Red or green? It isn’t just the state question of New Mexico anymore. But we’ll pick up on that in a moment. As some of you may have noticed, I have a fairly liberal personal definition of what constitutes a Desi Angle (TM) for your consideration. Perhaps this is due to my own mixed-up background — subconsciously, I probably worry that if you define desi too narrowly, there won’t be any room left for my mongrel ass. But it’s also that desi angles pop up in the darndest places. For example…
I have been working almost everyday on the drive to the double-wide. The last couple days I moved 53 tons of #2 gravel onto the drive. I believe I will need one more load to have everything covered good on the drive and to have enough to put a few around the entrances to the barns. It gets really muddy anywhere the animals gather up in the winter. At the ends of the barns is a soupy mess. Mud doesnt bother the cows, but it is a breeding ground for worms. Goats are very succeptable to parasites so they dont do well in moist places. Its also hard on the horses shoes. It seems to suck them right off. Not to mention I hate walking in it.
Monday I noticed someone had used my tractor while I was at work. Turns out BJ had to feed hay to Mamaw and Papaw Staleys cattle. Papaw said she did it like she had been doing it all her life. I told him it was just that she had a good teacher. Today I went and set out some rolls of hay to the same cattle. Same story where he has their cattle. Pretty much a soupy mess. They have rented my great uncle Freds old place and have about 25 head running on it. A few weeks back someone shot two of his cows. They must have done it in the night and just left them to die. There is enough loss in farming without such senseless things as that.
Let’s play Spot the Desi Angle, shall we? In the preceding quote, the Desi Angle is…
(a) Great-uncle Fred is Hindu, and his cows were sacred
(b) The writer is a share-cropper at the Maharishi’s farm in Iowa
(c) The writer is a blogger for an Indian farm equipment company
(d) Don’t be fooled by the names. This story takes place in Madhya Pradesh.
And the answer is…
The answer is (C). The quote is from the most recent entry on Life of a Farm, a blog by Joel Combs, 32, of Pine Knot, Kentucky, and hosted on the corporate website of Mahindra USA, the American subsidiary of Indian firm Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd.
Now before we get to the Mahindra part, I have to say that this blog makes for some very interesting, enjoyable reading. It’s clear from the writing and the photographs that Mahindra USA has sponsored a real-life, young family farmer from a deeply rural part of the country — southern Kentucky, about 60 miles from Knoxville, Tenn., as he develops his land and builds a home on it with the aid of his trusty Mahindra 6000 tractor.
Read a few entries — they are fairly infrequent, and the site only dates back to mid-2006, so it won’t take you long — and you will get a rather compelling glimpse into family farming, and one that is quite forthright about the struggles that family farmers face in a country where agriculture is so heavily controlled by large corporate interests. Joel (pictured here with kids Kaylee, Mattie and Garret) is a sympathetic character and a frank writer, and seems quite sincere in his affection for his Mahindra tractor.
Intrigued, I made my way to “The World’s Largest Tractor Community,” tractorbynet.com, where tractors are compared and criticized and maintenance and other issues are discussed to the tune of over one million messages so far. It was quite fascinating.
As you may or may not know, the dominant player in the U.S. tractor market is John Deere, one of those iconic American brands and one associated with a particular (and quite attractive) shade of green in which it paints its products. There are a number of competitors — Kubota, New Holland, Kioti — but it seems that in recent years Mahindra has been coming on strong, with aggressive pricing, successful advertising campaigns, and dealer and customer service that seems to have earned a solid reputation.
Mahindra is doing the color thing too. Their tractors are all red. Deere’s are green. The discussion on the board often uses the colors as shorthand for the brand.
The non-American origins of the Mahindra brand are well known to these family farmers. There are some very interesting discussions about the meaning of American products: there is a general preference for buying American, but a savvy understanding that Deere products are likely to include as many or more components sourced outside the US as are the competition.
It’s worth getting your tractor geek on and poking around this site to hear perspectives — not just on tractors, but on the farming life — that y’all city macacas don’t usually get to hear. It’s also noteworthy how easily an Indian brand has spread in this salt-of-the-earth, so-called “redneck” community, while resentment against desis grows in the suburban office parks of the nation.
