6 ms·

Scythe Works Without Borders

89 points by highway-trees 2y ago

HideousKojima 2y ago
I mean it's an interesting idea, but it's weird to imagine that small time farmers in poor countries are capable of obtaining and using a sickle but are somehow not capable of obtaining and using a scythe. At least looking for ones here in the US, a decent quality sickle seems to run in the $30-$60 range while places that sell scythes seem to cost $100-$300, so I can't imagine it's some massive price barrier either
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I mean from a capitalist point of view, a farmer that uses scythes will outperform ones that use sickles (according to this website anyway). So there's something else going on.
- burnte 2y ago
  It's usually lack of knowledge/understanding and simple inertia, "this is how we've always done it."
  - broken-kebab 2y ago
    I'm afraid you just dismissed the question, not answered it. Plenty of things changed in agriculture in spite of simple inertia. Why does sickle-for-wheat-scythe-for-hay concept seem to prevail for different cultures in distant lands for so long?
    - vdupras 2y ago
      I'm not sure, but what I've read is that there's a loss of grain associated with using the scythe on wheat when it falls on the ground. Maybe it's a concern in some areas. But I think that with a proper apparel such as the one we see in the video on the website, the fall can be made gentler while still keeping the significant efficiency gain that the scythe offers over the sickle.
    - crabbone 2y ago
      Well, with a sickle you hold what you cut, and then you bind it together, so the grain doesn't fall on the ground. With a scythe you will have to somehow pick it up and organize in such a way that you can later collect it (without much dirt stuck to it etc.) NB. In high-school, I worked one summer cleaning and otherwise maintaining the local after-school building. It had a huge lawn behind it, which I had to trim with a scythe once every few weeks. So, I thought I knew how to do that reasonably well... And then, one day, some years later, me and few friends of mine went on a trip into the mountains, and we put our tent, as we later discovered, on some farmer's field. He got mad at us, and wanted us to cut the grass for him, as a form of compensation. Using a scythe on an incline, as opposed to flat surface is a... whole different story. I lodged it into the ground a few times, and then the farmer almost killed us :) In the end, we bought him some alcohol and left. So, the moral of the story: scythe might not be always the best tool, and in some situations it's far from obvious how to use it efficiently.
      - haccount 2y ago
        A high speed processor And lidar with digital blade angle control will probably make it work effortlessly on an incline too.
        crabbone 2y ago
        But what about wearing a red checkered flannel shirt with a denim overall? Rolling up your sleeves, sweating like hell and working yourself into exhaustion to come back to your tent at the nightfall and bake potatoes and fish underneath a campfire? You just took away all the fun from the process :)
      - supermatt 2y ago
        It’s quite common to use a scythe with a “cradle” when cutting grain. Scythes are amazing for cutting on an incline. You need to work along the incline, not down the incline, and will take shorter strokes.
        crabbone 2y ago
    - burnte 2y ago
      I didn't dismiss it at all. I directly answered you. While plenty of things change despite inertia, plenty of things do NOT change. We've known about the benefits of no till, cover crops, crop rotation, etc. for centuries and they're still not common due to inertia. In the USA we know that government subsidies for corn have massively distorted the market and had huge negative impacts on health and the environment, but we don't change due to inertia. Water management something we're terrible at in the US despite having the knowledge of how to do it better, but we don't because of inertia. Don't underestimate the power of "we've always done it this way." People can come up with a thousand bad reasons not to do something. In my company, another leader forced his division to stop using a manual tracking spreadsheet because it was wasting time. People HATED the idea of stopping it, expecting there to be huge issues, but the manager was right, all the information was already reliably recorded in other systems and this was just a wasteful manual copy. When people stopped using it, literally nothing went wrong or changed, no one needed it, but now everyone got back 15 minutes of their day. But people resisted because "we've always done it this way." As another poster said, grain loss is more likely with these less-hand-labor-intensive methods, and people can overvalue the loss of that small amount despite the time and energy savings of scythes. So people might think, "I'll lose 3% of my harvest doing that, I can't afford that" except they'd expend 15% of the energy harvesting and thus that 3% loss is more than balanced out by the 85% time savings and the reduced work load. You can spend a fraction of that saved time making up the 3% difference in a hundred other ways. People are very resistant to change. A lack of education produces lapses in logic and critical thinking and thus people won't evaluate the change in the right frame of reference.
- Almondsetat 2y ago
  Taking inspiration from your nickname, how do you explain the many technical aspects of Japan that are still stuck in the 90s? They surely know how to look around and they surely know better things have been battle tested for decades in other countries, and yet...
