The Harvest Project

For the last several years, I (Richard) have been working on “The Harvest Project,” a multi-volume book series exploring agrarian themes in art and literature. Volume I: Hallowed Harvests, covers ancient to early modern times. Volume II: Harvest Hands covers early modern to recent eras. For those interested, both of those books are currently available on Amazon.

The third and final volume will be titled Harvest Horizons and covers the contemporary period. WSU Press is planning to publish this final volume soon. In the meantime, here is a excerpt to serve as a preview. This portion of the book highlights the imperatives of resilience in local food systems. Enjoy!

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In the introduction to Agrarianism in American Literature (1969), M. Thomas Inge identifies key tropes of agrarianism to include religion (farmer reliance upon God and nature), romance (redemption through natural harmonies), and reciprocity (mutuality of healthy rural communities). These elements have long been expressed in art and literature and inform present considerations of rural challenge and environmental sustainability. To others, like novelist-historian Saul Bellow, the rural American experience “has had a long history of overvaluation,” with notions of self-reliance and fairness mixed with considerable unhappiness, alienation, and provincial pride. The ubiquity of people’s familiarity with agrarian scenes, labor, and traditions throughout the world since time immemorial is evident in a wide range of artifacts, art, and literature. This vast realm of evidence has rendered aesthetic interpretations of harvest in greatly varied ways. The longstanding popularity of the harvest theme from ancient to modern times, throughout both East and West, has contributed works that range from sublime to exceedingly hackneyed. Yet these attest in the main to a conviction that beauty, cooperative endeavor, and remedies to cultural and environmental threats are moral imperatives.

Cultural anthropologist J. Katarzyna Dadak-Kozicka observes that since time immemorial harvest “was essentially the purpose of existence,” and that field labors had a latent contemplative and spiritual dimension commemorated through art and ritual. A century ago journalist Alfred Henry Lewis offered a sobering practical corollary: “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” The unprecedented pace of social change since industrialization has shifted populations from the countryside to cities and distanced human connections to nature. For many generations farm work has required intimate knowledge of natural systems and long hours of hard physical work whether using human, animal, or mechanical power. These demands have fostered improved tillage methods to increase crop yields and ingenious labor-saving inventions. But such developments have inexorably if irregularly distanced populations from their fundamental reliance on the wellbeing of the land.

The term “harvest” has often been invoked as a quaint synonym for agrarian bounty or some distant ingathering of crops. Throughout the course of civilization, however, harvest has determined sufficiency or want, been the subject of endless anxious speculation throughout the seasons, and in many times has been a matter of life or death. “Give us this day our daily bread.” British scholars note significant social dislocation and political instability associated crop failures in England (e.g., 1481-1482, 1555-1556, 1596-1597), which were usually caused by late rains and resulted in yields of less than 50% of normal production. Periodic “harvest dearths” of such magnitude have been a significant factor in human migrations. In modern times nations have established storage facilities and enacted multilateral policies to ensure food supply resiliency. Yet annual harvests remain the heartbeat of national economies in the twenty-first century and are increasingly at risk from climate change, centralization of agribusinesses, and political instability.[1]

In continental and global contexts imperialism originated, and endures, in the quest for the most coveted natural resource—harvested foods. Various ideologies have been formed since ancient times to justify the conquest. Substantial Roman grain ships transported wheat from Egypt, North Africa, and Sicily; medieval European traders tapped the fertile Great Hungarian Plain, Rhine-Mosel Valley, Great Hungarian Plain, and Ukraine’s “Black Earth” district, while rural colonizers in the modern era transformed the American heartland, Argentine pampas, and western plains of Australia’s New South Wales. Populations of many contemporary societies are preoccupied with various commercial and secular endeavors and take a dependable and diverse food supply for granted. But this confidence belies serious risks, and public concern has been expressed in recent sustainability movements and examinations of exploitive geopolitics.

[1] J. Dadak-Kozicka, “Long-sounding Notes and Ornamentation as Characteristic Qualities in Musical Expression in Slavic Harvest Songs,” in P. Dahling, 2009:97. Dadak-Kozicka’s insightful research which observes the distortion of festive and ritual harvest songs by Eastern European socialist regimes after the Second World War is based in part on research described in Eugenia Jagiełło-Łysiowa’s authoritative Elementy Styló Życia Ludności Wiejskiej (Elements of the Lifestyles of the Rural Population, 1978). On the grain trade of the ancient world see Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis, 1989. Concerns regarding modern-day food security due to global warming and geopolitics are explored in Thane Gustafson, Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change (2022), and Karl A. Scheuerman, “Weaponizing Wheat: How Strategic Competition with Russia Could Threaten American Food Security,” Joint Forces Quarterly 111 (October 2023).

