Agricultural Researchers Unite! Landrace Grains and the 2018 National Biennial Conference of the U. S. Agricultural Information Network

Agricultural scholars and librarians from across the country converged on Pullman, Washington, last month for the National Biennal Conference of the U. S. Agricultural Information Network. I had been asked last year to serve as guest speaker for one of the sessions and was pleased to accept as a token of my gratitude for the organization’s valued help in completing my book, Harvest Heritage: Agricultural Origins and Heirloom Crops of the Pacific Northwest (WSU Press, 2013). As part of my research for that study I spent an entire day at the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland, during a visit to Washington, D.C. I remember well walking in stifling summer heat from the end of Metro line to this impressive repository of USDA materials and other records on farm history. My trek was well worth it and led me to an array of early 19th century sources on landrace grains and other crops of early America.

Dr. Paul Wester’s Presentation on the National Agricultural Library

My remarks featured a summary of that research and description of the heritage grains we have been raising at Palouse Colony Farm. Many members of the audience were from eastern states so had special interest in learning about the original Colonial White Lammas (Virginia May) wheat and Scots Bere barley that we have restored to production. Demonstration plots can now be seen at the National Arboretum, Colonial Williamsburg’s Great Hopes Plantation, and Mt. Vernon Living History Farm.

My talk at the WSU conference was preceded by an address from Dr. Paul Wester, Director of USDA’s Agricultural Research Service at the National Agricultural Library. He presented an fascinating overview of the USDA’s history including information on its establishment by President Lincoln at a time when he certainly had other things on his mind with the Civil War raging. (The Pullman conference convened on the 156th anniversary of the department’s founding.)

Morrill Hall, Washington State College, Pullman (1895), Named for Justin S. Morrill, Father of the 1862 Land Grant College Act, Drawing by Rob Smith (2012)

Dr. Wester shared that the library’s strategic goals are four-fold: 1) To ensure efficient delivery of USDA programs; 2) feed and cloth the world; 3) strengthen stewardship of private lands through teaching and research; and 4) provide access to a nutritious and secure food supply. We met together after our presentations and he expressed special interest in emerging markets for landrace grains. He also offered to help with transportation to the library on my next visit to D.C.! My thanks to conference organizer Lara Cummings and WSU’s Dawn Butler for facilitating my participation in this informative gathering.

A “Farm to Table” Milestone—The Grain Shed Opens!

After seven years of patient labor begun with extremely limited quantities of rare landrace grain seed, we were thrilled to attend a soft opening of The Grain Shed in Spokane’s South Perry district (1026 E. Newark) on June 9. The event marked the culmination of our vision to complete a heritage grain-based “Farm to Table” market devoted to principles of “flavorful authenticity.” Imagine the rich, warm aroma of artisan breads made from whole grain Crimson Turkey wheat, the progenitor of most all modern bread wheats, accompanied by a glass of Scots Bere ale (“The grain that gave beer its name!”).

Red Letter Day: The Grain Shed Opens

Hat’s off to the remarkable cadre of committed souls whose dream for a place dedicated to serving healthy landrace grain products in an atmosphere of good fellowship was matched by months of careful planning and hard work. Palouse Colony Farm co-founder Don Scheuerman teamed up with Grain Shed co-founders, Joel Williamson, malster-brewer of LINC Foods,  brewer Teddy Benson, and renown Spokane artisan baker Shaun Thompson Duffy of Culture Breads. The result of these innovative endeavors is this first of its kind co-op producer/worker/service model in the region. 

Legendary Spokane Artisan Baker Shawn Thompson Duffy

Grain Shed-Palouse Pint Master Brewers Teddy Benson and Joel Williamson

Shaun designed the bakery’s enormous wood-fired oven where he applies the skills of a culinary artist to transform fresh-milled flour from The Grain Shed’s stone mill into succlulent Old World-style pastries and breads. Among his specialties are whole grain rye Volkornbrot and pain de mie, a soft French sandwich bread. As an indication of The Grain Shed team’s caliber of service, the informal opening was such a hit with locals that they sold out of both specialty loaves and house Scots Bere and Purple Egyptian ales. May the fates smile and allow you to enjoy the unforgettable experience of “flavorful authenticity” on your visit to The Grain Shed. Congratulations Don, Joel, Shaun, and Teddy!

Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition and Agrarianism (Part 2 of 2)

Reconciliation and The Threshing Machine

 Among the World Columbian Exposition’s most magnificent paintings was Russian master Grigoriy Myasoyedov’s monumental Time of Toil—The Reapers, identified at the fair as Harvest-Time. Nearly nine feet wide and covering forty-five square feet of canvas, the expansive painting and gilded wood frame may have been the largest at the exhibition, and appropriately dominated one of the Palace of Fine Arts’ four large halls as a gesture of cultural goodwill from Tsar Nicholas II’s personal collection. One marvels not only at such immense treasures, but at the time, expense, and labor needed for crating and secure global transport. Harvests and other agrarian scenes painted by artists with personal experience in farming like John Linnell and Parisian Albert Gabriel Rigolot (1862-1932), who had instructed Evans and the “Utah Missionaries,” depicted the new order in realistic scenes that were at once natural and humane.

