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.

Heartland, KareLift, and Harvest Hope

I’ve always enjoyed that closing scene in the Whoopie Goldberg comedy movie Sister Act when Pope John Paul II visits the San Francisco convent where lounge singer Delores-turned Sister Mary Clarence directs the St. Katherine’s Choir in a stirring rendition of “I Love Him.” The story is fictitious of course but the pope did make an extended visit to the U. S. where he made explicit reference to charitable obligations to the poor. This was during his unprecedented trip to the American heartland in 1979 that was hosted by the Diocese of Des Moines, Iowa, and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. John Paul celebrated an open-air Mass where a vast crowd of some 300,000—the largest in Iowa history, had assembled on a broad hillside at Urbandale, Iowa’s Living History Farms.

Pope John Paul II at Urbandale Living History Farms (1979)

Local St. Mary’s parishioner Joseph Hays had sent a hand-written letter to the Pope inviting him to witness the church’s “Community in the Heartland” ministry of rural study and outreach. The pontiff’s decision to visit the Iowa countryside led to weeks of preparation by members who broke from customary harvest routines to host the special ecumenical event. Surrounded by area church and civic leaders, the pope led the service from a massive platform fashioned of white oak from a century-old corn crib. The temporary sanctuary was draped with an enormous quilted banner designed by Fr. John Buscemi of Madison, Wisconsin showing a cross with four colorful contoured field patterns symbolizing the seasons. From this peculiar setting, Pope John Paul II delivered a homily urging his hearers “in the middle of the bountiful fields at harvest time” to embrace “three attitudes… for rural life”—humble gratitude, land stewardship, and generosity toward the poor.

 In an address ten years later commemorating the church’s “Declaration Nostra Aetate” regarding mutual respect and cooperation among world religions, John Paul II mentioned the notable contributions of American Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) to interfaith dialogue. A longtime resident of Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky, Merton also fostered fellowship with prominent Asian and Native American spiritual leaders and formulated a corpus of ecological writings permeated with contemplative appreciation of nature and agrarian endeavor. In his poem “Trappists, Working” (1942), farming is likened to a liturgy of worship amidst outdoor sanctuaries of divinely bestowed sun, wind, and “walls of wheat.” “Landscape: Wheatfields” (c. 1950) likens faithful soldiers of the faith to shocks of grain sheaves awaiting transport in holy service of others.

American farmers participated more directly in domestic gleaning programs in the 1980s as well as in similar global aid projects. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, a group of Pacific Northwest growers formed WestWind Ministries in 1991 in response to appeals from newly independent Russian leaders to provide food and medical assistance to schools and orphanages in the Russian Far East. A coordinated “Operation Karelift” effort involving the National Association of Wheat Growers, Washington-Idaho Pea & Lentil Association, and The McGregor Company of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon led to delivery of over a thousand tons of aid to areas in greatest need. Farmers hauled truckloads of wheat for processing into flour while Northwest barley, lentils, and beans were combined into nutritious soup mixes.

Sara Quinn, We’ll Still Be Here When This Is Over Cover Montage

“The colors of their flag mirror the blue skies and their fields of wheat and sunflowers. …I hope one day, the Ukrainian farmers will be able to return to their fields.”

Tumbleweird 7:4 (April 2022) / Courtesy of the Artist

When Russian President Boris Yeltsin made an unprecedented visit to Seattle in September 1994 to report on newly normalized relations between the two countries, he cited “this help in our hour of need” in the context of the food campaign as a key factor in his historic decision. Yeltsin’s gala reception was hosted by Washington Governor Mike Lowry, himself a native of the Palouse Country hamlet of Endicott, Washington, where his father, Robert, had managed the local grain grower cooperative in the 1950s. Lowry’s dedication to humanitarian causes and migrant farm worker causes was the subject of many tributes following his passing in 2017. Officiant Kacey Hahn of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Renton opened the late governor’s memorial with explicit reference to moral responsibility from Leviticus 23:22: “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner.” With the outbreak of war of Ukraine in February 2022, many of the original KareLift partners joined with other groups through “Operation Harvest Hope” raise funds and send Northwest commodities to help feed the several million refugees who fled the conflict to safe havens throughout Europe. The war between Russia and Ukraine—nations that provide nearly one-fifth of world grain exports, destabilized global wheat markets and put at significant risk the wellbeing of millions living in the Middle East and North Africa who depend on imports and subsidized bread.

