The One Scythe Revolution

Mow tall grass and weeds with ease. Harvest your own hay, bedding, and mulch from your own land, without the use of heavy, expensive, and polluting machines. Even grow and harvest your own grains. Our mission is to provide the best performing scythes available, and the knowledge necessary for people to be able to utilize them to their fullest ecological potential.

NO FUEL, NO NOISE, NO POLLUTION.

Whether you are alarmed about Climate Change, Peak Oil, Social Justice, Health Care, Food Safety & Security, or all of the above... At their roots, they all have one solution in common: We must fundamentally change the way we grow our food!  Big, mechanized, chemical agriculture is ruining our health, depleting our soil, building up toxins in our environment, wasting the remaining oil, massively increasing CO2 levels in our atmosphere, and financially devastating the closest thing that we have to sustainable farmers; small family farms.  
  Peak Oil expert Richard Heinberg states that in order to continue to grow the same amount of food in the future, without the use of cheap oil, we will need 40-50 million farmers, farming 3-50 acres, mostly with hand tools. No, not like in the Middle Ages. We are talking about appropriate technology here.

 Small-scale farmers, meet one of your new tools. The modernized "Austrian" scythe....

We sell the finest, hand-forged, scythe blades currently being produced, from Austria. The factory that makes these blades has been making scythe blades since 1540. All our blades have the same tang angle, and are all interchangeable on our snaths. The grass and field blades are triple-peened by the factory, and are super-sharp, and truly "maehfertig" (ready-to-mow). Our bush blades are also factory sharpened, and are ideal for mowing mature, thick-stemmed weeds.

Our wooden snaths are made in Switzerland, from Swiss Ash wood, and feature a gentle, double-curve, and have adjustable, ergonomic grips. Precision milling and superb quality, traditional Swiss woodworking. The adjustment mechanism for the grips hold very securely and is patented.

Whetstones are used to keep your scythe blade sharp while out mowing in the field. They are carried in a metal, plastic, or cowhorn whetstone holder, that contains water and is clipped to your belt. We carry an assortment of naturally quarried and man-made whetstones.

Austrian scythe blades are sharpened by thinning out the metal at the edge, with a hammer and scythe anvil, and then the edge is finished by honing it with a whetstone. They are not sharpened on a grindstone, like the American-style blade. We specialize in freehand peening with narrow anvils. We sell various complete peening kits, with the finest anvils available, and a highly detailed peening instruction manual written by Botan Anderson.

To make hay with a scythe, a hayrake is essential for tedding and turning the drying hay, and gathering up the finished hay. We sell classic, split-head, wooden hayrakes, made by the Cheesebrough factory of Michigan since 1864.

A large capacity garden cart is extremely useful on a scythe-based farm. I highly recommend the Carry-All made by the Norway Company here in Wisconsin. We use it for hauling fresh-cut grass and weeds, compost, manure, firewood, rocks, you name it. It's a real workhorse. It's extremely durable and well-made, and all the parts are replaceable (though so far the only thing that we've had to replace in 8 years, is one of the innertubes. And that was only because one of our geese chewed on the tire valve and gave it a leak!) See www.norwaycarryall.com .

Scythe is to lawnmower, as broadfork is to roto-tiller. We never turn over our soil here, but incorporate compost and other soil amendments, into our heavy clay soil as needed, by loosening it with a broadfork. To work a garden bed, we simply pull aside the thick mulch, spread on the compost, kelp, rock dust, pyrolized charcoal, etc., and then use the broadfork to loosen up the clay soil. We then finish the job with a 3-tine cultivator. My blacksmith friend, Larry Cooper (pictured at left) at Gulland Forge located in Black Earth, Wisconsin, makes an excellent broadfork. See http://gullandforge.com/

 I actually prefer to use a Japanese kama for harvesting certain grains, rather than an Austrian sickle. The short blade of the kama, is much easier to control, and safer to use than the long hooked blade of the Austrian sickle. Much easier (and safer) to sharpen also. Beware of cheap ones made in China for martial arts, though. Pictured here is the kama that I use. It is sold by the Hida Tool Company. Excellent quality. See http://www.hidatool.com/shop/shop.html  . Also check out their bamboo winnowing baskets. Great for garden-size harvests.

Silky Sugoi 420 Extra Large Teeth  - Sugoi means awesome in Japanese. Nicknamed the "human powered chain-saw", this saw is indeed awesome. Great for coppicing, and sawing up branchwood for bio-char. I use it to fell and saw up entire dead elm trees. We have a lot of young elms here, that die of Dutch Elm Disease when they are 6"-8" in diameter. I cut them down, and saw up the trunk for firewood, and the branches for bio-char. The Silky catalog says that this saw is sharpenable, but I haven't tried that yet.