Determining and Affirming Values of Care

Cultural tensions rise with proliferating perils of climate change, global food security needs, and concern about impacts on soil biomes and wildlife. Establishing balance involves mediation of the ancient urges for veneration and exploitation, and consideration of technocratic limits and trade-offs in agricultural improvement. Soil scientists estimate that no-till chemical intensive farming has reduced erosion on American farms by 40% while also creating conditions for the emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds. Yet less tillage in such systems reduces American diesel consumption by two-thirds for some 280 million gallons of annual savings. For Promethian bioentrepreneurs CRISPR gene modification and related technologies offer prospect of crop improvement although prominent biologists acknowledge that cellular arrangements can be altered in ways that are poorly understood. Reengineering life forms raises uneasy questions about the complicated relationships between the natural and unnatural, and theological distinctions between obeying God and playing God, or between earthly tenancy and proprietorship. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman likened the complexities of modern science to a cosmic chess game at which we are only observers with limited capacity to predict outcomes regardless of worthy intentions.

Wendell Berry explores these tensions and offers a fertile field of practical recommendations for how anyone can apply the useful habits of memory, attention, and reverence. He recognizes the primacy of earth care to support all other human endeavors, and likens this to holy service: “The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it…. It keeps the past, not as history or memory, but as richness, new possibility.” In this sense the urgent partisanship in political and economic affairs becomes secondary to stewardship of land and life, and the function of healthy community for enduring fulfillment.

Whether on a Midwest farm or in a Chicago high-rise, one may live with fidelity to place by learning and practicing domestic arts and community building. Family care and homemaking need not require moving “back to the land,” though new paradigms for remote working are faciliating rural residency. In any setting folks can summon moral courage to eat together, shop locally to support practicioners of local crafts, connect young people to worthwhile endeavors, and affirm the values of environmental care. Policies and practice of self-reliance and promotion of the common good that characterized republicanism in the ancient world are relevant more than ever in an era of threatened landscapes, endangered species, and marginalized labor. Ethicist Julie Crouse characterizes Berry’s ongoing literary conversation about these matters as a “sacred harvest” for renewing the common good by promotion of connections among people, landscapes, and spirituality. In the context of farm work for participation in the market economy, or mental work for healthy imagination and discernment, Berry calls the external standard of such endeavors the “Great Economy,” or the “Kingdom of God.” The goal is to promote abiding, abundant harvests and the longterm wellbeing of individuals in community. In spite of dreams of space colonization, exploration of extraterrestial neighbors near and far has shown that, in the words of science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, “There is no Planet B.”

Berry has explored ideas of earth care most fully in his novels and short stories about the Coulter, Catlett, Branch, and other families. They dwell together in imaginary Port William, for which the author’s native Port Royal, Kentucky, serves as a touchstone. The place is not a utopian metaphor as its residents navigate with failure and success through cross-currents of old ways and modernity’s encroachments and benefits. In “That Distant Land” (1965), a rural neighborhood crew gathers for tobacco harvest in the sweltering August heat, and Berry casts a scene that resembles field laborers of ancient times: “They dove into the work, maintaining the same pressing rhythm from one end of the row to the other, and yet they worked well, as smoothly and precisely as dancers. To see them moving side by side against the standing crop, leaving it fallen, the field changed, behind them, was maybe like watching Homeric soldiers going into battle. It was momentous and beautiful and touchingly mortal.” The classical allusion is not incidental. In “The Agrarian Standard” (2002), Berry invokes lines from Virgil’s Fourth Georgic about “an old Cilician” who cares for a small plot of land that produces abundantly because of an ethic “rooted in mystery and sanctity” that values giving back to the health of the soil—an affectionate agarian stewardship for the sake of present and unborn generations.

Meaning-making in classical thought came through an honorable paideia of civic engagement and reflection. Intellect detached from action risks loss, and empathy apart from action is purposeless. Apparent in literature and art from Virgil and Horace to British Georgics, French Rustics, and Russian Itinerants, a holistic life of labor—such as Port Royal harvesting, craft,  and community, promotes personal as well as cooperative wellbeing. A related education grounded in distinctly local connectedness through stories and art, mealtime fellowship and field study offers prospect of cultural renewal.

