is abhorrent to the little farmer. He gets a big bunch of herbicide ($200) to thwart Nature's plan and buys more SuperGrass seed to fill in the holes ($100). Why this grass, developed in the Amazon rainforest, does not thrive in Western Kansas is beyond him.

Mr. LawnMowerMan is very good at producing grass. He laments that the city trash truck will only carry off 2 bags of grass clippings per week instead of 4 bags. Since no one can stand the sight of trash bags on the lawn, he buys an old pickup truck ($2000) to cart off his surplus crop. Hey! He could even buy a trailer to go with the truck ($500), haul the lawnmower around, and "hire out" his teenager to mow other people's grass! Might have to have a nicer lawnmower, though ($6000). And a bigger shed to house the lawnmower and pickup ($2000). He takes the sum total of his efforts (his grass crop), dumps it in the landfill, and pays the city to cover it up with dirt.

To me, there are very few sights on Earth as beautiful as the High Plains prairie. I love to go out on the ranch and watch the cattle graze in the summer time. I can watch the fat calf, its nose covered in milk, trail around after its mother who seeks a favorite weed to munch. Last year my family mowed 25 square miles of grass without a single lawnmower. We effectively cheated John Deere out of at least 20,000 units of lawnmower sales. We put food on our own table and hundreds of others as well. And we left our environment as it was in my ancestor's day, covered in hardy, eternal grasses that require no maintenance. The insects and weeds stayed in their place and we stayed in ours, coexisting as we must. I can't help but smile at the LawnMowerMan.

In a million years or so, a blink of an eye in geologic time, little tractors and SuperGrass will weather into the dust. They will give way to bluestem, bison, and bugs. Our Earth will simply shrug off the LawnMowerMan and go on mowing grass in her eternal Way.

Nathan Lee, January 11, 2004