Pendleton’s Umatilla County Museum and the Runquist Brothers

“Save the best for last,” the saying goes, and what a pleasant surprise to find on the last day of our cross-country expedition one of the finest agricultural exhibits we had seen anywhere in the country. Pendleton, Oregon, is best known for the annual “Stampede” rodeo held there for over a century. But grain has been grown in the area far longer—reaching back to nineteenth century Hudson Bay Company trader days. The remarkable story of the region’s agricultural heritage is the subject an impressive new exhibit at the city’s Umatialla County Historical Society’s Heritage Station Museum where we were hosted by tour coordinator Shannon Gruenhagen.

The museum’s substantial “Umatilla Gold” exhibit showcases numerous aspects of grain production with special emphasis on agricultural innovations. But among the featured treasures is the remarkable art of Portland artist brothers Arthur (1891-1971) and Albert (1894-1971) Runquist. They both attended the Art Students League in New York in the early Thirties and returned to the Northwest where they shared a studio and painted scenes laden with social commentary on the experiences of minorities and laborers. Arthur, who began working for the Federal Arts Program in 1935, was once severely beaten for his socialist leanings. He painted numerous landscapes including the richly colored Early Oregon (1941) mural as a state Federal Arts Program commission for Pendleton High School on which he was assisted by the brothers’ “self-described sister” and fellow activist Martina Gangle (1906-1994). The immense painting includes a substantial harvest scene that shows unsmiling field hands resting amidst the stubble in the foreground of a passing threshing machine while other workers stack grain sacks on a truck. A red elevator rises in the distance against a range of barren hills and the pensive pose of the central figure casts a mood of resilience amidst despair upon the idyllic landscape. The harvest scene, now framed in three panels with other sections of the mural, were salvaged during renovation at the school for exhibition at the Pendleton museum.

Although still in the throes of the Great Depression, most Northwest farmers had long since made the transition to mechanized farming. Only one large farm along the lower Columbia River route as late as the 1940s still used animal power to pull the combine behemoths. George Wagenblast of Dufur, Oregon, harvested rugged slopes near the mouth of the Deschutes and could not bear to part with his beloved team of twenty-seven mules. But times were changing and in 1941 they would make their last appearance before being sold for wartime service by the U. S. Army for about $45 a head. (He had paid $175 apiece in 1929). Comparing New Deal era and twenty-first-century themes in public art and critical discourse indicates a modern trend away from intellectual consideration of the land and its toiling masses who feed the world. Of over 45,000 entries in the most recent edition of the authoritative thirty-four-volume Grove Encyclopedia of Art (2011), for example, no subject headings are included for agrarian, agriculture, rural, or rustic.

Arthur Runquist, Early Oregon Harvest Panels (1941)

New Deal Art Project Mural, Pendleton, Oregon, High School

Relocated to the Umatilla County Historical Society Museum, Pendleton

“Umatilla Gold” Exhibit Panel

To be sure, countless numbers of regional artists and authors continue to create important interpretive works. Their enduring appeal is evident in the listings of agency websites like Saatchi Art and Mutual Art that feature hundreds of contemporary harvest-themed works and in exhibits like we found in Pendleton. Israeli historian Yuval Harari, author of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015), suggests that the pace of technological innovation is increasingly associated with the volume of personalized digital postings that threaten shared values that have long knit cultural identities and connected peoples to landscapes. Such preoccupation, Harari asserts, not only increasingly distances people from employable skills, but risks humanity’s wellbeing by neglecting regard for land care and sustaining social values. Hats off to the dedicated folks who affirm timeless agrarian values in places we visited this summer like Mt. Vernon and Steele’s Tavern, Virginia; the Spanish colonial missions from Texas to Arizona, Springville, Utah; Aberdeen, Idaho; and Pendleton, Oregon. Washington (D. C.) to Washington …nice to be back home!

Founding Farmer Art and Architecture

George Washington understood the primacy of land stewardship for bountiful harvests and expressed concern about settlers’ “ruinous” tendency to exhaust frontier soils only to continue farther westward and inflict similar damage. He advocated use of “scientific farming” to renew soils and transition away from Southern tobacco and New England maize to grains, legumes, and grasses through a complex system of crop rotation and use of soil amendments. Washington’s progressive ideas were strongly influenced by foreign correspondence and reading of books by Great Britain’s most respected agricultural writers—Arthur Young’s first four volumes of Annals of Agriculture (1785) and Henry Home, Lord Kames’ The Gentleman Farmer (1776).