Kansas farmer-philosopher Oren Long has contributed for decades to agrarian periodicals and his local paper, the Valley Falls Vindicator, to offer insight on topics ranging from food security and social unrest to seed rates and meaning in art. In a 1983 New Farm article, Long underscores the vital understanding that rural experience is at once terrestrial and transcendent. “My farm is my refuge from the deception and hopelessness that haunts this intrusive commercial world. …I am an inseparable part of a great biological scheme of things and the greater contribution toward the complexity and harmony of that scheme, the greater will be the beauty of my world and the greater my significance to it.” In this way rural experience is understood to impart beauty to life in ways long expressed by agrarian painters and writers who have shown the abiding value of sowing, reaping, and other “cooperative arts” practiced with attention to land care and the less fortunate.

Mid-Columbia Symphony and Mastersingers Ukraine Benefit Concert, Kennewick, Washington (March 26, 2022)

Johannes Brahms, A German Requiem to Words of Holy Scripture, Op. 45

Sie gehen hin und weinen / und tragen edlen Samen, / und kommen mit Freuden / und bringen ihre Garben.

(They go forth and weep, / bearing precious seed, / and come with joy / bearing their sheaves.—Psalm 126:5-6)

Of Hackles and Scutching— Old World Flax for New World Linen

My granddaughters explaining flax and linen production to George Washington
Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

Last week our three granddaughters and their parents had the exciting opportunity to visit Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. The experience gave them an chance to dine at restaurants that serve from menus that would have been familiar to 18th century America visitors to the colony’s capital and immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of this special place. Several years ago our Palouse Colony Farm supplied Williamsburg’s Great Hope Plantation with the seed of grains like Red May and Virginia White that are known to have been grown in that region during the colonial period, and farmer Ed Schultz kindly hosted our family members for their recent visit. The farm was in the midst of flax harvest so visitors could participate in the kind of “living history” for which Williamsburg is famous, and their time included a memorable conversation with George Washington who surprised them with his extensive knowledge of his extensive Mt. Vernon farming operation.   

The girls had great fun splitting the fibrous plants in the first stage of turning flax into linen, and they learned some new vocabulary about the process. Their stories reminded me of interviews I had done years ago with community elders who had grown up on the Volga and knew this very work first-hand. Diminutive, cheery Mary Morasch and Mollie Bafus told of Old Country flax and hemp harvests and the laborious process of transforming the dried stalks into beautiful silvery-brown thread, yarn, and fabric.

These spring-sown crops were pulled out by the roots, tied into small bundles, and first broken down by either dew or soak retting. After drying workers then used a wooden “breaker” to crush the outer, brittle layer for separation with knives from the strands of soft inner bast that extend into the roots. After this peeling process (scutching) the threads were pulled through combs of thin, sharp prongs (hackling) to clean, split, and straighten the fibers. The long, hair-like threads were then spun and woven into three grades of fabric that was patiently boiled and sun-bleached to made into linen tablecloths and bedspreads, heavier work clothes, and coarse material for tents and sacks.

Puget Sound Flax Harvest (c. 1900)
Columbia Heritage Collection

In the 1890s Northwest farmers began experimenting with flax cultivation using plants and techniques introduced from Russia, Belgium, and Holland. Russian Riga and White Blossom Dutch were the most widely cultivated American varieties with vast acreages raised along Puget Sound and in the Willamette Valley. Substantial quantities were exported to Ireland and Scotland. While wistful at memories of life in the Old Country, our immigrant elders we knew did not paint a pastoral idyll. They had willingly left and were grateful to have come to America and Canada.

Volga German speech was heavily seasoned with Russian loanwords, especially in areas like our ancestral village that were located on the periphery of the colonial enclave and closer to ethnic Slavic settlements. Our immigrant elders’ word for granary, ambar, was from a Russian peasant term for barn, ambary, that is probably Persian and came to southern Russia through the region’s Tatar tribes. Like inhabitants of many rural communities, the Volga Germans were very clannish and residents of our people’s village divided it into the Galmucka and Totten sections. These names were derived from the native Buddhist Kalmyk and Muslim Tatar tribes.