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    It's an aging populace. They are the leading indicator of the demographic Cliff of urbanization and post-industrial countries in post-industrial economies. Old people don't like to adopt new technology or ideas Countries with demographic cliffs likely also try to extract more labor out of older people. So decision makers for adoption of new technology and techniques which would go with management or some other analogue, have reduced neuroplasticity and won't adopt change as readily.
- wood_spirit 2y ago
  This is tangent, but I’m not in the US so my price perspective might be really different, but first of all that sounds really expensive. Second of all, I can’t imagine any of my neighbours (live in countryside and have a lot of manual tools in shed) buying these things new. Far better to buy old ones for basically nothing at garage sales. (I watch a lot of homesteading YouTube from US and am always amazed at how many power tools are purchased just for the one next job (or perhaps for the upcoming monetised video?). Power augers particularly. Far quicker and cheaper to just roll up sleeves than drive to town and back. It’s just a whole different view on consumption.)
- K0balt 2y ago
  Some insight here. I have spent a sizable portion of my time in developing nations. There are deep rooted cultural differences that sometimes are counterintuitive to westerners. One of the great strengths of some memetic frameworks is the easy and rapid adoption of processes and technologies that lower effort or raise efficiency. As a result these cultures are also subject to rapid change on many fronts, and may become unrecognizable in just a few decades. These dynamic cultures thrive in name only, since they are not really the same memetic creature after a scant few generations. As a note in the margin, the aforementioned, production oriented cultures often have a history of large scale wars, conquest and often colonization. War is a strong filter for valuing efficiency over other considerations. Other memetic frameworks endure by virtue of valuing tradition and communal experience with past generations. These cultures change slowly, as their value structures resist change. This type of memetic symbiant has other kinds of value to humanity that are not measured in GDP or other economic metrics. As an example, let me describe a common scenario that I have personally experienced multiple times: Happening upon a person apparently having difficulty with a task, I show them a “better” way that stems from my cultural experiences. Usually, they are receptive and enthusiastic about the “new” way, which they themselves demonstrate as “better”. Later, I may happen upon the same person doing the same task, in the “old” way. When I ask them why, they say something along the lines of “because it’s the way my father and his father did it”. At first, I found this vexing. Now I understand that in these cultures, doing it in the “new” way was a fundamentally distinct action, which removed the meaning from the task. The original method was valued because it was communing with their family and heritage. The new method was effective but lacked a sense of meaning, effectively making it a hollow act in some way that I will probably never understand even though I can see. Only when productivity is a goal unto itself is “progress” intrinsically valued. Not all cultures value productivity in the same way. In some cultures, being able to do something difficult at high proficiency is much more valued than being able to achieve the same outcome using a different method with much greater productivity. This is visible in nearly all cultures in sport. Sport is typified by rules that make a trivial task difficult, and useful innovations using technology are typically frowned upon. The skill of the difficult task is valued for its difficulty, as well as its ties to tradition and the way it is woven into the memetic tapestry. As an oversimplified and caricatured example: Someone who can harvest a dozen animals in a day with a sling is a great hunter and respected provider. His brother that can do that in half an hour with his 22 rifle is a slacker who doesn’t respect his ancestors or the spirits of the forest. I’m not trying to say that these cultures are retrograde or immune to progress. Rather they are not perpetually looking for new and better solutions with the same enthusiasm that some people might expect, and the innovators within their communities may encounter a degree of social friction that many people might find counterintuitive. Adoption of new processes in these cultures often springs up but reverts to its prior state when even a minor friction to continuing adoption is encountered. The benefits often need to meet a surprisingly high bar for an innovation to be sticky.
efm 2y ago
The Future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. William Gibson What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run it?
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  >What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run it? There used to be an easy answer to this, now it's not politically or morally acceptable to support: colonization. Colonization is what brought modern farming practices (and their accompanying massive yields) as well as the development of the infrastructure needed to support it and other developments.
  - r14c 2y ago
    My guess is that's because people don't like being colonized. "Modern" industrial farming is also depleting the soil, so I'm not sure the jury is out on it actually being "better" than local practices.
- vdupras 2y ago
  In terms of joules spent per blade of grass cut, a well honed scythe in the hands of a skillful operator is more efficient than mechanized solutions. If you have an area where you already have an abundance of agricultural workers, it might be that scythe is a better solution than having your agriculture sector being dependent on fossil fuels.