George Washington Presidential Library Reading Room, Mt. Vernon

Fred Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington

Washington made dozens of pages of notes from these and similar works and twice recorded Kames’ observation that, “No branch of husbandry requires more skill and sagacity that a proper rotation of crops,” which in England had come to involve cycles as long as seven years. Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s of the public need to promote a “natural fertility” (his own italicized expression), and that if “…taught how to improve the old, instead of going in pursuit of new and productive soils, they would make these acres which now scarcely yield them anything, turn out beneficial….” (The opening essay of the Annals series which Young personally sent to Washington carried a broadside against Britain’s wasteful wartime spending.)

Harvesting wheat, oats, and rye remained labor intensive and undertaken by Washington’s enslaved workers. But he sought to make the process more efficient by careful field observation and in 1786 recommended that every pair of adult cradle scythers be followed by four reapers and one binder followed by younger carriers of bundles. Harvest at Mt. Vernon and Washington’s other farms generally took place in July and August followed by the seeding of fall grains. Threshing was conducted in winter or even in spring. Washington also advocated improved agricultural mechanization and in 1792 constructed an innovative sixteen-sided, two-story threshing barn at Mt. Vernon’s Dogue Farm so horses could more efficiently tread out grain stalks on a slatted floor so the kernels could rain down and be gathered below. Prior to the advent of mechanized threshing, four pairs of horses trotting in a circle some sixty to one hundred feet in diameter could tread out some 300 bushels of wheat per day. Similar results with flailing might take five threshers working exhaustively for ten days. After a tour of Washington’s estates in 1788 guided by Washington himself, French minister to the United States Comte de Mousteir termed the newly elected president’s treading barn “a true monument to Patriotism.”

Mt. Vernon Threshing Barn

Mt. Vernon “New Room” Plaster Ceiling and Doorway Frieze Harvest Motifs

Mt. Vernon National Historic Landmark; Mt. Vernon, Virginia

Columbia Heritage Collection Photographs

Washington’s meticulous records of purchases at Mt. Vernon indicate his aesthetic as well as commercial interests. He was a serious collector of art prints and purchased no fewer than one hundred during his time in Philadelphia and at Mt. Vernon. Washington also bought six landscape paintings from English immigrant artists William Winstanley and George Beck that depicted the Potomac and Hudson River Valleys. These first hung in the original presidential residence in Philadelphia, but upon completion of his second term in 1797, Washington bought the entire group along with prints and furniture for his Mt. Vernon home’s grand two-story “New Room.” Designed in the style of an English manor house salon, the large room with airy Palladian windows was crowned with Richard Tharpe’s intricate plaster ceiling bas reliefs depicting harvest sheaves, scythes, rakes, and other farm tools. Art appreciation through collecting and display was understood to foster the moral virtue of both owner and viewers, and ornamental details honored sources of wealth and aspirations.

Washington also acquired exquisite copper mezzotints by London master printer John Boydell (1719-1804) and others showing scenes from biblical history and Greek mythology as well as Dutch pastoral landscapes (e. g., Adam Pynacker’s Morning and Evening). Boydell learned the complexities of printmaking and became one of the era’s most influential publishers who procured the services of such leading British artists as Benjamin West (1738-1920) and Richard Westall (1765-1836). Boydell engraver Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815) perfected colored stippling techniques that drew widespread acclaim from European and American patrons who had only known reproductions in black and white or brown tones. Washington’s Boydell prints were from the London publisher’s magisterial edition of Liber Veritatis (1774-1777), a precursor to the modern coffee table book, which contained two hundred drawings of works by influential French landscapist Claude Lorrain that came to be owned by William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire. The scenes were reproduced by engraver Richard Earlom (1743-1822) as distinctive mixed-method colored mezzotint for washes and etching for pen lines, and the series soon became a standard for aspiring artists to study.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Inner Court

Artists and authors contributed to an iconography of Washington as a modern Cincinnatus and agrarian statesman that was well established within several decades. His uncommon leadership and benevolence stand in contrast to the presence of amiable slaves who appear in several early nineteenth-century Mt. Vernon scenes. But Washington himself underwent a paramount life transition as young patrician who inherited vast estates with slaves when only eleven to Father of the Nation who freed them upon his death.

