Twice, during the past year, I have wished for a tool that is no longer available to the average consumer. Last winter, when my farm was infiltrated by a pair of obnoxious beavers that had dammed the creek and created flooded fields, and again this summer when a large corner post broke off and the hole needed to be re-dug in drought-hardened soil, I found myself longing for a mere quarter of a stick of dynamite. Editor’s Note: If you would like to see an old ad for Farming with Dynamite from DuPont, go to http://ozarksfn.delivr.com/1jdet_qr or visit our Facebook page.
Growing up on an Ozarks farm back in the 1950s and 60s, my father could walk into almost any hardware store and purchase however much dynamite he wished – and he did quite often. There were no forms to fill out, licenses to pay for, or background checks to perform. You simply told the owner how much you needed and he’d go in the back room and wrap up (carefully) however many sticks you requested and ring up the sale. As long as I could remember, there was always dynamite stored in the fruit cellar, right inside the door on the top shelf to the left.
I remember watching, with a kid’s amazement, as dad reclaimed a productive creek-bottom farm by logging out the huge oak trees and blowing the stumps out of the ground with dynamite. According to my father, hiring a bulldozer was too expensive and, “was a waste of both good lumber… and dirt.”
My father even used dynamite to ‘blow out’ the side of a steep hill and make a fairly level building site for the home in which I was raised. Granted, we had to use the wheelbarrow to move hundreds of loads of rock and dirt, but the dynamite had reduced boulders and hard clay into material that was moveable.
Through the years, I’ve watched my dad use dynamite to create post holes where one would think a post could never be set, unplug drainage ditches that had become clogged with timber and debris, straighten the flow of creeks so they didn’t erode away the productive bottom land, and even eliminate garden varmints by imploding their prospective dens.
Back in the day, dynamite was a very useful item for the Crownover farmstead. It was a readily available and relatively cheap product used to make life easier. Today, one needs a federal permit to own the stuff and it is available only from specialized suppliers who require a ream of paperwork to accompany every transaction. And, even if you go through all the training, jump through all the hoops, and pay all the licensing fees, I would suspect there might be a swarm of black SUV’s and quite possibly a helicopter in the vicinity the first time you enlarged that first post hole.
So, I’ll just continue to clean out beaver dams and post holes the old-fashioned way through hand labor and sweat. But the memories of the good old days linger every time I see a tree stump I’d love to blow out of the ground because I’ve run over it at least 12 times with the farm truck… or I’ve hit the exposed surface of what I suspect is a half-ton, mostly buried, boulder every time I’ve mowed that field for hay.
Yes siree, if I could get my hands on a few sticks of dynamite, I could take care of stumps and rocks so quickly, I’d be tempted to take up fishing again…just like I did when I was a kid.
Jerry Crownover is a farmer and former professor of Agriculture Education at Missouri State University. He is a native of Baxter County, Arkansas, and an author and professional speaker. To contact Jerry about his books, or to arrange speaking engagements, you may contact him by calling 1-866-532-1960 or visiting ozarksfn.com and clicking on ‘Contact Us.’