  - troupo 2y ago
    "If you already have a bunch of people doing back-breaking labor, do not even think about giving them efficient machines"
    - vdupras 2y ago
      Working in the field is difficult, yes, but the western world still hasn't figured out an answer to the question "what happens when we run out of dead dinosaurs[1] to eat?". Until it has, any idea to not exacerbate the problem until we figure it out is, in my mind, a good idea. [1]: fossil fuels, with poetic license
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dtquad 2y ago
Insane that a country that hasn't invented the scythe yet has also produced one of the authors of the "Attention is all you need" paper.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> regions where sickles (or machetes) are traditionally used I don't understand how it's possible that there are regions that don't use scythes (for crops that warrant them), when scythes have been around for over a thousand years? I would venture to say that if they haven't transitioned yet it's because they don't want to (for whatever reasons--no idea what those might be).
- traverseda 2y ago
  Guesses at some reasons * Scythes need to be sharp, a machete will work even when poorly maintained. * Machetes are cheaper to make. * Machetes are easier to use * Scythes are a specialized tool, where as I can buy a machete for ten dollars at Canadian Tire. Economics of scale are different. > There are still several remaining scythe factories in the world. In recent years a competitive, market-driven economy is making it difficult for scythe making factories to retain the quality level that was once a standard. https://scytheworks.ca/swwobs-blade-choice/ https://scytheworks.ca/swwobs-blade-choice/
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  Invention and adoption of technology, even "basic" technology, is very contingent on circumstance. Bows are pretty near universal (but not quite), but specific improvements like recurved limbs are patchy. And people aren't exactly quick to adopt new farming techniques when a failure could mean they starve. I guess that's also why this organization is pushing uphill. But I think it's very possible that lots of people haven't heard of or seriously evaluated a scythe.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    There's illustrations inside the pyramids that are thousands of years old showing people watering their fields using a bucket on a long swinging arm. It needs just a couple of long poles, a bucket, and a rope. I saw this still in use today when I went to Egypt. That blew my mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof
opwieurposiu 2y ago
A good scythe is faster then a weed-wacker but slower then a lawnmower. I have been using a scythe to cut my lawn for a few years now. It works, and is fun, but you must keep it VERY sharp. If the scythe is not razor sharp it will simply push the grass over instead of cutting it. A sickle will still work when somewhat dull, because it gathers the grass into the concave bit and/or you can hold on the grass with one hand and cut it with the other. A scythe you have to sharpen every 5-10 min or so, normally you keep a scythe stone in your pocket to do this. The sickle you can just sharpen at the beginning of the day and that will be good enough. The sharpening process takes some practice to get good at, particularly if you start peening it as well. https://scytheworks.ca/knowledge-base/chapter-4-preparing-the-blades-edge/ https://scytheworks.ca/knowledge-base/chapter-4-preparing-th...
- motohagiography 2y ago
  it really does. I use a scythe for clearing high grass that I got from lee valley and hoped it would be a fun lawnmower alternative, but it was less satisfying than I had hoped. Maybe next season I'll get good at it, or buy a few more and and bus city people out to do scythercise classes.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    Or just monetize the scythe skills at Halloween.
- yetihehe 2y ago
  > The sharpening process takes some practice to get good at, particularly if you start peening it as well. I wish someone invented an easier and safer way to sharpen a scythe. If you make an error, it's pretty easy to cut yourself pretty deeply, and even cut into finger joints (did it one time, cut was deep but so clean it healed essentially in a day). "Dull" scythe is still as sharp as your average knife. Sharp scythe is sharper than a razor.
  - opwieurposiu 2y ago
snitzr 2y ago
This reminds me of economist E. F. Schumacher's idea of "intermediate technology." It's tech that is more advanced than an impoverished person's existing technology, but not so advanced that only a few can afford and use. Intermediate technology prevents a dual economy / neocolonialism where only a few people get rich and productive from using advanced labor-saving technology.
- wood_spirit 2y ago
  This reminds me of Hans Rosling’s talks about poverty and washing machines https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w
- tweetle_beetle 2y ago
  I wonder the tipping point for that status for the scythe occured historically. They are fairly difficult tools to manufacture, as far as hand tools go. And it wasn't that long ago, in the history of the tool, that a patent led to a single small site (by modern standards) exporting riveted English scythes all around the world. https://www.sheffieldmuseums.org.uk/visit-us/abbeydale-industrial-hamlet/site-history/ https://www.sheffieldmuseums.org.uk/visit-us/abbeydale-indus... https://scytheassociation.org/english-scythe-making-traditions-at-issac-nash-ltd/ https://scytheassociation.org/english-scythe-making-traditio...