Protecting the Common Good

Mentalities of limits and moderation foster individual identity as well as social cohesion to sustain both culture and soil. French sociologist Émile Durkheim criticized modern society’s “malady of infinite aspiration” that trades cultural renewal for a fixation on replacement and perpetual commercial agitation to acquire things. In his foreword to Of the Land and the Spirit (2008), an anthology of Walter, Lord Northbourne’s writings on ecology and religion, Berry (like Lord Northbourne) points to perennialist matters of ultimate purpose as expressed by Jesus to, “[S]eek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness...,” in order to be provided food, drink, and clothing. Berry suggests that mastery of agriculture, husbandry, weaving, and other skills are assumed in this context, and that Jesus demonstrated faith by prayerful service to others in feeding and healing them. In these ways, literary, artistic, social, and vocational endeavors in any age represent harvests in which anyone can participate. A wide range of sustainable farming initiatives have been advocated and implemented in recent decades with varying success. Those with prospect for enduring progressive change incorporate core elements of crop rotations for soil health; improved conservation through reduced tillage and terracing of slopes; and policies that reward farmers for these practices.

Amidst the mistral winds of June 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his Harvest (Wheat Fields) series of ten paintings which provided him opportunity to experiment with color and technique. He worked quickly, “just like the harvester, …intent only on the reaping,” and blended striking hues of gold, copper, and bronze with yellow, red, and brown. The lush expressionistic masterpiece Wheat Field with a Reaper he painted in July 1889, gleams with a swirling sea of grain in impastoed layers of yellow-orange with white highlights seen in many of his Saint-Rémy paintings. A benevolent sun stands against a sky of aquamarine and seems to shine from the canvas uninterrupted by shadow or shade. The view is from the upper story of the building where van Gogh had sought recovery and shows the field’s gray-white boundary wall without any sense of confinement. Van Gogh wrote of its “vague figure toiling away… in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold,” as a modernist expression of “sacred realism” with calm, religious hope in the face of death and his own demise.

Association of grain with life suggested humanity’s vulnerability and resiliency in passionate reds and golds composed in balanced synthesis with the greenery and browns of verdant earth. These colors he complemented by mysterious orange and blue tones of the cosmos—a palette strikingly similar to his The Resurrection of Lazarus (1890). In spite of grain’s susceptibility to ruin from fire and wind, or harvest with scythe and sickle, the fields serenely endured as tangible evidence of incomparable beauty, fecundity, and energy of the divine order. The death reaper fulfilled the sower’s purpose in the grand mysterious cycle of life.

Johann Raphael Wehle, And They Followed Him (1900), Lithograph on cardboard, 4 x 6 inches, Columbia Heritage Collection

 Tolstoy’s exposition on aesthetics in What is Art? (1897) embraces a wide range of creative expression from painting and sculpture to literature, folklore, and liturgy. He characterizes their highest forms as conveyance of the makers’ regard for human dignity and the natural world in ways that astonish, mystify, and benefit the common good. That Tolstoy points to Millet, Lhermitte, Gogol, and Pushkin as aesthetic exemplars is significant for their use of agrarian themes to present such universal values. Great painting and writing express struggle and beauty through memorable associations with ideas, people, and places. Such understanding is at risk in contemporary society at once smart and ignorant. Information technologies can be exploited to distraction for endless browsing and displace contemplation of relationships to the earth and to others. Unprecedented threats to wellbeing loom if humanity’s commons of seed for harvest becomes unalterably modified and proprietary. Enduring individual and societal flourishing in any age, as Ruskin observed when considering a sheaf of grain, requires the discpline of work and rectitude. The beneficial middle way tempers entreprenership and technology through hard decisions protecting the common good. 

The characters who inhabit Tolstoy’s stories have heroic capacity, even when cast as loners and losers. They walk familiar paths to work together in the fields and better understand the people and world around them. Among the most stirring moments in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is when landlord Konstantin Levin, who sought the full life of mind, love, and labor, joins a scythe-wielding brigade in an afternoon of great satisfaction: “He… wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible.” In a day of tension over progressive approaches to a more sustainable future, ancestral regard and considerations of Ruth and Boaz, muzhik harvesters, and Port William farmers offer restorative interpretations of land use and the human prospect.

     Praise God for the harvest of farm and field,

     Praise God for the people who gather their yield,

     The long hours of labor, the skills of the team,

     The patience of science, the power of machine.

     Praise God for the harvest of conflict and love,

     For leaders and people to struggle to serve,

     To conquer oppression, earth’s plenty increase,

     And gather God’s harvest of justice and peace.

