Amber Waves of Eden Grain

Persian Grain Market (c. 1900)

“There’s only one thing better than a good story, and that’s a good true story!” sagely observed legendary Pikes Place Market restaurateur, brewer, and entrepreneur Charlie Finkel of Seattle. We were discussing the various benefits of heritage grains like flavor and nutrition, and Charlie pointed out that cultural values also greatly contribute to culinary significance. Like fine wines, the evocative names of many heritage varieties suggest fascinating worldwide associations and distinct flavors as with Yellow Breton wheat, Scots Bere barley, and the Himalayan Brown oat. But the context of our visit about “true stories” was how a USDA “plant explorer” came across an exceedingly rare hard white grain while on an expedition to Persia over a century ago. This historic region covered present Iran and portions of Iraq and included the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, long considered the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization.

The American had visited a Persian grain market famed for quality and variety, and asked his host for a sample of their finest wheat. He was directed to a vendor and asked him what made his wheat so special. The visitor learned that its name apparently said it all—the grain came from the land of Eden. The skeptical scientist may well have dismissed such a fanciful story, but nevertheless retrieved a sample for the USDA seed collection at Beltsville, Maryland, where it was stored with countless others. That might have been the end of the story had not some agricultural experiment stations in the western US a few years afterward sought to identify the baking characteristics of several recent grain introductions. As is commonly known, the finest yeast breads are made from hard red wheats, while pastry and flatbread flours are made from soft white varieties. Only in exceedingly rare instances does Mother Nature create a hard white wheat which makes possible a lightly colored whole grain loaf.  The variety found at the Persian bazaar, they discovered, was a hard white wheat which they further identified as an “excellent miller.”

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World Grains Map (1907)

The wonderful flavor and appearance of hard white baked goods have long made it a highly desirable flour, and it typically fetches premium prices although virtually all hard white bread flours today are modern hybrids bred primarily for greater yields. We undertook a worldwide detective hunt for the Eden grain found in Persia over a century ago which was no longer available from the USDA. We eventually located a sample from a European germplasm center and set about with a few precious seeds several years ago to carefully increase it to the point that we able to plant about one acre this past spring, which should yield about a ton of when ready to harvest (and we’re harvesting it now as this is written!).

Sowing Palouse Heritage Amber Eden Wheat (Early May 2020)

Grandpa’s Weed-pullers (July 2020)

Amber Eden is a beautiful grain with large beardless heads, and to ensure a clean crop we’ve twice enlisted the valued help of young grandsons Zachary, Micah, and Derek to keep any other plants from growing in the field. This old-fashioned process is called “rōgging,” a term that comes from German roggen, or rye. Back in the day rye was sometimes mixed with wheat and barley so the stalks were pulled out by hand to keep crops pure. The boys are anxiously awaiting the fruit of their labors in the form of a freshly baked loaf after harvest, and Zachary intends to bake it himself, something Grandpa never considered doing at that age.

Climate Change — Back in the Day

We’re still trying to figure out the climate patterns after an unusually hard winter of 2019 that brought record snowfall to our part of the world, following by virtually no precipitation this past winter. Back in the day when the fortunes of harvest meant the difference between a local population’s prospect of plenty or privation for an entire year, an atmosphere of intense anticipation stirred across the countryside as summer beckoned. For the small tenant farmers of medieval times, several acres the harvest required the labor of all able-bodied family members from older children to adults. On the manorial estates of England and France, workers could number more than 200 so the harvest could be completed within the few prime weeks of summer between the kernel’s full ripeness and risk of damage from sprout or threat of rotting. Forces of nature that had brought forth bounty in the fields could also conspire to ruin crops in late summer with shattering hail, incessant rain, or felling winds, torching entire fields by lightning, or with a plague of all-consuming locusts. Fasts and feasts of the medieval church followed a sacred rhythm of agrarian wholeness represented by a liturgical calendar in recognition of parishioners’ reliance upon divine sustenance and protection from forces beyond mortal control.

Johann Hans, Celebration of the Harvest Festival in Ulm (1817), Lithograph, 9 ½ x 13 ¼ inches; Columbia Heritage Collection

Ulm’s grand medieval Ulmer Münster church and Münsterplatz are depicted in an early nineteenth century print that indicates the vulnerability and devotion of the populace in the wake of the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The Northern Hemisphere’s subsequent “Year without a Summer” with recurrent rains and cooler temperatures led to the catastrophic crop failures and famine in central Europe. With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and return of the climate to more normal conditions by 1817, city folk and farmers alike gave thanks and renewed harvest celebrations  throughout the land. In Frankfurt Pastor Gerhard Friederich led worshippers in a grand July Erntedankefest with prayers and hymns; Johann Hans’s Celebration of the Harvest Festival in Ulm depicts a similar event in that southern German city with verse about the calamity:

It was a sad year, a year of sorrow.