89 points by highway-trees 2y ago

I mean it's an interesting idea, but it's weird to imagine that small time farmers in poor countries are capable of obtaining and using a sickle but are somehow not capable of obtaining and using a scythe. At least looking for ones here in the US, a decent quality sickle seems to run in the $30-$60 range while places that sell scythes seem to cost $100-$300, so I can't imagine it's some massive price barrier either

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I mean from a capitalist point of view, a farmer that uses scythes will outperform ones that use sickles (according to this website anyway). So there's something else going on.
burnte 2y ago
It's usually lack of knowledge/understanding and simple inertia, "this is how we've always done it."
- broken-kebab 2y ago
  I'm afraid you just dismissed the question, not answered it. Plenty of things changed in agriculture in spite of simple inertia. Why does sickle-for-wheat-scythe-for-hay concept seem to prevail for different cultures in distant lands for so long?
  - vdupras 2y ago
    I'm not sure, but what I've read is that there's a loss of grain associated with using the scythe on wheat when it falls on the ground. Maybe it's a concern in some areas. But I think that with a proper apparel such as the one we see in the video on the website, the fall can be made gentler while still keeping the significant efficiency gain that the scythe offers over the sickle.
  - crabbone 2y ago
    Well, with a sickle you hold what you cut, and then you bind it together, so the grain doesn't fall on the ground. With a scythe you will have to somehow pick it up and organize in such a way that you can later collect it (without much dirt stuck to it etc.) NB. In high-school, I worked one summer cleaning and otherwise maintaining the local after-school building. It had a huge lawn behind it, which I had to trim with a scythe once every few weeks. So, I thought I knew how to do that reasonably well... And then, one day, some years later, me and few friends of mine went on a trip into the mountains, and we put our tent, as we later discovered, on some farmer's field. He got mad at us, and wanted us to cut the grass for him, as a form of compensation. Using a scythe on an incline, as opposed to flat surface is a... whole different story. I lodged it into the ground a few times, and then the farmer almost killed us :) In the end, we bought him some alcohol and left. So, the moral of the story: scythe might not be always the best tool, and in some situations it's far from obvious how to use it efficiently.
    - haccount 2y ago
      A high speed processor And lidar with digital blade angle control will probably make it work effortlessly on an incline too.
      - crabbone 2y ago
        But what about wearing a red checkered flannel shirt with a denim overall? Rolling up your sleeves, sweating like hell and working yourself into exhaustion to come back to your tent at the nightfall and bake potatoes and fish underneath a campfire? You just took away all the fun from the process :)
    - supermatt 2y ago
      It’s quite common to use a scythe with a “cradle” when cutting grain. Scythes are amazing for cutting on an incline. You need to work along the incline, not down the incline, and will take shorter strokes.
      - crabbone 2y ago
  - burnte 2y ago
    I didn't dismiss it at all. I directly answered you. While plenty of things change despite inertia, plenty of things do NOT change. We've known about the benefits of no till, cover crops, crop rotation, etc. for centuries and they're still not common due to inertia. In the USA we know that government subsidies for corn have massively distorted the market and had huge negative impacts on health and the environment, but we don't change due to inertia. Water management something we're terrible at in the US despite having the knowledge of how to do it better, but we don't because of inertia. Don't underestimate the power of "we've always done it this way." People can come up with a thousand bad reasons not to do something. In my company, another leader forced his division to stop using a manual tracking spreadsheet because it was wasting time. People HATED the idea of stopping it, expecting there to be huge issues, but the manager was right, all the information was already reliably recorded in other systems and this was just a wasteful manual copy. When people stopped using it, literally nothing went wrong or changed, no one needed it, but now everyone got back 15 minutes of their day. But people resisted because "we've always done it this way." As another poster said, grain loss is more likely with these less-hand-labor-intensive methods, and people can overvalue the loss of that small amount despite the time and energy savings of scythes. So people might think, "I'll lose 3% of my harvest doing that, I can't afford that" except they'd expend 15% of the energy harvesting and thus that 3% loss is more than balanced out by the 85% time savings and the reduced work load. You can spend a fraction of that saved time making up the 3% difference in a hundred other ways. People are very resistant to change. A lack of education produces lapses in logic and critical thinking and thus people won't evaluate the change in the right frame of reference.