     —Brian Wren, “Praise God for the Harvest” (1968)

Questioning Popular Assumptions

Jacqueline Daisley, Palouse Hills—End of Harvest (2018), Oil on canvas, 42 ½ x 32 inches, Columbia Heritage Collection

Recent Palouse Country fine art exhibitions that have explored themes of food security and agrarian landscapes have been sponsored by the Pullman Arts Council, Moscow Arts Commission, and Colfax Arts Council. They have featured works by George Bedirian, Vicki Broeckel, Anna Blomfield, and by Jacqueline Daisley, who lives on a farm near Pullman where the surrounding countryside inspired her curvaceous masterpiece, Palouse Hills—End of Harvest. Anna Blomfield embarked on an artistic farrago in the fall of 2006 to explore and depict Palouse grain production throughout the seasons. The British newcomer had studied painting and printmaking at St. Martin’s School of Art in London and in Liverpool before moving to California in 1987 to work as an animator and muralist. Her popular online “frogblog cartoondiary” commenced on November 7, 2006 when she observed, “If I wanted to buy a combine harvester there are 3 dealers in town to choose from.” Blomfield, whose family had operated a farm implement business, first applied her special interest in the venerable forms of manual labor to paintings of foundry and tannery workers.

Relocation to the Northwest brought unexpected agrarian vistas and serendipitous friendships with area farmers, combine dealers, shop mechanics, and others engaged in agricultural pursuits. “I was entranced with the landscape, the people, and the various crops” she remembered; “each one had a story to tell and show.” Over the course of her five-year residence in the region, these encounters yielded dozens of such colorfully illustrated posts as “Out Amongst the Wheatfields (8.28.07),” “Threshing Bee (9.3.08),” and “A Combine Chorus Line (4.25.2010)” with commentary provided by the artist’s alter ego Froggie who traveled year-round in Studio Subaru. Characterizing her captivating genre as “visual storytelling,” Blomfield combined illustration and information to transport and amuse readers through expeditions to harvest fields, grain elevators, inspection stations, rural railroad sidings. Public “gallery” showings of her popular work were appropriately held in repurposed silos, barns, and the farm equipment dealerships she had first noted in her earliest online posts.

Henry Stinson, Untitled Wall Mural (2019), Fonk’s Store Mural; Colfax, Washington

Columbia Heritage Photograph

Pullman, Washington, artist Henry Stinson has painted beautiful representational canvases of harvesting combines and other modern farm equipment in action, but is especially known for whimsical views that reflect his lifelong fascination with gadgets and electricity that attest to modern American society’s ubiquitous connections to technology. An enormous untitled Stinson 2019 exterior wall mural looks as if American Gothic appeared in an 1960s episode of Lost in Space. The painting reflects the artist’s interest in a world where people and livestock increasingly share rural landscapes with with drones and satellite-controlled, computer-monitored  field equipment. The work may also suggest dehumanization of the countryside as well as frayed intimacy and responsibility to landscapes.

Disturbing provocations have long been essential work for artists and authors who question popular assumptions about the benefits of innovation and globalization while trying to preserve what should not change. Shapes and names of the surreal artwork of contemporary Canadian painter Jo-Anne Elniski reflect rural environmental concerns. The Last Harvest depicts a fulminating sky in vivid swirls of yellow, purple, and white that rain down upon rows of grain that wave in the same garish colors. Other works by Elniski like Field of Gold and Prairie Harvest appear as flaming fields of abundance that rise to confront brightly lit horizons of pink, orange, and yellow. The depictions are awesome if unsettling. Yet concerns expressed through art and literature also present opportunities for reconsideration of assumptions, intervention, and progressive change. Such reconsideration is a principal theme of Indian author-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 book The Great Derangment. Ghosh’s ecumenical survey of world literature from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey explores storytelling as commentary on natural resource extraction and climate change. He holds authors and artists of the modern era as culpable as politicians and economists for a collective failure of imagination to express an unfolding “derangement” of natural systems, social stability, and food production.

A disturbing scenario of consequences resulting from such dislocation is the subject of Uncertain Harvest (2021) by Vermont sociologist Charles Simpson (1941-2021). The novel relates American journalist Ed Dekker’s hazardous global quest after uncovering evidence at a European biotech conference of minacious environmental and food security risks wrought by transnational agribusinesses. Dekker finds that the company “Naturetek” and others exert unprecedented control of the university and government research sectors and develop genetically engineered terminator seeds that produce sterile offspring and compel grower reliance on their patented germplasm. The engaging story draws on Simpson’s own experiences working with farmers and indigenous peoples in Mexico and Guatemala and investigation of U. S. government subsidies, lax regulation, and global trade policies that are inimical to small-scale sustainable farming and regional rural development.

