Mennonites drive tractors

I picked up a load of 22 tons of chilled (not frozen) turkey for which I waited about four hours. I awoke from the nap I was taking while waiting only to discover that the trailer I was waiting for was now sitting next to my truck, but that everyone had gone home - at 5:04 pm! This turkey place was in the middle of the Shenandoah valley in Virginia. Beautiful country that looks as if you could grow anything.

The entire valley is above about 1300 feet elevation so it was considerably cooler than the previous day I'd spent near the coast in Norfolk.

Driving south out of the valley the highway climbed up to 2200 feet near Christiansburg VA to top off in a high plateau which I had no idea existed. Driving south through Tennessee I was struck by the scents. First, very floral in northern Tennessee. When I lived in South Carolina last summer I noticed a continuous spicy smell from the forest. Driving through southern Tennessee and northern Alabama I smelled something similar, but just a bit different.

I also saw some of the devastation from the Tornadoes from a few weeks ago. Five different locations, one of which was an entire town at an exit on the highway. Every tree within a half mile had been completely stripped of leaves and many of the remaining trunks had been cut in half. What had been a forest was now a wasteland. I even saw a few trees with two-foot wide trunks pulled completely out of the ground with their root balls and all, just strewn across a field. The dual 60 foot tall towers previously holding the sign for a Petro truck stop was stripped of it's sign and both towers were bent at a 30 degree angle. The Petro station itself was crushed. Frightening. Unfortunately no good photos.

So, as I was pulling out of the turkey place in Virginia, somehow the security guy (who had a definite New York accent) and I got to talking about the local Mennonite farmers. He told me that every night the local roads are crowded with Mennonite farmers driving their tractors (not horses and buggies) between their various plots of farm land. Apparently the Mennonites in the Shenendoah Valley are called "horse and buggy old order Mennonites" who have justified the use of tractors for farming, but no other modern convenience. On my drive into the turkey plant I passed someone in a horse and buggy.

Which got me thinking that Mennonites might be a really good source of information on low-energy/low-carbon ways of living. Their carbon footprints, other than their tractors, must be near zero because they're still living in essentially the same conditions everyone lived within in pre-petroleum days. I bet they have a bunch of good information on how to live comfortably in such a low-energy consumption way of life.