Almondsetat 2y ago
Taking inspiration from your nickname, how do you explain the many technical aspects of Japan that are still stuck in the 90s? They surely know how to look around and they surely know better things have been battle tested for decades in other countries, and yet...
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  It's an aging populace. They are the leading indicator of the demographic Cliff of urbanization and post-industrial countries in post-industrial economies. Old people don't like to adopt new technology or ideas Countries with demographic cliffs likely also try to extract more labor out of older people. So decision makers for adoption of new technology and techniques which would go with management or some other analogue, have reduced neuroplasticity and won't adopt change as readily.
wood_spirit 2y ago
This is tangent, but I’m not in the US so my price perspective might be really different, but first of all that sounds really expensive. Second of all, I can’t imagine any of my neighbours (live in countryside and have a lot of manual tools in shed) buying these things new. Far better to buy old ones for basically nothing at garage sales. (I watch a lot of homesteading YouTube from US and am always amazed at how many power tools are purchased just for the one next job (or perhaps for the upcoming monetised video?). Power augers particularly. Far quicker and cheaper to just roll up sleeves than drive to town and back. It’s just a whole different view on consumption.)
K0balt 2y ago
Some insight here. I have spent a sizable portion of my time in developing nations. There are deep rooted cultural differences that sometimes are counterintuitive to westerners. One of the great strengths of some memetic frameworks is the easy and rapid adoption of processes and technologies that lower effort or raise efficiency. As a result these cultures are also subject to rapid change on many fronts, and may become unrecognizable in just a few decades. These dynamic cultures thrive in name only, since they are not really the same memetic creature after a scant few generations. As a note in the margin, the aforementioned, production oriented cultures often have a history of large scale wars, conquest and often colonization. War is a strong filter for valuing efficiency over other considerations. Other memetic frameworks endure by virtue of valuing tradition and communal experience with past generations. These cultures change slowly, as their value structures resist change. This type of memetic symbiant has other kinds of value to humanity that are not measured in GDP or other economic metrics. As an example, let me describe a common scenario that I have personally experienced multiple times: Happening upon a person apparently having difficulty with a task, I show them a “better” way that stems from my cultural experiences. Usually, they are receptive and enthusiastic about the “new” way, which they themselves demonstrate as “better”. Later, I may happen upon the same person doing the same task, in the “old” way. When I ask them why, they say something along the lines of “because it’s the way my father and his father did it”. At first, I found this vexing. Now I understand that in these cultures, doing it in the “new” way was a fundamentally distinct action, which removed the meaning from the task. The original method was valued because it was communing with their family and heritage. The new method was effective but lacked a sense of meaning, effectively making it a hollow act in some way that I will probably never understand even though I can see. Only when productivity is a goal unto itself is “progress” intrinsically valued. Not all cultures value productivity in the same way. In some cultures, being able to do something difficult at high proficiency is much more valued than being able to achieve the same outcome using a different method with much greater productivity. This is visible in nearly all cultures in sport. Sport is typified by rules that make a trivial task difficult, and useful innovations using technology are typically frowned upon. The skill of the difficult task is valued for its difficulty, as well as its ties to tradition and the way it is woven into the memetic tapestry. As an oversimplified and caricatured example: Someone who can harvest a dozen animals in a day with a sling is a great hunter and respected provider. His brother that can do that in half an hour with his 22 rifle is a slacker who doesn’t respect his ancestors or the spirits of the forest. I’m not trying to say that these cultures are retrograde or immune to progress. Rather they are not perpetually looking for new and better solutions with the same enthusiasm that some people might expect, and the innovators within their communities may encounter a degree of social friction that many people might find counterintuitive. Adoption of new processes in these cultures often springs up but reverts to its prior state when even a minor friction to continuing adoption is encountered. The benefits often need to meet a surprisingly high bar for an innovation to be sticky.

