Here you see Dennis Black beginning the annual mowing of our restored fields yesterday. The job often takes more than a day due to some significant slopes and other terrain irregularities. It also can be challenging when the soil is wet.
We postpone the mowing of our fallow fields until the fall to assure that their summer residents – multitudes of birds, insects, reptiles, and other animals – are no longer raising their families there.
The cutting is necessary to prevent quick-growing raspberry bushes, conifer trees, and other larger plants from reappearing and changing the density of the land cover. Many of us have created and maintained fields of wild grasses, sedges, and wildflowers because such environments are disappearing in the United States, endangering the species that breed and live in them.
For equipment buffs: Dennis is riding an AGCO Allis 5670 tractor and pulling what I think is a Woods single-spindle rotary cutter. That type of cutter (or “mower”) commonly is called a “bush hog,” which is not quite correct.
A “Bush Hog®” is a brand name that should be applied only to the field and brush-cutting machines of Bush Hog LLC, headquartered in Selma, Alabama. (That company advertises that, when it first demonstrated its invention in 1951, an amazed farmer said: “That thing eats bushes like a hog.”)
Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 1, 2024.