The grass at Fox Run Farm in East Montpelier stood up to our thighs. After a day of rain, the stems were stiff—perfect for mowing with a scythe.

Five men, each outfitted with a straight-handled scythe, followed each other through the field. After 45 minutes of quiet and not-very-hard work, with a lot of time spent pausing to talk to each other or show each other tips on how to swing the blade, an impressive portion of the field lay in windrows.

Richard Czaplinski (right) demonstrates scythe technique for Jesse Shapiro.

A scythe is what peak oil writer Richard Heinberg calls a Class B tool—manufacturing it requires external energy, but once it’s made, it operates off of human power. Most of industrial civilization is powered by what he calls Class D tools, which require external energy both to manufacture and to operate. Things like string trimmers, gasoline-powered lawn mowers, and diesel-powered, farm-sized mowers are Class D tools. As oil becomes more expensive after peak oil, and supplies are periodically interrupted, tools that require only human power to use will become more valuable.

That’s a good part of the reason why I bought a scythe and was at Fox Run Farm last night, learning to use it and maintain it with the East Montpelier Historical Society.

A good scythe, in the right hands, can mow grass about as low as a lawn mower. Once the grass reaches a certain height, a person with a scythe can also mow faster, at least than the gasoline-powered push mower we use on our lawn.

Like a lawn mower, a scythe can also be used to keep a path open through a field, or to mow down a cover crop before planting something else.

A scythe can also do much more. The scythe can harvest tall grass for hay, as our mowing team was doing at Fox Run Farm. Or it can harvest grain crops.

If you’ve ever tried using a scythe, it’s likely you’ve used the American scythe. The snath, or handle, is curved, and you bend over to mow with it. In recent years, the Austrian scythe has started to make a comeback in the US. It has a lighter blade, more easily sharpened; the curved blade doesn’t catch on rocks or divets as easily, and the snath is lighter and straight. The Austrian (or European) scythe is less weight to swing in the fields, and you use it standing straight up. With the Austrian scythe, what Peter Vido calls the “dance” of the scythe becomes a dance of pleasure, not drudgery.

James Zimmerman has compared the scythe and the string trimmer. For the scythe, pros include that it’s lighter, likely to be considerably more comfortable to use, and quiet. It’s also free from an external power source—which means that if you’re mowing under a fence or along a road or path, you don’t need to lug a gas can with you.

Among the cons of the scythe, Zimmerman lists the fact that the blade must be kept very sharp. Don’t let the blade hit hard things like rocks or metal! If you do that with a string trimmer, you might break the plastic string and just need to let out a little more. With a scythe, an errant rock can mean painstaking work pounding and filing the blade back into shape. For that reason, sometimes a particular weed can be hard to cut, because of the risk of hitting a rock or a metal fence post—or just because it’s hard to find room to swing the scythe.

A US-based scythe company sells an Austrian scythe for $180, complete with sharpening kit and David Tresemer’s introductory book, The Scythe Book (free PDF; 2nd edition also includes The Scythe Must Dance.) That’s the same price as, or less than, some of the top-selling, gas-powered string trimmers sold by a hardware chain. With the scythe, of course, you never need to buy gas or string again.

Technique is more important than strength for using the scythe. In 1990, my wife met an older farmer who told of a mowing party when he was a kid, probably in the 1940s. His dad assigned him to work right behind an old man. The kid complained about working with a slow, old man, but his father told him just to do it.

Well, the kid worked as hard as he could, but the old man took off faster ahead of him. The kid tried working harder, and the old man got even further ahead. Before long, the old man had come around the field and was about lap the kid. “Hurry up kid,” he cried out, “before I come nipping at your heels!”

Probably the best way to learn the scythe technique is from an old, experienced mower, when you’re a kid. I’m learning as an adult, and I’m glad to have others with decades of experience to help me. If you’re the only one you know who uses a scythe, you can still get started with The Scythe Book or a video, plus the tool itself. The tool will teach you a lot about how to use it.