The poor spoke with tears every morning:

“Where do I find bread for my children today?”

The joy had been veiled, hidden.

Wherever one went, it was still and deathly.

“Oh open your heart, Mother Earth,” we begged,

“That we may be helped!”

And see, a beautiful day has come,

Joyous laughter has returned to all.

Plenty is Revealed, Beautiful Upon the Earth

Harvesting Heritage Grain Plots with Family “Volunteers”

We’ve had great fun here at the farm watching family members tend the heritage grain plot trials near the old farmhouse which allows us to determine which grains adapt well to our part of the country. Among the varieties we have grown are White and Red Lammas wheats that owe their enduring folk name to medieval Anglo-Saxon Lammastide (Anglo-Saxon hlaf-mas, “Loaf Mass”) of offerings traditionally held in early August when priests blessed the first ripe wheat. This annual commemoration’s antecedent included the sober rites of Celtic Luhgúhnadh, or the Celtic Sun god “Lugh’s Assembly,” which took place on August 1, when Scottish Gaelic Lùnastal (Welsh Gwl Awst—the Feast of August) was also observed.

In ancient Celtic folklore, Lugh established the festival to honor his foster mother, Talantiu, the “Great One of the Earth,” for dying from exhaustion after clearing forest for land to cultivate. By the early Middle Ages the festival came to include tribal assemblies attended by the High King, sporting contests, trade fairs, and other special events. The modern English word “earth” attests to these early peoples’ sacred regard for the land since the term is derived from Hertha, the Celtic goddess of the soil. (The word “harvest” is from Old English hærfest—“autumn,” the time described by the tenth century Menologium as “…[W]ela byð geywed fægere on foldan, or when “Plenty is revealed,  beautiful upon the earth.”)

Harvest Home in Sandomir (Poland)

Jozef Lienkowicz, Les Costumes du Peuple Polonais (Leipzig, 1841)

Columbia Heritage Collection

Early religious groups adapted these gatherings and vocabulary to the changing conditions of early medieval life and the new faith. Linguists trace the word “bread” (Nordic brøt) to Proto-Indo-European bhreu of northern Europe, a word suggesting the bubbling of leavened bread, the boiling of broth, and the brewing of beer. This northern term implies a process, while Mediterranean Latin’s word for loaf, panis (and derivatives French pain, Italian pane) emphasizes the end product. Medieval harvest festivals were commonly held throughout Europe for several days in late summer or fall depending on local traditions and after the crops had been substantially gathered. Folks of all ages but young people in particular looked forward to these spirited events as a time to don traditional costume, socialize, and engage in amusements after months of toil in the fields. Known in German as Kerbfest or Kirmes (Dutch Kermesse), these joyous times typically featured special church and market fairs with strolling minstrels, fellowship and feasting with family and friends and plenty of drink, and evening dances. The revelry is colorfully and sometimes comically depicted in such paintings as Kermis, Peasants Making Merry (1574) by Lucas van Valckenborch (1535-1597), Village Feast (c. 1600) by Marten van Cleve (c. 1527-1581), Brueghel’s The Kermesse of St. George (1628), and David Teniers the Younger’s Peasant Kermis (c. 1665).

Lucas van Valckenborch, Kermis, Peasants Making Merry (1574)

Oil on panel, 14 ½ inches

Danish National Gallery, Copenhagen

The beautifully composed painting Harvest Festival Procession (1826) by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) presents a romanticized view of such an occasion in the German countryside with elements that combine classical and medieval motifs with the artist’s Christian worldview. A celebratory peasant throng bearing grain sheaves follow a raised eagle standard as if a Roman legion marching toward a towering statue of Ceres. Other harvesters continue to labor in a distant field beneath the ruins of a medieval castle. Schinkel’s symbolic works characteristically depict historical and topographical detail in reverence to great epochs through the ages meant to inspire contemporary social renewal.

The painting presents the view of a people who appreciate the sacred bounty of the land which is used to uplift individual spirit and elevate overall area culture.  In many Catholic parishes the church consecration day that commemorated the founding of the church or its patron saint came to added sacred elements to the festival’s old folk traditions—often condemned by clerics, but did not greatly displace them in many areas. Catholic services commemorated the transmission of supernatural power upon a place of worship and featured a lengthy liturgical Mass with Holy Communion of wine and white bread. Protestant Kirchwiehen also involved solemn ceremony but as a sacred dedication and without the metaphysical connotations.