Mary Morasch identified two plants used for processing into fabric—Höneft and Fabel, possibly localized Volga German terms for hemp and flax. Dominant Russian flax varieties of the era were Slanets (dew-retted) and Motchenets (water-retted). Lower Volga River production of colorful Sarpinka gingham from cotton was a thriving business originally established in the late 1700s by colonists from Sarepta near the Sarpa River. On Northwest American flax production origins, see A. W. Thornton, European System of Flax Culture Americanized and Adapted to Local Conditions of U. S. A., c. 1917.

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).

“Modern US Wheat Has Roots in Ukraine” - My Interview With NPR's The World

I (Richard) was recently contacted by Bianca Hillier from National Public Radio’s PRI The World national radio program. Given the current food crisis stemming from the conflict in Ukraine, she asked to interview me regarding our work with heritage grains that have ancestral ties to that region. Our conversation ended up lasting over forty-five minutes as we covered a range of related topics, including our recent charitable work in Ukraine. For time’s sake, she could not include our full discussion in the show’s finalized segment (which you can listen to here). However, I wanted to share more of my comments from our conversation here in case it would be of further interest to any of our readers.

As further background, The World is public radio’s longest-running daily global news program. Their goal is to engage domestic US audiences with international affairs through human-centered journalism that consistently connects the global to the local and builds empathy for people around the world. 

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Interview with Dr. Richard Scheuerman; Richland, Washington
Bianca Hillier, The World; Broadcast June 20, 2022

The US is a major exporter of wheat around the world. But according to experts, most modern US wheat can be traced back to Turkey Red Wheat, which Mennonites brought from present-day Ukraine in the late 1800s. The World's Bianca Hillier reports.

NPR: Tell us a little about your background and where you live.
Richard Scheuerman: My wife, Lois, and I reside here in the Tri-Cities of Washington State which is located in a region of remarkable agricultural bounty known as the Columbia Plateau. We were raised in the rolling hills of Eastern Washington’s scenic Palouse Country where our family farm was located between the rural communities of Endicott and St. John. Among the earliest immigrants to the area were Germans from southwestern Russia who had settled in the Volga region under Empress Catherine the Great in the late 1700s, while others established farming colonies in the Ukraine’s Black Sea region in the early 1800s under Catherine’s grandson, Tsar Alexander I. My great-grandparents immigrated from Russia to Kansas in 1888 and continued on to the Palouse in 1891. They first resided in what our elders called the “Palouse Colony” which was a small agrarian commune along the Palouse River where today we operate Palouse Colony Farm.

We raise non-hybridized landrace “heritage” grains for artisan baking and craft brewing used at places like Ethos Bakery and Stone Mill in Richland and The Grain Shed in Spokane. We began the work of identifying and propagating “Palouse Heritage” varieties in 2014 with Stephen Jones, Steve Lyon, and Kevin Murphy of Washington State University and Alex McGregor of the McGregor Company, and established demonstration plots at our farm and at the Franklin County Museum in Pasco. The community of Connell in central Franklin County was first called “Palouse Junction” for its strategic location as an important Northern Pacific Railroad grain terminal. Numerous Germans from Russia and Ukraine settled in that vicinity as well, and the area figures prominently in author Zane Grey’s 1919 best-seller The Desert of Wheat in which Turkey Red might well be called a principal character.

NPR: How did you come to be interested in Russian and Ukrainian agriculture?
Richard: When you’re raised in rural communities many of your nearest neighbors and best friends are elders in their 80s and 90s! I came to enjoy visiting with first generation immigrants who told captivating stories about life in the Old Country—riding camels, encounters with the peaceful nomadic peoples of the steppes, raids by roving bandits, and the beauty and bounty of the native grasslands which their ancestors transformed into one of the world’s breadbaskets. I gathered many of their tales and later published them as books of history and short stories in works like Hardship to Homeland and Harvest Heritage.