efm 2y ago

The Future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. William Gibson What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run it?

HideousKojima 2y ago
>What is the skill tree of development, and how do we speed run it? There used to be an easy answer to this, now it's not politically or morally acceptable to support: colonization. Colonization is what brought modern farming practices (and their accompanying massive yields) as well as the development of the infrastructure needed to support it and other developments.
- r14c 2y ago
  My guess is that's because people don't like being colonized. "Modern" industrial farming is also depleting the soil, so I'm not sure the jury is out on it actually being "better" than local practices.
vdupras 2y ago
In terms of joules spent per blade of grass cut, a well honed scythe in the hands of a skillful operator is more efficient than mechanized solutions. If you have an area where you already have an abundance of agricultural workers, it might be that scythe is a better solution than having your agriculture sector being dependent on fossil fuels.
- troupo 2y ago
  "If you already have a bunch of people doing back-breaking labor, do not even think about giving them efficient machines"
  - vdupras 2y ago
    Working in the field is difficult, yes, but the western world still hasn't figured out an answer to the question "what happens when we run out of dead dinosaurs[1] to eat?". Until it has, any idea to not exacerbate the problem until we figure it out is, in my mind, a good idea. [1]: fossil fuels, with poetic license

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dtquad 2y ago

Insane that a country that hasn't invented the scythe yet has also produced one of the authors of the "Attention is all you need" paper.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> regions where sickles (or machetes) are traditionally used I don't understand how it's possible that there are regions that don't use scythes (for crops that warrant them), when scythes have been around for over a thousand years? I would venture to say that if they haven't transitioned yet it's because they don't want to (for whatever reasons--no idea what those might be).