I first learned about the scope of GMO commercialization in 2012 while traveling from Seattle to a global orphan care conference in Indonesia. I noticed the logos of prominent U. S. seed suppliers on the shirts and backpacks of other passengers on the Tokyo to Bali connection. I spoke with several while waiting for our bags at the airport and learned that the Asia & Pacific Seed Association Conference was also taking place that same week at the city’s posh Legian Seminyak Resort. During a break in the meetings I was attending in more humble surroundings, I ventured across town to the seed conference and met security befitting the visit of a head of state. After considerable effort and the intervention of delegates I had met on the plane, I was finally admitted. A combination trade show with large group presentations, the forum provided an opportunity for transnational agribusinesses like Sygenta, Bayer, and Monsanto to showcase proprietary seeds and technologies that I was told could “transform” Asian agriculture.

Small Farmer’s Journal 45:2 (November 2021)

Cover Photo: Measuring a Case thresher operating speed

One of the influential contemporary voices on small-scale sustainable farming and rural culture is painter-farmer-author Lynn R. Miller of Sisters, Oregon, who has written over twenty books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. In publication since 1976, Miller’s quarterly Small Farmer’s Journal reaches 20,000 readers and features articles on a wide range of topics for farmers and ranchers devoted to the “craft” of farming and husbandry and for those interested in the life and literature of the countryside. He decries industrial agriculture as well as trivialized boutique “fad” farming. The Journal has featured numerous harvest-related articles including Esther M. Jensen’s c. 1940 Willamette Valley memoir, “The Day the Threshers Came,” equipment reprints like H. R. Trolley’s “The Efficient Operation of Thrashing Machines” from a 1918 USDA Farmer’s Bulletin, and detailed accounts by twenty-first century operators of horse-drawn reaper-binders and stationary threshers like Khoke and Ida Livingston of Davis City, Iowa (“The Harvest of Grain”).  Miller’s photo essay “Anatomy of a Threshing” (2021) is a prelude to forthcoming books, “Threshing Machines” and “Grain Binders and Reapers,” which will be the culmination of his years-long mission to glean practical information from out-of-print books, manuals, parts lists, and catalogs.

 Miller describes the Journal as more of a “community odyssey” than periodical. In a recent editorial titled “Seedbeds & The Rooted Mend,” he recalls visiting a local high school where he was asked to speak about farming. “I told them, no I tried to show them, that the small s big F—small Farming—the one where the farmer is the measure—contains every single element of life, most every attainable pedestal of adventure, and the best chance at everlasting health.” Perhaps spurred by the immediacy youthful hearers, Miller then mused about the significance of their high desert homeland: “To take root here is to find and see the elements, wind, sun, trees, wildlife and our own meddlesome footprints as belonging. You do that in part by keeping sight of what is near at hand, by being ‘short-sighted.’ If you are looking off to imagined holiday vacations, to deep seedy city environs, to video fantasies, to cosmetics in pursuit, to worrisome accounting, you will NOT see yourself rooted, you will NOT see the other elements near you as rooted.” In closing Miller expressed hope that his enduring effort at “community journalism” had provided “a soft drumming of information, shared adventure, and kinship” to support, celebrate, and gather the vital assembly of “human-scale,” small farmers.

Friends of the Land and Sustainable Agriculture (Part 1)

Ohio farmer and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Bromfield deeply loved farming as cooperative art in the classical sense of working in partnership with nature. He combined experience from a rural upbringing with agricultural studies at Cornell and in journalism at Columbia to author nineteen novels and eight books of non-fiction. Bromfield established Malabar Farm in 1939 on a thousand acres near his native Lucas, Ohio, to promote soil conservation, animal husbandry, and sustainable “permanent” farming. Bromfield explained his agricultural principles in a book named for the farm which had become an enormously popular tourist attraction and is now a state park and living history farm. Malabar Farm (1948), illustrated with woodcuts including scenes of wheat, oat, and corn harvest by Kate Lord, is based on Bromfield’s 1944 journal “written when the weather was bad and the work was light.” The book relates dinner table conversation and musings on a range of wartime economic issues, talk about Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton, “farmer religion,” and political constraint on human tendencies to exploit and do harm.