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the late 1980s, I traveled to Russia and Ukraine over a dozen times to assist in establishing a series of student and faculty exchanges between schools of higher education there and in the US. During those years I also visited the ancestral villages of my ancestors and arranged with various archives to duplicate about 10,000 pages of original source material related to various aspects of Volga German and Black Sea settlement. Having been raised on a farm where my elders shared many stories of Old Country rural traditions I had special interest in their accounts of farm life.

NPR: How have grains from southeastern Europe influenced American agriculture and culinary history?
Richard: Well it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that before pioneering Midwestern immigrant farmers started raising “Turkey Red” bread wheat in the 1870s that there was no bread such as we know it today made in America. Of course folks were baking breads since early colonial times, but it was made from soft white and red “Lammas” wheats from the British Isles and western Europe that is better suited to flatbreads, scones, biscuits, pancakes, and the like. Production of many of these varieties like White “Virginia May” Lammas, which we have worked to revive and was used to make Northwest Indian frybread, were devastated in the 1770s by Hessian fly infestations. So our early “Founding Farmer” families like Washington, Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams—Abigail supervised most of the farm work—and others devoted considerable attention to acquiring new grain varieties.

Among those they introduced by the 1790s was semihard Red Mediterranean, and Red Fife in the 1840s to Canada which was actually a bread grain from the western Ukraine district of Galicia. But it was not until German Mennonites from the Ukraine settled in central Kansas in the 1870s that one of their leaders, Bernard Warkentin, began raising Turkey Red. It was a hard red bread grain native to the Crimea, and its seeds began an agricultural and culinary revolution in the US in figurative and literal terms.   

NPR: How was Turkey Red different from other grains raised in the US?
Richard: Turkey Red was America’s first true hard red bread wheat. That is, the kernels possess gluten proteins with a cross-hatch molecular structure that traps gases produced by yeast that makes bread dough rise. Not only that but the nutritionally dense inner endosperm and fiber make for an incredibly delicious loaf that has a naturally sweet, nutty flavor. Many farm families safeguarded their Turkey Red for personal use and sold other modern varieties they raised. Turkey Red was hard on early milling equipment, but once folks found out how wonderful the bread tasted they wanted more. And concurrent with production of Turkey Red was the advent of improved hammer-milling technology that produced a better quality of flour. Of the many modern varieties of bread grains raised throughout North America, virtually all can trace their lineage back to the Turkey Red native to Ukraine.

Americans tend to like their bread lighter in color than other places where people routinely dine on whole grain brown breads, and Americans tend to prefer clear brews when various styles throughout the world are cloudy. A premium is paid today for hybridized hard white bread wheats but in extremely rare cases Mother Nature does create a naturally occurring hard white wheat so you can have a high fiber, light colored loaf. Over a century ago a USDA grain explorer was traipsing across Persia—present Iraq, and found a grain vendor in a bazaar who was said to have wheat from the Garden of Eden. I suspect the American politely smiled while gathering his sample and routinely sent it back home with others he had gathered. But the lab analysis later reported the variety was a rare hard white landrace, so we have been increasing this Amber Eden for the past couple years and bakers praise its quality.

NPR: What are your thoughts about the situation in Ukraine today?
Richard: The news of the war is deeply disturbing and I hope Americans will stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine for freedom’s cause. During our Revolutionary War notable help came from abroad in terms of material aid as well as the heroic service of foreigners. French commander Marquis de Lafayette and the Prussian general Baron von Steuben stood shoulder to shoulder with General Washington during the years of our struggle for independence. Perhaps lesser known but of special significance was the remarkable service of Polish officer Thaddeus Kosciuszko who helped win victory for the Continentals at the Battle of Saratoga which is considered the turning point of the war. He later returned to Europe and fought against autocratic rule in his native land as well as in Ukraine.

My special interest has been in joining with others to promote the work of A Family for Every Orphan (AFFEO) to provide safe havens for Ukraine’s most vulnerable children. AFFEO also provides food for those in need through its Operation Harvest Hope bakeries in Ukraine. Until the tragic outbreak of the war, no nation on earth had done more to reduce orphanhood than Ukraine through a remarkable collaborative of churches, government child protection agencies, and social service organizations. I hope work continues for these vital efforts in the land that has given so much to provision others throughout the world. 