“Ancient Prayers” — Discing, Planting, Cutting

Contemporary agrarian art and literature offer insightful if variable perspectives on the transformation of rural landscapes and ways of country life. Stories and paintings can be elegiac and abstract as well as hopeful, with expressions of agrarian renewal evident in newfound appreciation for regional heritage and stewardship of the land. These considerations juxtapose values related to the natural world with those of private development and global capitalism. There is little to regret about archaic rural prejudices, grinding aspects of exhaustive dawn to dusk farm labor, and highly erosive tillage practices that once characterized areas like the Palouse. Small town redevelopment efforts are examining in new ways how local stories, specialty crops, and other resources might be shared to better contend with shifting labor patterns and demographic change. Harvest bees and church benefits still aid neighbors in times of special need. At the same time the annual harvest experience requires seasonal urgency, and the instinct for necessary provision unites humanity worldwide through rituals of planting and harvesting and thanksgiving.

Reflecting on contemporary agrarian experience, my longtime friend and novelist Bruce Holbert observes that in places like the Palouse, “God is in the details—turning a wrench, discing the summer fallow, spraying and rod-weeding, planting and cutting.” He considers these to be prayers “of the ancient sort, the ones you offer not for an answer as much as to be heard. Their reward is the opportunity to perform similar acts tomorrow and the next day. Their faith is not invested in an end; it is the opposite, a prayer to continue and in it is a kind of patience with the fates that few outside this place share.” The inhabitants of Holbert’s stories are not portrayed to explore the classic American theme of personal freedom amidst the conformist mainstream. Instead, they seem to take for granted a life of mystery and misery amidst economic hardship and the vagaries of nature, and speak perceptively from deep within as they move about in clouds of uncertainty. Holbert explores the abiding toil and periodic terrors of country life in Hour of Lead (2014), winner of the Washington State Book Award for Fiction, and in other novels and writings. His short story “Ordinary Days,” in which the Mason Hills are cast for the Palouse, features an exploration of rural change and meaning-making.

Nostalgia for some halcyon past contributes to the popularity of rural art but tempered with consideration of what has been lost and what has been gained. These contrasting themes are considerably explored in contemporary photographic art and are the special interest of Pacific Northwesterner John Clement and Don Kirby of Santa Fe. Ambivalent considerations about such trends are expressed in “Palouse” by Lewiston, Idaho, poet William Johnson:

There is always an empty house

by the road at the edge of town,

its windows whiskered with lilac

and letting in rain. Nearby,

a barn drags itself home,

and in May, daffodils trim the yard

against an ocean of wheat

that rolls in on a slow inexorable tide.

The stark, mysterious black-and-white photography of Kirby’s Wheatcountry (2001) shows unpeopled agrarian vistas from Texas to Washington. Essayist Richard Manning writes of the contrast between the imaginative West of the national consciousness—reshaped since settlement and largely uninhabited, and landscapes tended by farmers who contend with the vagaries of weather and maneuver through an array of government programs to provision the masses. Kirby’s monochromatic views bear the titles of nearby locations scarcely known or seen by outsiders, but that conjure memory and meaning to locals. His Palouse series includes Diamond and Lancaster (places where farmers came from miles around to procure seed wheat), Harrington and Pomeroy (home to area flour mills), and the Snake River port of Central Ferry, which remains one of the Northwest’s largest grain exporting terminals.

Having grown up in the vicinity, I immediately recognized Kirby’s “Wheatfield III, Repp Road, Endicott, Washington,” which shows a prodigious stand of ripening wheat cloaking an enormous swirl of sloping summer-fallow beneath a stack of cumulus clouds. The Repp family had the only pool for miles around before the town built one in the 1960s, so kindly taught a generation of us how to swim. The matriarch of the clan is still active at age 104 and her nephew Mike Lowry—our state’s twentieth governor who contributed to normalized US-Russia relations in the 1990s, surely helped harvest that very hill. Trends in the depopulation of the countryside are found throughout the nation, even as affordability of houses in small towns has helped keep some populated with newcomers to sustain local schools, churches, and clubs. Shrinking numbers of farmers remain as vital carriers of intimate knowledge about the land and growing conditions, and of practical skills that keep bringing forth the crops.

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.”