Scythes, Sickles, and Mr. Tusser

A vivid memory from my Palouse Country boyhood is watching Dad cut tall grasses and weeds around our farmyard with an exceedingly old scythe. He was fond of saying, “There’s a right way and a wrong way” (to just about everything), and I remember him showing my brother and I how to properly hold the handles (“nibs”) and set a rhythm to the cutting. Early cradle scythes appeared in the thirteenth century and are depicted in paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525-1569). These featured a small half-circle loop attached to the base of the handle that caught the entire mowed gavel that was dropped at the end of each stroke for gathering into piles. Some ten swaths by an experienced fieldworker typically provided enough stalks to fashion a sheaf about one foot in diameter, and a long day’s labor with a scythe kept keen could cover from one to two acres depending on field conditions. A customary fieldworker echelon of four reapers followed by a binder could then harvest about five to six acres per day. The improved cradle scythe featuring a long scythe blade connected to four to six long wooden ribs that could hold several swaths eventually appeared in nineteenth century America. Its more substantial cuttings were then dropped in the stubble to be bundled and placed into rows of shocks. Using the more modern method, a single cradler-bundler pair could cover about the same area as the medieval five-member team.

Cradle Scythe (c. 1890), Columbia Heritage Collection

In medieval times, a landowner typically appointed a bailiff to preside over the day-to-day operations of the manor’s agricultural enterprises. Reporting to the bailiff were the reeve (Old English gerefa), the workers’ representative in civil affairs, a hayward (heggeward) responsible for safeguarding fields of hay and grain from theft and roaming livestock, and harvest overseer (“lord”) who urged timely completion in Thomas Tusser’s sixteenth century poem, “The End of Harvest.”

COME home, lord, singing,

Come home, corn bringing.

'Tis merry in hall,

Where beards wag all.

Once had thy desire,

Pay workman his hire:

Let none be beguil'd,

Man, woman, nor child.

Thank God ye shall,

And adieu for all.

 Tusser’s classic was among the most popular printed works in Elizabethean England and reflects his own experience as a small farmer. Some proverbs on thrift and country life that appear in his verse may not have been original with him, but appear for the first time in such writings from the period and also testify to harvest labor and equipment from the time (“Threshe sede and go fanne”). Tusser also offers qualified support to the era’s controversial enclosure of open fields which was widely opposed by rural commoners who had long benefited from access to the commons (“champion farming”). But Tusser saw economic benefits for all from individualized stewardship of natural resources that would improve efficiency and diversify crop production (“More profit is quieter found / Where pastures in severall be; / Of one seely acre of ground / Than champion maketh of three”).

The “Cerealization” of Europe

The story of farming is one of usual significance throughout rural America, and certainly to urban consumers year-round, let alone in times like these when stocking grocery store shelves is threatened by pandemics and market dislocations. Self-reliant agriculture had long been practiced by natives peoples in North and South America, and since ancient times in the Eastern Hemisphere. When European immigrants began flocking to the United States in the early 1800s they brought many Old World farming traditions that harken back to practices introduced a thousand years ago. A gradual shift in the early medieval period away from annual and two-year cropping in Europe that exhausted soil fertility led to improved cereal production across the continent. The three-year open field rotation system (German Verzelgung, Russian trekhpol’ye) became widespread during the thirteenth century and increased crop yields from one-half to two-thirds in many parts of central and eastern Europe with heavier soils and higher rainfall than in the south. While variable local geographic conditions allow for only generalizations, the triennial system did begin a widespread continental shift from mixed farming to the production of specific grains on designated fields.

This “cerealization” of Europe was directly related to the era’s population rise and led to the emergence of urban centers and new social classes. Grain yields from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries remained negligible by present standards, however, with wheat averaging some eight to twelve bushels per acre, barley ten to fifteen, and oats fifteen to twenty. (Modern non-irrigated yields are commonly five to six times higher.) England’s medieval standard measure of distance, the furlong, was established at 220 yards, or about how far a team of oxen could make a furrow by pulling a plow before needing to rest. A width of forty-four yards—twenty-two trips down and back, came to represent a full day’s work to define the present acre of 4, 840 square yards.

Pietro de Crescenzi, “Farmers Harvesting Crops, ”Opus Ruralium Commmodorum (1471), Vollbehr Collection, Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress

Field size varied widely depending on local norms of peasant holdings, topography, and soil conditions. The area of a “full holding” varied considerably in early medieval Europe but was generally understood to be the amount of land and livestock necessary to support a three-generation family living under the same roof. The year’s culminating grain harvest served the three imperative needs of sustenance for family and livestock, seed for future crops, and seigneurial tax. Over time conventional units of area (English “hide,” German Hufe, French mansus) came to be associated with obligations to seigneur and state, though definitions reflect considerable stratification among villagers. In central Europe, for example, a prosperous Austrian peasant head of household with both full holding and a tenancy might have a hundred acres, while similar status in Bohemia represented sixty acres, but half that area in England and Hungary. Subdividing over generations led to numerous fractional holdings, cotters with only a house and garden, and large numbers of landless laborers.