Daily Bread, Liberty, and the Orphans of Ukraine

Ethos Stone Mill Ukrainian Grain Loaves
Richland, Washington

If you’ve ever eaten a slice of bread you can thank Ukraine. That’s not an exaggeration. The flavorful grains that transformed the North American prairies during the nineteenth century into a continental breadbasket were varieties native to Ukraine’s famed Black Earth districts of Crimea and Galicia.  To be sure, Americans had previously consumed something called bread, but virtually all colonial and early American wheats were soft white and red varieties that made exceedingly dense loaves and are used today for scones, biscuits, and pancakes. The pedigree of most any modern hard kernel bread wheat can be traced back to famous “Turkey Red” and “Scotch Fife” that actually have nothing to do with Turkey or Scotland. Through happenstance of pioneer delivery and cartographic misunderstanding, Ukraine’s proper claim as historic and contemporary provisioner to the world is often overlooked.

Putin’s campaign to annex substantial portions of its peaceful southern neighbor is inflicting trauma upon its residents on a scale unprecedented since World War II in a twisted quest to restore some semblance of great power status. Today Ukraine’s annual production of some thirty million tons of wheat accounts for 12% of the global export supply. Together with Russia’s output, annual wheat production of the two countries exceeds the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Australia combined and represents one-third of world wheat exports. Ukraine is a leading supplier to Moldova, Lebanon, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Indonesia to which deliveries are now at risk. As a result of the present conflict grain prices have soared. Much was made by Kremlin spokesmen before the outbreak of war about the need to reaffirm a broader Slavic cultural solidarity from western influence. But in the wake of Russia’s declining population and moribund economy, Ukraine’s agricultural bounty has surely been an important factor in Putin’s malevolent calculus.

This is not the first time that someone has terrorized the inhabitants of the fertile steppes. Russian demographers have documented how the murderous calamities of Stalin claimed more innocent lives than did Hitler. None was more horrific than the 1932-1933 Holodomor when as many as ten million peasants were starved to death in southern Russia during Stalin’s campaign to expropriate grain for Russia’s industrial cities to the north. No greater genocide has taken place in modern times, and the experience remains a searing legacy among Ukrainians. In 1930 and 1931, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty wrote from the comfort of his Moscow apartment in flattering terms about Kremlin initiatives to modernize the Russian economy. He also pointed out that leaders in the United States and Great Britain had not appreciated Stalin’s genius. Duranty even received a Pulitzer in 1932 for his series on the Bolshevik Revolution which he composed against the backdrop of show trials in Moscow that led to the imprisonment and mass executions of Stalin’s rivals.

Enter essentially unknown but courageous young Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who decided to do more than parrot official accounts of conditions in Ukraine after hearing rumors of catastrophe. At great risk to his own safety, Jones donned the clothes of a Soviet commoner and journeyed by rail to Ukraine in the spring of 1933 where he witnessed unimaginable carnage and reported it to a skeptical world press. Once bustling villages were eerily silent except for the occasional cry of children, imposing church edifices had been boarded up on orders from above by burly militiamen who forbade public worship. Within two years Jones himself would be executed in likely retaliation by the Soviet secret police for daring to write the truth. Since Putin’s rise to power, at least forty-four Russian journalists investigating his doings have been murdered, as have numerous political rivals. The ministries of evangelically minded Russian Orthodox leaders in the spirit of martyred priest Alexander Menn have also been significantly obstructed.

Those of us with ancestral ties to the region recall stories of family elders’ distress that the emerging evidence of evil in the 1930s seemed lost on so many fellow Americans. Our grandparents recalled the feeling of helplessness when they gathered with neighbors after Sunday church services to read the latest news from relatives who remained in Russia. We have kept these yellowed pages all these decades as reminders to never take freedom for granted, to help others in dire straits, and to affirm inconvenient truths. One of our letters from that time reads: To begin with, we send you greetings in the name of the Holy Spirit. I will let you know that we are without parents. Where they are is unknown to us [and] only to God. We think they received the same treatment as others so is very bitter for us children. Will you not take mercy on us because we are lost children and will not be long on this earth. …Please send us help because we are orphans.