Harvests Then and Now

Stories and paintings that relate a range of interpretations regarding contemporary and future existence add voice and visibility to diverse perspectives on land use. Consolidation of family farms in recent decades into larger corporate enterprises and the commodification of grain—William Cronon’s “transmutation of one of humanity’s oldest foods,” warrant high regard for stewardship of the land. Reinvigoration of Americans’ deep-seeded social memory and cultural capacity can guide landowners and public officials who contend with environmental challenges and finite production acreage. When Conrad Blumenschein told me in the 1970s about leaving Russia for America just before the outbreak of World War I, ten families lived on a dozen farms of about 320 acres each scattered along the road between my hometown of Endicott and the Palouse River some seven miles to the north. (The other two landowners lived in town.) Numbering some fifty people, most attended one of two Lutheran churches in the area—the Missouri Synod in the country, and the Ohio in town, and two country schools enrolled the area’s children through the eighth grade. Many of these families were related to each other, and regularly gathered for summer harvest labors, fall butchering bees, and various ceremonies and celebrations.

A half-century later when I began interviewing first generation immigrant elders like Conrad Blumenschein and Mary Morasch, the number of farms had fallen to nine with some consolidation of property holdings among the seven families of thirty-two individuals who remained. The size of area farms had increased to an average of 550 acres, and both country schools had consolidated with the larger town district that offered instruction through grade twelve. My father was able to complete our month-long harvest on about that much acreage by keeping in good repair the old tractor and pull-combine that had teamed up for at least a quarter-century to make the annual run. Based on a photograph from the time, family member Rob Smith captured the scene in the watercolor A 3L-160 Harvest, c. 1970 (2012, named for the equipment model numbers). The price of a bushel of wheat rarely rose to $2 from 1960 to 1973, when a controversial U. S. trade deal to supply the Soviet Union with grain boosted prices to as much as $6.25. The long-sought optimism felt by growers ushered in a year of equipment upgrades and land purchases encouraged by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz’s 1973 “get big or get out” slogan. Favorable Russian harvests the following year coupled with reduced federal subsidies contributed to America’s 1970s “farm crisis” followed by years of rural economic stagnation.

The year of Butz’s remarks was coincident with publication of British-German environmental economist E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (1973). The contrast in perspectives regarding the wellbeing of farmers could not have been starker. Schumacher (1911-1977) considered federal promotion of larger production acreages and related needs for more expensive equipment to be a reckless hubris of domination. Inspired by thinkers like Tolstoy and Gandhi, Schumacher understood the forces of modernity to be complex but fueled by a blinkered preoccupation with short-term solutions that ignore ancient ways of sustainable living. He invoked a sovereignty of reason to advocate for enterprising farmers who valued the longstanding natural and social commons that provided economic benefits well worth protecting. Without such public policies vast numbers of younger farmer families would be driven from the countryside. And so they have been. (Ohio farmer-essayist Gene Logsdon, author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse [2007], responded to Butz’s admonition with advice on how to, “Get small and stay in.”)

Palouse Harvesttime Smoky Sunset and Pine City Grain Elevator Firestorm Aftermath (2020)

Columbia Heritage Photographs

In the fifty years that has now passed since my 1960s high school FFA speech on world hunger, global population has increased by four billion and the world has consumed some 1.3 trillion barrels of oil. (Approximately one and a half trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide have been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.) The result has been a warming of the earth’s surface by 0.6 degrees C. and the disappearance of a million square miles of spring snowpack in the northern hemisphere. The pace of change has led to devastating impacts on biodiversity and prospect of neo-Malthusian food security crises. Regional trends can only be discerned over time but already some disturbing patterns are evident. Since 2020 annual precipitation has declined across the Columbia Plateau and in the summer of that year the only firestorm in living memory made national headlines when it devastated the Palouse hamlets of Malden of Pine City and destroyed vast areas of standing grain. Notable modern writers like James Rebanks, author of Pastoral Song: A Writer’s Journey (2021), reflect upon the impact of climate change upon agriculture and natural systems in passionate and informed prose as compelling as Rachel Carson. The urgent planetary imperative is to live within the biosphere’s means through new economies and methods of sustainable production. 

My boyhood rural neighborhood of several thousand acres that had been home to about fifty souls in 1900 is comprised today of just eight farms. All but one are parts of larger family-owned operations whose members also own or lease other cropland in the area. (The average Palouse Country farm size in 2020 was approximately 1200 acres.) Only four households are located on the same seven-mile stretch that supported those ten families a century ago, and today are populated by just five adults whose grown children live elsewhere. In between these habitations one can now see lonely clusters of dying locust trees, broken fences, and the rusted equipment of abandoned farmsteads. The trend has brought debilitating effects on rural communities that contend with closures of local stores, banks, and public service by reaffirming pioneer values of hard work, integrity, and teamwork.