In 1940 writer-conservationist Russell Lord (1895-1964) and Bromfield founded the Society for the Friends of the Land, a non-profit advocacy organization to publish the quarterly journal The Land (1940-1954) and promote sustainable agriculture. Honorary members included venerable environmentalist prophet Liberty Hyde Bailey, Soil Conservation Service founding director Hugh Bennett, Aldo Leopold, and other leading figures. The group envisioned an interdisciplinary forum as relevant to agrarian affairs as Atlantic Monthly was to urban interests by offering an enriching humus of pragmatic and cultural perspectives. Edited and illustrated by the Lords from their farm near Bel Air, Maryland, The Land was published in Columbus, Ohio, for fifty-two issues under Bromfield’s oversight and featured short stories, articles on farming, science, politics, religion, and poetry. It became an influential voice for a permaculture based on “interdependent” biodiversity and multinational cooperation. The approach contrasted with developments in a world of nationalist rhetoric growing out of rising East-West tensions and the advent of controversial new technologies. Bromfield expressed the group’s hopes for the movement with allusion to emerging issues of the time in a membership appeal:

 Friends of the Land attempts to create an awareness in the minds of all our citizens of the importance to them of the wise use of our soil and water, and to provide a forum for all points and shades of opinion on conservation, to the end that the people themselves shall form their own opinions and take proper action. …There is a great revolution going on in American agriculture. This is being brought about by economic and population pressures, including increasingly high taxes, mounting labor costs and mechanization. These pressures make it imperative that the farmer who is to survive must adopt new and more efficient methods for the production of food, feed and fiber. …Friends of the Land would have our people see that forests, cover crops, grassland farming, inter-row cropping, stream flow, water power, transportation, commerce, and flood prevention are all tied together to promote our prosperity and to determine our standards of living and therefore our health and happiness.

Bromfield’s words underscore the holistic nature of the founding Friends perspectives against the backdrop of events that profoundly affected American farming. They reveal the emerging fault lines between a new order of global cooperation and sustainability envisioned under Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and Gifford Pinchot in contrast to unilateral approaches pursued under the Truman administration to increase production at home and unilaterally advance American foreign policy objectives. Despite misgivings over Wallace’s progressive advocacy, his concern over the militarization of science, and conciliatory attitude toward the Soviets, Truman retained him as a cabinet member for six months until Wallace delivered a speech in September 1945 advocating conciliation with the USSR. The new president had given Stalin the benefit of the doubt but Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and the specter of totalitarianism led to a fundamental shift in his thinking by 1947 and the beginning of the Cold War.

Truman’s pick for Secretary of Agriculture, Clinton Anderson (1895-1975), reorganized America’s post-World War II agricultural economy to increase domestic food production, alleviate global post-war shortages, and enter the foreign policy realm to counter communist tendencies in developing nations. New Deal initiatives in soil conservation, rural electrification, and other realms celebrated by WPA artists and authors gave way to government contracts with industry scientists, university researchers, and corporate laboratories. Discussion of the contest over the future wellbeing of the planet played out on the pages of The Land throughout the 1940s and early ‘50s. Bromfield and Lord contributed numerous articles as did other notable figures in conservation including Wallace Stegner, Paul Sears, and William Vogt. A collection of popular selections illustrated with Kate Lord’s woodcuts appeared in 1950 as Forever the Land: A Country Chronicle and Anthology.

While soliciting a range of viewpoints on domestic and world affairs, plant genetics, global population growth, and other topics of agrarian relevance, Lord and Bromfield expressed concerns over “quick buck” policies they feared would transform fields into factories and enlist technologies that risked unintended environmental consequences. During the war years, the USDA had suspended publication of the annual Yearbooks but released a 900-page compendium titled Science in Farming—The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1943-1947. In the new volume’s introduction, Secretary Anderson dismissed fears about DDT, genetic testing, and “[concern] that life be too abundant.” A generally favorable review of the book by The Land’s assistant editor James R. Simmons included some skepticism: “I decline to eat the bread that is no longer bread but a puffed-up something that has about as much flavor as ground peanut shells…. I can’t understand why it is necessary to grind the nourishment out of our grain and ship something that must be ‘enriched’ with chemicals before it is fit to nourish the human body.” Simmons also touched on recent national changes that were detrimental to rural vitality—interstate highways that bypassed smaller communities, centralized processing and marketing facilities, and a growing societal affluence that prized consumerism above conservation. The Land’s summer 1953 issue featured “The World Gets Warmer” by meteorologist Harry Wexler, one of the first widely published articles on the likelihood of climate change due to burning of fossil fuels. Bromfield wrote passionately about the dangers of militarism and the nuclear arms race other Land contributors warned of potential dangers from atmospheric testing of atomic bombs.

Living History “Open-Air Museum” Farms, Self-Discovery Accokeek, and Beyond

National Colonial Farm Entry at Piscataway Park
Accokeek, Maryland

One of our stops on last month’s cross-country tour was the 200-acre National Colonial Farm on the Maryland peninsula about ten miles southeast of Washington, D. C. where we were welcomed by a host of colorful swallowtail butterflies, friendly squirrels, and flock of heritage breed Hog Island sheep. The farm has operated since 1957 as a partnership between the National Park Service and non-profit Accokeek Foundation. It is one of the nation’s first land trusts and includes the farm and large vegetable garden, heritage sheep, swine, and cattle breeding program, and maintains a visitor and education center. Farm buildings include colonial era Laurel Branch Farmhouse (c. 1770) and “Bachelor’s Choice” estate Tobacco Barn (c. 1780).