Our elders did send help that made all the difference for those who managed against human odds to survive and build a new life in the aftermath of famine, war, and the USSR’s eventual collapse in 1991. I was in Russia numerous times that year and afterward in response to overtures from the Russian Academies of Sciences and Education to establish faculty and student exchanges between universities in Russia and Ukraine and members of the U. S. Consortium of Christian Colleges and Universities. Dozens of these relationships flourished until Putin rose to prominence. Under his oppressive regime such relationships summarily ended as well as the collaborative social services programs they had fostered to address the challenges of foster care and orphanhood in our countries.

Vibrant democratic initiatives and educational exchanges did continue in Ukraine. I traveled to Crimea in the summer of 2010 for meetings on global orphan care and was amazed by the vibrancy of life in the capital city of Simferopol. My gracious hosts were local residents who expressed hope for the future under Ukraine’s nascent democracy. They smiled, talked of prospect for better lives, and enjoyed relationships with Americans and other Europeans. We drove south across the undulating expanse of recently harvested grainlands to the historic Black Sea port of Sevastopol where a double row of massive steel silos glistened alongside ships being loaded for delivery worldwide. Our conversation turned to opportunities for service that would have been impossible before Ukraine’s independence. Now after three decades an unprecedented interfaith consortium of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant church leaders was forming an indigenous “Ukraine Without Orphans” (UWO) movement to find caring homes in-country for Ukraine’s 30,000 adoptable orphans.

The number seemed staggering, but “UWO” was no mere slogan. Sasha, Marina, and my other new friends were seriously committed to a nation without orphans. They found inspiration in a theme verse about seemingly overwhelming odds: “There is a lad here with five barley loaves and two fish, but what are these for so many people?” (John 6:9). If divine provision could feed 5,000 using an anonymous lad’s unselfish offering, why couldn’t a nation without orphans be possible? (And perhaps, they wondered aloud, a “World Without Orphans”?) To this end the UWO consortium soon grew to involve 400 churches of all confessions in Ukraine as well as 110 public and charitable organizations that included a presidentially appointed Commission for Children’s Rights.

As a result of this commitment and as a percentage of its population, no nation on earth has accomplished more to address orphanhood in the last decade than Ukraine. In 2010 Ukrainians adopted 2,247 orphans while 1,202 were adopted internationally, and by 2015 the total number of in-country adoptions since 2010 reached 11,300. By 2021 the number of children eligible for adoption had fallen to 4,920 for a dramatic 83% reduction of adoptable orphans. (In Ukraine as elsewhere, significant numbers of children have been in residential care who have at least one adult who retains parental rights.) UWO leaders pledged to not rest until all such children had been placed in caring homes, and their dedicated efforts attracted the attention of care givers worldwide. Their inspiring example helped launch “Without Orphan” movements elsewhere in Europe as well as in Africa, Asia, and South America, and has also contributed to improved foster care initiatives in the U. S. and Canada.

The tragic aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now threatens to undo the remarkable progress UWO childcare providers have made and has greatly complicated conditions for orphans and vulnerable children. Ukraine’s unfolding national nightmare is also presenting Americans with fundamental choices about civic and moral responsibility given the consequences of our own domestic politics and foreign repercussions. Authoritarian rulers of the past century like Stalin, Hitler, and now Putin have zealously applied the propagandistic “Big Lie” approach to obscure their nefarious intentions. Hitler blamed the Jews, Stalin blamed peasant farmers, and Putin astoundingly is blaming Nazis. Historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny (2017) of cardinal lessons we should have learned from 20th century experience. Number 10 reads: “Believe in Truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” 

We must brace for the fallout of economic dislocation that will test the mettle of any who subscribe to core principles of liberty and justice for all. They aren’t free. Standing in solidarity with Ukrainian freedom fighters will come at a cost. “Give me liberty or give me death!” can be easily thought or shouted, but the events of the past century have abundantly shown that American freedom and prosperity is inextricably linked to the wellbeing of like-minded nations throughout the world. Americans aren’t being asked to put their lives on the line in Ukraine, but we will pay more for a gallon of gas and loaf of that bread with Ukrainian roots.