Grigoriy Myasoyedov, Time of Toil—The Reapers (detail, 1887), Wikimedia Commons

Linnell’s Storm at Harvest, which was exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and Rigolot’s The Threshing Machine, painted that same year but not shown in Chicago, both exemplified prospect of an emerging cultural consilience in the aftermath of what agricultural historians term the Second Agricultural Revolution. (The first took place with medieval farmers’ introduction of crop rotations to increase soil fertility and grain yields.) To be sure, the workers in Rigolot’s painting appear too intent on their duties to sing harvest folksongs, which probably could not have been heard above the din of the thresher anyway. But as with the group scenes in the 1870s Harvest Time pictures by William Hahn and William Rogers, they still work together. In Rigolot’s canvas a woman helps to feed a similar stationary thresher, and the team likely eats together, converse throughout the day, and are probably grateful for the mechanical marvel that spares so many weeks of toilsome flailing. The scene is vibrant from the artist’s admirable talent for rendering the soft, hazy effects of summertime heat, and balances a spirit of innovation with the adjacent timbered farmhouse and barn where as many animals are seen as in any Barbizon painting.

Albert Gabriel Rigolot, The Threshing Machine; Loiret (1893), Wikimedia Commons

Similar views are in Albert Kappis’s many German harvest works like Farmyard Threshing Machine (1885) which shows no less than twenty people—men and women feeding the enormous wooden Dreishmaschine while children play among chickens, turkeys, and geese. One can almost hear the whine of pulleys and belts as an elderly man stokes the engine’s fire with a shovelful of coal. The overall wholesomeness of paintings by Linnell, Rigolot, and Kappis reveal a hopeful oeuvre in which agrarian landscapes with agricultural innovations need not represent contradictory values, but complementary ones. Their works also represented an important middle way between the aesthetic tensions of an age that divided critics and commoners into rural and urban, traditional and progressive, mystical and visionary.

Albert Kappis, Farmyard Threshing Machine (1885), Columbia Heritage Collection

 

World’s Fair Journalism and Sculpture             

Popular Iowa journalist and novelist Alice French (1850-1934), who authored many stories under the pen name Octave Thanet, visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 for two “Sketches of American Types” Scribner’s Magazine articles, illustrated by Pennsylvanian A. B. Frost 1851-1928), “The Farmer in the North” (March, 1894) and “The Farmer in the South” (April, 1894). Frost was colorblind which may have enhanced his notable use of grayscale for photorealistic art as seen in A New England Type, his tender Scribner’s depiction of a young girl in a harvest field who appears to deliver a lunch pail to an elderly worker.

French’s approach as a local colorist emphasized rural custom and dialect in sentimental prose that described various farm folk she found visiting the fair:

Sunshine seemed to fit her; for she was a comfortable and ample presence in holiday black, brightened by the red rose in her bonnet and the pink on her comely cheeks. She listened to a monotone of complaints of the crowd and the weather and the restaurant fare...; she was sympathetic but she was unflinchingly cheerful. I perceived that here was one of those homely saints who hide their halo under a zest for laughter…. I know she bakes the wedding-cake for the rural brides, and has fifty sensible, homespun remedies for sickness, and comes to watch with the very sick, and helps babies come into the world, and is a sturdy comforter and provider to the rural clergy.

…All the classes and divisions of the American farmer were at the great Fair. There was the prosperous farmer of the New England states, and the equally prosperous farmer of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa; there was the tenant-farmer of the South, who may not prosper, but is always sure of cornmeal, pork, and molasses as long as his planter landlord does not go bankrupt; and the unprosperous farmers farther West, with their mortgaged farms and their discontent. Nor did it take any especial gift of discrimination to pick them out, the one from the other.

A. B. Frost, A New England Type, Octave Thanet, “The Farmer in the North” (Scribner’s Magazine; March, 1894)

Chicago’s Columbian Exposition also showcased important agrarian sculpture including Jean-Alexandre Republican France allegorical statue and the stunning life-size bronze, The Mower (1884 plaster, 1894 bronze) by English sculptor W. Hamo Thornycroft (1850-1925). Member of a distinguished London family of sculptors, Thornycroft became the leading figure in the New Sculpture movement of the 1890s that sought to animate the staid poses of classical statuary through more natural and contemporary representations of the human form. The Mower shows a shirtless young “countryman” clasping a scythe to his right side and holding his left arm akimbo with laced work boots and bib strap. Inspiration for the work came from a countryside excursion he took by boat along the Thames in 1882 when he saw a figure who brought to mind lines from the pastoral poem Thyrsis (1866) by Matthew Arnold (1822-1888):

   Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!

