Jim Kovaleski sharpened a long sickle-shaped blade, held in front of him at the end of a long, curved wooden handle, and then moved it over the ground in semi-circular strokes.
With this tool, a scythe, he smoothly cut long grass, ready to be gathered with a hay rake. A crowd quickly gathered around him at the Common Ground Fair in Unity on Friday. One onlooker asked to hold the scythe, another asked a reporter to take her photo with him, her “hero.”
Kovaleski, who often leads demonstrations, has gone viral and drawn devoted fans from his videos using the tool to cut grass to feed his vegetable plants. He may be one of the more public faces of the ancient farming tool’s revival.
The small crew behind many of these tools sold in the U.S. has been led for decades now by Carol Bryan, who’s continuing the work her late partner, Elliot Fishbein, started 25 years ago. From the small Washington County town of Perry on the Canadian border, Scythe Supply has custom built and shipped growing numbers of scythes across the country – and helped reintroduce them to more common use. It’s one of just a couple scythe businesses in the country.
Their European-style scythes have curved handles, or “snaths,” with lighter long, curved blades forged by hand, rather than straight-handled American-style scythes made of stamped metal.
They’re quiet, compared to motorized weed whackers and mowers – customers often remark on being able to hear the birds sing while they work – and can be used in wet areas where heavy tractors can’t go. Scything also spares fuel costs. “It runs on breakfast,” one company refrain goes.
The most ambitious scythe users are small farmers managing several acres a year for tasks like cutting down cover crops before they go to seed, according to Bryan, but people most often use them as weed whacker substitutes.
American-style scythes were once common farm tools in Maine and are even featured on the state’s flag, but had fallen out of popular use by the early 2000s. At early trade shows, older farmers who grew up with them would tell Bryan they’d never use one again, remembering them as “heavier than a lifetime of sin.”
It’s been decades since any U.S. manufacturer made scythe blades, and those Scythe Supply sells come from an almost 500-year-old factory in Austria.
So, “[Fishbein] knew if it was going to do anything, it had to be education-based,” Bryan said.
He had used scythes as a teenager working on a dairy farm in upstate New York before coming to Maine as a back-to-the-lander. When Bryan met him, he was mowing his yard with one.
“When you’ve powered the mechanism…there’s a whole new sense of personal achievement,” he told the Bangor Daily News in 2001, describing scythes as amazingly efficient.
A sign painter with a background in woodworking, Fishbein had the skills to create custom snaths from Maine wood to the customer’s measurements for comfortable mowing.
But the year after starting Scythe Supply, Fishbein was killed in a car crash. Bryan carried on the business with the help of friend and snath-maker Richard Scott, who remains involved as a consultant, advising potential customers about scything on their particular land.
Earlier farmers likely used heavier American scythes over large amounts of land, contributing to the feeling of drudgery, Bryan said.
But mowing on a small scale is comfortable with the custom-fit European designs, and with other new farm tools and practices breaking up workloads, they can fill a different role on a small farm – perhaps having more of a place than ever, Bryan said.
Scythes are also simple machines with just a few components. The “back-to-basics” tools allow the user to engage with their surroundings more deeply while providing exercise, employee Dan Cashore said at the fair Friday while demonstrating blade maintenance.
Today, the scythe seems to have moved from a strictly back-to-the-lander tool into the mainstream, Bryan said, “which is really fun. It’s fun to see that change.”
Early customers were often people who already used scythes looking for replacements, followed by homesteaders working an acre or two.
Fans have grown to include conservation sites where heavy equipment can’t be used, living history museums, Amish communities and Waldorf schools (the company’s recommended minimum age for scythe use is 8 or 9, with adult supervision).
Maine remains a major part of its ever-growing customer base, as a state that’s a bit of a “time warp,” in a good way, Bryan said.
“We’ve had fun being the kingpin,” she said.