The broader demographic impacts on rural life and labor are consistent with trends over the past two centuries that have changed the nature and necessity of worker communities. In 1840s pre-industrial America, for example, a farmer could produce an acre of hand-broadcasted wheat yielding about twenty bushels from approximately fifty hours of annual work using simple implements like a single-shear plow and scythe. (Soil exhaustion and other factors in early nineteenth-century France and Germany contributed to average yields of less than half that amount, or about ten bushels per acre; yields on unmanured fields in England were in the range of fifteen. Continental Europeans commonly faced substantial crop failure and famine at least once every ten years.) A single day’s harvest by an able-bodied reaper could cover up to one acre. By 1900 an American farmer equipped with horse-pulled gang plow, harrow, and mechanical drill still produced about twenty bushels from an acre but in some ten hours. An experienced crew operating a reaper-binder and steam-powered thresher at that time could cut about forty-five acres a day for some 1,200 bushels (31 tons) of grain. A farmer in 1940 using a gas-powered tractor, three-bottom plow, and combine with 12-foot header further reduced annual per acre labor to 3.5 hours.

Harvests Yesterday and Today—Different Times, Identical Location

Lautenschlager & Poffenroth (1911) and Klaveano Brothers Threshing Outfits (2019)

Four miles north of Endicott, Washington

 Dryland grain yields increased three-fold nationally during the twentieth century and Palouse Country yields of eighty bushels per acre are common today along with diesel-powered, satellite-guided equipment that make crop rows of linear perfection. High-capacity combines now cost as much as a million dollars and feature sidehill leveling, cruise control, and electronic monitoring of threshing functions that automatically adjust to crop load. Modern farmers invest scarcely fifty minutes in total annual per-acre labor, and can harvest three hundred acres in a ten-hour day with a combine header forty feet wide to yield some 30,000 bushels (900 tons) of wheat, or 72,000 bushels of corn. Sickles endure. Modern versions feature four-inch-wide chromed, serrated triangular sections arranged toothlike in a row that runs the length of the header and moves back and forth at lightning speed. Such mechanical marvels represent the output of a thousand reapers and twice as many binders laboring in harvest fields before the Industrial Revolution. (Substantial numbers of others were tasked with carting unthreshed stalks to barns, flailing grain, tending livestock, and other related tasks.) A phalanx of these modern behemoths cruising through a field of golden grain evokes appreciation for techno-mechanical ingenuity, and still stirs ancient feelings of gratitude for agrarian bounty. Dayton watercolorist Paul Strohbehn’s dramatic Sorghum Hollow Gold (2018) shows three immense John Deere Titan combines rising from a Palouse hillside chaff cloud.

Among the most recent developments in farm mechanization is the application of autonomous driving capabilities to tractors and combines. Technology has also transformed bulk grain handling facilities at strategically located places like Endicott and other locations along railroads and river ports. Endicott was platted in 1882 by the Oregon Improvement Company, a subsidiary of the Northern Pacific Railroad, on its Columbia & Palouse branch line. This route tapped the fertile grain district along a route from the main NPRR transcontinental line at Palouse Junction (present Connell, Washington) eastward to Endicott, Colfax, and eventually Pullman and Moscow. An extensive network of feeder lines later fanned across the northern and southern Palouse to other farming communities.

Columbia & Palouse Railroad Grain Storage Flathouses, Endicott, Washington (c. 1910)

Northwest Grain Growers High-Capacity Unit Train Loading Facility, Endicott (2022)

With the recent merger of the local Endicott-St. John grain storage cooperative with Walla Walla and other groups to form Northwest Grain Growers, the new entity constructed a storage and 110-car unit train loading facility in Endicott since the line there had been constructed with heavier rail weight capacity. The project called for construction of seven immense steel silos located to bring total capacity there to approximately 3,100,000 bushels. The new facility, which became operational in 2020, is designed for rapid one-day loading of the trains which are capable of holding 100 tons of grain per car for a total capacity of 420,000 bushels. Grain is trucked from farms and other elevators for rail shipment and barging along the lower Columbia River to Portland and Kalama for distribution worldwide.

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).