   But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick;

   And with the country-folk acquaintance made

  By barn in threshing-time, by new-built rick.

Where are the mowers, who, as the tiny swell

Of our boat passing heav’d the river-grass,

Stood with suspended scythe to see us pass?—

They are all gone, and thou art gone as well.

Right: W.  Hamo Thornycraft, Agriculture, Institute of Chartered Accountants, London (c. 1893)

Thornycroft’s masterpiece was probably the century’s first life-size statue of an everyday rural laborer—an unprecedented representation in both style and subject for class-conscious Victorian England. In an 1885 lecture to students at the Royal Academy, he explained how sculpture could benefit from new technologies like photography and “scientific exactness,” but that art served a higher purpose: “Science teaches man how to make use of the forces and laws in nature and shows their perfect consistency and harmony. But it is by means of Art that the ever-changing and evanescent forms and effects in nature, which are constantly before man and which astonish and perplex, can alone be arrested & permanently expressed. Art can thus interpret nature to man and teach him to perceive her beauty.”

Thornycraft’s innovative approach and adulatory commentary on his work by British art critic Edmund Gosse secured his reputation as a key figure in the transition of Western sculpture from the Neoclassical style of the 1800s to the twentieth century Modernism of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) and his followers. Inspired by images of the Roman goddess Libertas, France’s stalwart republican figure of Marianne and America’s Columbia emerged in the nineteenth century as important symbols of national culture and aspiration. Both were commonly depicted with crowns of cereal grain and in other ways associated with rural folk and values.

Adolph Weinman, Cereals (1908), Vermont Marble North Pediment, Department of Agriculture Whitten Building, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

W. Clark Noble, Sheaf of Wheat (c. 1900), National Gallery of Art

Among America’s foremost Neoclassical sculptors of the time were Adolph Weinman (1870-1952), a native of Karlsruhe, Germany; Lithuanian-born Victor David Brenner (1871-1924), and W. Clark Noble (1858-1938) of Maine. Weinman had immigrated to the United States in the 1880s and studied at Cooper Union in New York with Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Philip Martiny. Weinman’s lyrical designs brought numerous state and federal art commissions ranging from medallions and the “Mercury dime,” to monumental stone friezes. Among his finest works in Washington, D. C. is Cereals (1908), a massive pediment sculpture crowning the Department of Agriculture Whitten Building’s north entrance. Carved from Vermont marble, Cereals shows two figures surrounded by sheaves of grain and corn husks who hold a title shield and is Weinman’s tribute to the agricultural bounty of his adopted homeland.

Brenner is best known for his design of the “Lincoln penny” that featured a profile of the president based on an iconic Mathew Brady photograph. Released in 1909 to commemorate the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, Brenner’s familiar design also featured a curved wheat stalk flanking each side of the image symbolizing America as a land of plenty. Brenner also created the Neoclassical bronze and granite public sculpture A Song of Nature (1918) that is a contributing property to Pittsburg’s Schenley Farms Historic District. After his ship captain father died at sea, Clark Noble moved with his mother to her father’s farm in Maine where he became fascinated by the beauty of natural forms in livestock and crops. He studied anatomy and art in Boston and London before opening a studio in Newport, Rhode Island, and later in New York where he won many commissions for monumental works. His Sheaf of Wheat (c. 1900) is a masterfully carved modern interpretation of this elegant primitive form.

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To view the first post of this 2-part blog series, click here.

Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition and Agrarianism (Part 1 of 2)

Artistic Tradition and Innovation

Ideas began circulating in cities across the United States in the late 1880s about prospects to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America and to showcase the country’s economic progress in 1893. New York, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities vied for the honor which was awarded by Congress to Chicago, the Midwest trading crossroads long associated with agriculture. A colossal granite statue of Ceres twelve feet tall bearing a wheat sheaf and cornucopia, flanked by a similar sixteen-ton figure representing Industry, stood atop the entry the recently constructed Chicago Board of Trade Building in tribute to the sources of nineteenth century regional prosperity. (Thought to have been lost when the building was demolished in 1929, both sculptures were found in a woodland preserve west of the city in 1978 and returned to their original site in 2005).

Left: Agriculture—Ceres (1885); Chicago Board of Trade Building

Right: Louis St. Gaudens, Ceres (c. 1914), Union Station, Washington, D. C.