Both courageous and vainglorious voices have been raised in the drama that is being played out on the world stage these dark days. The courageous promote the general welfare of the community, nation, and world. They have names like Zelensky and Blinken, and those who have been prime movers in the Ukraine Without Orphans movement like Sasha and Marina of A Family for Every Orphan. The people of Ukraine, whose harvests have long been blessed as daily bread for millions throughout the world, now need our support as they face a humanitarian disaster that may well drag on.

Facing invasion from the north in ancient times by powerful aggressor Assyria, the Prophet Isaiah asked how the religious might live out their faith. He answered: “Share your bread with the hungry and provide the wanderer with shelter” (Isaiah 58:7). Patriots young and old of Ukraine who have hosted our visits are putting their lives on the line for faith and freedom. They have shown me up at gatherings by loudly singing from memory all six verses of the Woody Guthrie classic, “This Land Is Your Land” about the “sun come shining” and “wheat fields waving.” They also know the somber refrain sung throughout the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, Gospodi, pomiluy—"Lord have mercy.” Let us pray that it may it be so, and instead of complaint that good hearts here and abroad will help sustain their deliverance.

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Dr. Richard Scheuerman resides in Richland, Washington, and is a founding board member of A Family for Every Orphan, which promotes indigenous adoption in Ukraine and a dozen other countries. A longtime school administrator and professor emeritus of education at Seattle Pacific University, he is also author of Hardship to Homeland: Pacific Northwest Volga Germans, and Harvest Heritage, a history of agriculture and heirloom crops. Please consider a one-time donation to A Family for Every Orphan’s Operation Harvest Hope fund.

Goodness, Grain, and Humankind— Thoughts Concerning Ukraine and Our Nation’s Founders

Cabrini Brothers Plaster Bas-Relief (c. 1910)
After Emmanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851)
Endicott-St. John Middle School; Endicott, Washington

How happy to think to our self when conscious of our deeds, that we started from a principle of rectitude, from conviction of the goodness of the thing [freedom] itself, from motive of the good that will come to humankind.
—Thaddeus Kosciuszko to General O. H. Williams; February 11, 1783

Day after day throughout all twelve years in the stately three-story brick school in rural hometown Endicott, notable figures from America’s past stared down at us from each classroom in the form of substantial bas-relief sculptures. Bearing the incised manufacturer name “Caproni Brothers” of Boston, these substantial plaster works resembled carved marble and spoke to the value placed on public education and art by members of our farming community who built the school in 1911. The three largest Caproni masterpieces hung against a wall of the third floor auditorium and included the famous scene Washington Crossing the Delaware which was painted some seventy years after the event by German-American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816-1868). The painter had returned for a time to his homeland and sought to support the wave of democratic revolts against European monarchies in the late 1840s. Leutze painted several other American Revolutionary War views including Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (1852) which is now held by the Los Angeles County Art Museum.

Notable battles that changed the course of world history were famously fought on fields of grain including Caesar’s defeat of Pompei in 48 BC on Greece’s Thessalian Plain at Pharsalos (Farsala—birthplace of Achilles), and English King Henry’s victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years’ War. That large military engagements took place across vast rural areas is unsurprising and came to be associated with heroic sacrifice and symbolic harvests of souls. The Schuyler Wheatfield scene is especially notable for depicting an incident associated with the 1777 Battle of Saratoga that is considered the turning point of the Revolutionary War.

We learn in school about the nation’s Founders—men and women like Washington and Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, James and Dolly Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and others who pledged their “sacred fortunes” to procure a free if imperfect nation based on democratic values. As part of this effort begun nearly 250 years ago other influential names are also familiar—army heroes Marquis de Lafayette of France, and stern Baron von Steuben of Prussia who became General Washington’s Chief of Staff and helped bolster patriot forces amidst the baleful conditions of Valley Forge. Another formidable if lesser-known foreign officer in freedom’s cause was cavalry general Thaddeus Kosciuszko (ko-choose-ko) who played a leading role in the Continental victory at Saratoga.

Emmanuel Leutz, Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (1852)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Painting at the distance of many decades, Leutze took liberties for his masterpieces of patriotic romanticism and the dramatic view of harried Catherine Schuyler, wife of Continental General Philip Schuyler and in-laws of Alexander Hamilton, combines elements of fact and legend. She is shown clad in red, white, and blue setting fire to a field of wheat on the family’s Hudson River estate presumably in September of 1777 to prevent its harvest by British troops approaching in the distance. The subsequent defeat of British General Burgoyne at the nearby Barber Wheatfield during the Battle of Saratoga in early October is considered the turning point of the American cause. The painting is remarkable not only for its depiction of a female figure in heroic wartime action, but she is shown being assisted by an African-American boy who carries a metal lamp.