traverseda 2y ago
Guesses at some reasons * Scythes need to be sharp, a machete will work even when poorly maintained. * Machetes are cheaper to make. * Machetes are easier to use * Scythes are a specialized tool, where as I can buy a machete for ten dollars at Canadian Tire. Economics of scale are different. > There are still several remaining scythe factories in the world. In recent years a competitive, market-driven economy is making it difficult for scythe making factories to retain the quality level that was once a standard. https://scytheworks.ca/swwobs-blade-choice/ https://scytheworks.ca/swwobs-blade-choice/
andrewflnr 2y ago
Invention and adoption of technology, even "basic" technology, is very contingent on circumstance. Bows are pretty near universal (but not quite), but specific improvements like recurved limbs are patchy. And people aren't exactly quick to adopt new farming techniques when a failure could mean they starve. I guess that's also why this organization is pushing uphill. But I think it's very possible that lots of people haven't heard of or seriously evaluated a scythe.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  There's illustrations inside the pyramids that are thousands of years old showing people watering their fields using a bucket on a long swinging arm. It needs just a couple of long poles, a bucket, and a rope. I saw this still in use today when I went to Egypt. That blew my mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof

opwieurposiu 2y ago

A good scythe is faster then a weed-wacker but slower then a lawnmower. I have been using a scythe to cut my lawn for a few years now. It works, and is fun, but you must keep it VERY sharp. If the scythe is not razor sharp it will simply push the grass over instead of cutting it. A sickle will still work when somewhat dull, because it gathers the grass into the concave bit and/or you can hold on the grass with one hand and cut it with the other. A scythe you have to sharpen every 5-10 min or so, normally you keep a scythe stone in your pocket to do this. The sickle you can just sharpen at the beginning of the day and that will be good enough. The sharpening process takes some practice to get good at, particularly if you start peening it as well. https://scytheworks.ca/knowledge-base/chapter-4-preparing-the-blades-edge/ https://scytheworks.ca/knowledge-base/chapter-4-preparing-th...

motohagiography 2y ago
it really does. I use a scythe for clearing high grass that I got from lee valley and hoped it would be a fun lawnmower alternative, but it was less satisfying than I had hoped. Maybe next season I'll get good at it, or buy a few more and and bus city people out to do scythercise classes.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  Or just monetize the scythe skills at Halloween.
yetihehe 2y ago
> The sharpening process takes some practice to get good at, particularly if you start peening it as well. I wish someone invented an easier and safer way to sharpen a scythe. If you make an error, it's pretty easy to cut yourself pretty deeply, and even cut into finger joints (did it one time, cut was deep but so clean it healed essentially in a day). "Dull" scythe is still as sharp as your average knife. Sharp scythe is sharper than a razor.
- opwieurposiu 2y ago

snitzr 2y ago

This reminds me of economist E. F. Schumacher's idea of "intermediate technology." It's tech that is more advanced than an impoverished person's existing technology, but not so advanced that only a few can afford and use. Intermediate technology prevents a dual economy / neocolonialism where only a few people get rich and productive from using advanced labor-saving technology.

wood_spirit 2y ago
This reminds me of Hans Rosling’s talks about poverty and washing machines https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w
tweetle_beetle 2y ago
I wonder the tipping point for that status for the scythe occured historically. They are fairly difficult tools to manufacture, as far as hand tools go. And it wasn't that long ago, in the history of the tool, that a patent led to a single small site (by modern standards) exporting riveted English scythes all around the world. https://www.sheffieldmuseums.org.uk/visit-us/abbeydale-industrial-hamlet/site-history/ https://www.sheffieldmuseums.org.uk/visit-us/abbeydale-indus... https://scytheassociation.org/english-scythe-making-traditions-at-issac-nash-ltd/ https://scytheassociation.org/english-scythe-making-traditio...