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by crabbone 604 days ago
Well, with a sickle you hold what you cut, and then you bind it together, so the grain doesn't fall on the ground. With a scythe you will have to somehow pick it up and organize in such a way that you can later collect it (without much dirt stuck to it etc.)

NB. In high-school, I worked one summer cleaning and otherwise maintaining the local after-school building. It had a huge lawn behind it, which I had to trim with a scythe once every few weeks. So, I thought I knew how to do that reasonably well...

And then, one day, some years later, me and few friends of mine went on a trip into the mountains, and we put our tent, as we later discovered, on some farmer's field. He got mad at us, and wanted us to cut the grass for him, as a form of compensation. Using a scythe on an incline, as opposed to flat surface is a... whole different story. I lodged it into the ground a few times, and then the farmer almost killed us :) In the end, we bought him some alcohol and left.

So, the moral of the story: scythe might not be always the best tool, and in some situations it's far from obvious how to use it efficiently.

2 comments

A high speed processor And lidar with digital blade angle control will probably make it work effortlessly on an incline too.
But what about wearing a red checkered flannel shirt with a denim overall? Rolling up your sleeves, sweating like hell and working yourself into exhaustion to come back to your tent at the nightfall and bake potatoes and fish underneath a campfire?

You just took away all the fun from the process :)

It’s quite common to use a scythe with a “cradle” when cutting grain.

Scythes are amazing for cutting on an incline. You need to work along the incline, not down the incline, and will take shorter strokes.

Pretty sure the farmer who spooked us knew how to do that too. It's just an example of how someone who, even though had some experience with the tool, still didn't know how to use it in a novel context.