Kosciuszko was a Polish nobleman and idealist, whose own privileged position in life contrasted with the democratic values he came to champion in peacetime and war. Commissioned a brigadier general by the Continental Congress and later made a member of the American Philosophical Society through Benjamin Franklin’s support, Kosciuszko nevertheless returned to Europe and helped lead the fight against autocracy in Poland as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the 1790s. Russia with far superior forces under Catherine the Great eventually prevailed against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Turks in order to gain strategic access to the warm water Black Sea ports. Russia emerged victorious in 1792, and two years later Empress Catherine herself initiated the founding of Odessa which soon became Russia’s third largest city. Russia’s roots in Ukraine stretch back much further as Kyiv is considered Russia’s founding capital and flourished in a cultural Golden Age from the 10th to 12th centuries until its devastation in 1240 by the invading Mongols.

To secure her vast newly acquired southlands from such foreign threats, Catherine instituted one of the largest and most diverse settlement campaigns in European history. Substantial numbers of Armenians, Greeks, Italians, and other ethnic groups were directed to Ukraine to live among native Crimean Tatars and Turkic peoples. Beginning in the 1760s Catherine arranged for the relocation of 27,000 peasants from her native Germany to the lower Volga region, and some 50,000 followed until the 1830s to establish Black Sea colonies throughout Ukraine. Many came in the aftermath of Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812 that inspired Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. A century later the prolific Black Sea German colonists needed more land to farm and faced increasing cultural threats from ascendent Slavic influences. Some chose to relocate as their ancestors had done, and many found new homes in America’s fertile farming districts—the Chesapeake Peninsula’s red loam country of Maryland and Delaware, southeastern New York’s “black dirt” area, the vast Midwest’s Great Plains, Pacific Northwest’s Columbia Plateau, and Canada’s prairie provinces. Black Sea German Mennonites brought Crimean “Turkey” Red wheat seed to Kansas in the 1870s which revolutionized American grain production and breadmaking.

Massey-Siemens Family Black Sea German Samovar
(c. 1890)
Palouse Heritage Collection

Those who appreciate this heritage have important reasons to be grateful their ancestors emigrated. European borders closed in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, the Communist Revolution and three-year Russian Civil War followed until 1921, and Stalin’s brutal war on religion and campaign of collectivization led to Ukraine’s catastrophic Holodomor that claimed some eight million lives in the 1920’s and 30’s. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR caused the death of 27 million people during World War II. (American World War II casualties were about one million.) No wonder Timothy Snyder’s excellent 2010 chronicle of this era and place carries the disturbing title Bloodlands.

 Eastern European immigrants and survivors came, and substantially remained, because Americans both new and old found fidelity in the ideas expressed in Kosciuszko’s 1783 letter about “deeds,” “principle,” “conviction,” and “goodness.” These terms may be variously debated today, but they did not have vague meanings to those who wrote or heard them. And while they have been lived out in ways that excluded many since the nation’s founding, they have provided a framework for freedom, security, and economic prosperity unknown on a national scale in previous history. Such core ideas are threatened today because of extremism on both sides of a political continuum that values personal benefit and perceived “rightness” above the common good—an inversion of American First Principles.

To be sure, Jefferson’s expression “pursuit of happiness” is eighteenth-century code talk for private enterprise which forms the basis of modern economic development. But in the same breath he writes of “promoting the general welfare” since he, Kosciuszko, and the Founders understood liberty to be the use of freedom to promote national wellbeing, versus licentiousness as use of freedom for selfish power and gain. The peoples of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus faced a momentous decision in 1991 when in the wake of the USSR’s collapse they voted to declare independence. Much has been written about the litany of events and political vacillations that have ensued since then. May the cause of Kosciuszko yet prevail on both sides of the Atlantic, and peace and prosperity return to the people of Ukraine’s fertile Black Earth grainlands.