Regenerative agriculture coordinator K. C. Carr had recently harvested the farm’s small stand of Red May wheat using sturdy aluminum scythes with long steel blades. Using the ancient method, they then thrashed the cuttings with wooden flails and cleaned the grain with screen sieve. The yield was still rather limited so all the seed was saved for planting season but K. C. hopes there will be enough next year for servings of Accokeek bread and biscuits. Red May is a flavorful soft red winter wheat but the region’s 18th century production was devastated in the 1770s when Hessian troops brought over from Germany to fight against the Americans in the Revolutionary War also brought the Hessian fly. The farm’s seed stock was generously provided by our friend Ed Schultz from Colonial Williamsburg’s Great Hope Plantation.

The first large scale American open-air museum and living history farm was Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan which opened in 1929. Influenced by similar places in Sweden, antiquarian George Francis Dow (1868-1936) restored buildings on the grounds of the Salem, Massachusetts Essex Institute between 1898 and 1910. Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg opened in 1934 with major support from John D. and Abby Rockefeller, Jr. The living history movement’s fascinating story in the United States is profiled in Jay Anderson, Time Machines: The World of Living History (1984). One of the movement’s most influential advocates was Ellis Burcaw, longtime professor of history and museum studies at the University of Idaho in Moscow. 

With son Karl and Accokeek Regenerative Agriculture Coordinator K. C. Carr

Laurel Branch Farmhouse (c. 1770), National Colonial Farm

Prominent American art collector and critic Christian Brinton (1870-1942) also championed the approach throughout the inter-war years in a storied career that resulted in over 200 published articles and dozens of curated art shows. Brinton moved easily among artists, intellectuals, and government cultural administrators to foster appreciation for art and history by arranging for exhibitions in leading galleries of prominent painters and sculptors, as well as lesser known artists who he believed merited wider attention. Although basing his far-flung endeavors in Philadelphia, Brinton traveled zealously throughout Europe from 1912 to the Thirties to collect and study exemplary works of Nordic, Slavic, and German art. He sought to uplift distinct national trends in modernism and use gallery exhibitions and publications to improve cultural relations.

For these purposes Brinton organized the European-American Art Committee which included representatives from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Museum of Art, leading European art museums, and members of the diplomatic corps. Through these ambitious efforts and other associations arranged by Brinton, highly visible exhibitions held in various American cities included Contemporary Scandinavian Art (1913), Russian Painting and Sculpture (1923), and Contemporary Belgian Painting, Graphic Arts, and Sculpture (1929). In the introduction to the Scandinavian exhibit catalogue, Brinton made his case for enriching national aesthetics of “soil and tradition” to uplift spirits instead of perpetuating the “souless convention” of nineteenth-century classical styles or pursuing abstract universals.

Notwithstanding the Romantic tendencies of Swedish artists like Gunnar Hallström (1875-1943), Brinton found in his paintings and others by Anders Zorn (1860-1920), renown for his landscapes for portraits, and Denmark’s Karl Shou (1870-1938) a refreshing naturalism of coloristic beauty. Scenes of everyday country life including Shou’s The Farm and On the Border of the Field and works by Hallström were included in the popular 1913 exhibition. Zorn’s pensive watercolor Our Daily Bread (1886) depicts his aged mother tending a mealtime campfire to feed workers who harvest grain nearby.

Anders Zorn, Our Daily Bread (1886)
The International Studio XLIV:173 (July 1911)

In the summer of 1912, Brinton visited Norway, Sweden, and Denmark in preparation for the exhibition under the auspices of the American-Scandinavian Society. In additional to arranging loans of notable art works, the trip introduced him to living history “open-air” museums that showcased what he termed “the humble, anonymous treasure troves of peasant industry” seen in indigenous decorative art, rural architecture, and farm tools. The world’s first open-air museum had been established at the Bygdøy Royal Farm near Oslo (Kristiania) in 1881-1882 when King Oscar II of Norway and Sweden arranged for the relocation of four farm buildings and a medieval stave church from Gol in the Hallingdal Valley to his summer country residence. Gol was my maternal great-grandmother Sunwold’s ancestral village. Restoration and management of other historic structures that followed from the area were transferred in 1907 to the Norsk Folkmuseum which had been established in 1894 by historian Hans Aall (1869-1946).