The Farm Novel

In the wake of industrialization and associated currents of social change, the farm novel appeared in the eighteenth century as a distinct genre beginning with works like Patrice Lacomb’s story of French-Canadian country life La Terre Paternelle (1846, later translated into English as The Ancestral Farm). A concurrent European phenomenon led to the appearance of numerous French “roman rustique,” German “Bauernroman,” and British Country Life titles. This “literature of the land” flourished in North America and Europe through the 1950s, and has been revived in the twenty-first century with the rise of “back to the land” and small-scale sustainable agriculture efforts. While rural locations in these novels has been as varied as the fictional characters who inhabit them, they generally share settings in a specific place where plots unfold that explore the human condition through protagonist struggle with the elements and urban influences. Notable works by such writers as Lacomb, O. E. Rølvaag, Willa Cather, and Louis Hémon are also characterized by use of vernacular language and accurate, detailed depiction of farming operations like tillage and harvest.

John Nash, Land Agitation in Ireland, The Graphic (September 20, 1880)

Association of the term “agrarian” with rural experience dates back to at least to second century BC Rome with tribune Tiberius Gracchus’s controversial Lex Sempronia Agraria (Agrarian Laws) which sought to redistribute public lands to the poor. In many contexts the term retained a land reform connotation into the modern era with published works containing the word before 1920 almost exclusively suggesting economic struggle. Nineteenth and early twentieth century books titles including the word deal with such topics as the agrarian “problem” (England), “outbreak” (Ireland), “disturbance” (Italy), and “distress” (India). The term has had similar connotations in America, where Solon J. Buck’s The Agrarian Crusade (1920) summarizes post-Civil War farmer political activism.

A different, more naturalistic and idealistic sense of the word emerges in the writings of Thomas Jefferson about yeoman farmers and with modern writers like Russell Lord and Wendell Berry. In the introduction to Agrarianism in American Literature (1969), author M. Thomas Inge identifies key tropes of this understanding to include religion (farmers 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.

George? Gregory, Hill (engraver), Harvesting in Scotland, Harper’s Bazar (February 16, 1878)

Historian Florian Freitag (2013) writes of the genre’s significance in establishing the farm as a symbol of national identity and giving voice through rural discourse to enduring national values. Among such widely shared attitudes and tendencies are self-reliance and individualism, political conservatism and religious faith, and suspicion of city ways informed by a kind of primitivism. However, Freitag further notes national and cultural distinctives in farm novels. American authors, for example, have often written of impoverished immigrant settler families who seek prosperity on the broad expanses of the heartland. Québécois rustic literature generally affirms strong the agrarian community and religious identity among well-established farm families, while English Country Life novels tend to depict the peaceful “order and control” seen in well-tended, stone-fenced fields and the parish assembly.

Poetry and Pictures — Author Howard Nemerov and Photographer John Clement

Themes of change upon the landscape mixed with agrarian wonder characterized many poems by Pulitzer Prize winning author Howard Nemerov (1920-1991). Although the New York native spent much of his life in academia, he traveled widely through the New England countryside and with publication of his 1955 collection The Salt Garden, Nemerov’s refined, contemplative verse took on more practical tones in defense of the land. Poems like “Midsummer’s Day” and “The Winter Lightning” reflect upon the timelessness of the seasons and consider a consilience with humanity’s ephemeral presence. In “A Harvest Home” an abandoned vehicle stands in a recently harvested field (“So hot and mute the human will / As though the angry wheel stood still / That hub and spoke and iron rim”), while marvelous creatures of the wing appear throughout the day—jays “proclaim” dawn, afternoon crows “arise and shake their heavy wings,” and an owl “complains in darkness.”

John Clement, Bringing in the Sheaves (2005), John Clement Gallery

Color images of “Northwest Drylands” photographer John Clement like May Grain Abound, Wheat Moon, and Bringing in the Sheaves show the influence of two prominent American watercolor artists whose works he has closely studied since starting his career in the 1970s—Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth. Although the substantial portion of Homer’s paintings depict realistic Eastern landscapes and ocean scenes, Impressionistic views like Schooner at Sunset captured Clement’s imagination just as they inspired a generation of modern American artists like Wyeth and his father, Nathaniel. Clement studied the watercolors of the younger Wyeth and learned that the drier Pennsylvania prairie and underlying abstractions in paintings like Christina’s World held lessons in originality for photography of the arid Columbia Plateau grainlands.  Clement’s unpeopled landscapes, which earned him induction into the Professional Photographers of America International Hall of Fame, typically feature evidence of humanity’s presence—barns and fences, retired farm machinery, and fields of maturing grain. His ideas about the “saturating luminosity” of dawn and dusk suggest affinity with the nineteenth century American Luminists and pioneers of twentieth century color photography whose detailed agrarian views beneath soft, hazy skies engender feelings of tranquility and spiritual appreciation.