The substantially unimproved Jackson Park area of some 600 acres southeast of the city center along Lake Michigan was selected as the site for the grand fair. Following two years of ambitious planning and building, the World’s Columbian Exposition hosted an opening day crowd on May 1, 1893 estimated to be between 300,000 and a half-million. Among other attractions, visitors would be treated for the first time to Quaker Oats, Shredded Wheat, Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, and other consumer products that premiered at the event. President Cleveland presided at the ceremony which was attended by Alexander Graham Bell, Susan B. Anthony, William Jennings Bryan, and other notable national leaders and foreign dignitaries.

Some 400 buildings were erected in the “White City” of shimmering if ephemeral staff-stucco and limestone which were arranged around an impeccably landscaped lagoon with statues and fountains that resembled a bustling Mediterranean seaport. Director of Decoration and American artist-sculptor Francis Davis Millet (1848-1912) suggested use of white for the exposition’s most prominent building exteriors, and also contributed murals to the Fine Arts Building and other structures. Many of Millet’s works were influenced by his extensive European travels and based on classical themes. His mural Thesmophoria depicted the ancient Greek festival that honored Demeter by celebrating the abundance of grain and fertility of the earth.

Francis Davis Millet, Thesophoria (1894-1897), Wikimedia Commons

Featuring a grand Corinthian arcade nearly one-third mile along Lake Michigan, the grandiose Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building was the largest structure to have ever been built to that time, and provided forty-four acres of exhibit space. Among the exposition’s most impressive Neoclassical buildings were the three grand pavilions of the Palace of Fine Arts along the east shoreline which exhibited some 2500 works of art from sixteen nations on 200,000 square feet of wall space. The international organizing committee’s decision that countries could only send works by living artists raised serious concern from U. S. representatives who made specific mention of strong public interest in the rustic art of Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton, John Constable and John Linnell, and other European painters. Allowance was made, therefore, for American galleries and private collectors to loan over 100 additional masterpieces.

The Art Palace also served as the meeting place for the American Historical Association’s annual conference in July where historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) delivered his seminal lecture, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” declaring that while the nation’s frontier experience had essentially come to a close, "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward” explained the country’s development and, to a great extent, its identity. The same might be said of popular artistic and literary themes of the period. The Exposition’s ambitious World Congress Auxiliary convened scholars from around the globe at new The Art Institute of Chicago building to exchange ideas on a wide array of topics affecting societies at the close of the century.

Midwest author Hamlin Garland presented a paper on “Local Color in Fiction” at a modern literature panel and reinforced an emerging critical appreciation for stories like his about rural America. Adjacent to the Fine Arts Palace, an expansive outdoor performance area featured such stellar guest maestros as Antonín Dvořák, who had composed his famed New World Symphony in honor of the Columbian anniversary, and Russian folk chorale conductor Eugenie Lineff. Peculiar circumstances had led the renowned Czech composer and his family to summertime residence in tiny Spillville, Iowa, where he noted “endless acres of field and meadow” that inspired further symphonic works that year.

Technology Meets Aesthetics

On the opposite, southwestern side of the lagoon from the Columbian Exposition’s Fine Arts Pavilion rose the magnificent Agricultural Building and adjacent Machinery Hall (Implement Annex). These imposing structures housed what an August, 1893 issue of Farm Implement News lauded as “the latest and most improved machinery finished and decorated like objects of art and placed like jewels in the most attractive settings.” Displays festooned with colorful flags, bunting, and posters featured John Deere & Company’s celebrated “Columbian Peace Plow”—with moldboard and share cast from old weaponry to render swords literally beaten into plowshares, the “Largest Wagon in the World” from the Moline (Illinois) Wagon Company, and most elaborate of all, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company’s centerpiece exhibit. It featured reapers and objects chronicling the company’s famed founder’s rise from Virginia farmer-inventor to head of the world’s largest manufacturer of harvesting equipment.

World’s Columbian Exposition Fine Arts Palace, The World’s Columbian Exposition Illustrated (Chicago: James B. Campbell, 1893)

Approximately twenty-seven million visitors attended during the six-month quadricentennial celebration. Palace of Fine Arts and Agricultural Building exhibits brought into rare proximate focus growing contrasts in perspectives on American cultural life and progress. McCormick’s gospel of reaper plenty furthered ambitions of the company’s evangelistic salesmen who throughout the decade of the ‘90s expanded to a vast network of offices throughout North America and formed a worldwide force of affiliates in Europe and Russia, South Asia, and Latin America that sought to convert the sickle and scything masses to the new mechanized order. Journalist Herbert Casson (1869-1951) wrote admiringly of the changes wrought by recent improvements in agricultural mechanization by McCormick and others, and suggested new emphasis on commercial incentives for manufacturers and growers alike: “Farming for a business, not for a living—this is the motif of the New Farmer. He is a commercialist—a man of the twentieth century. He works as hard as the Old Farmer did, but in a higher way. He uses the four M’s—Mind, Money, Machinery, and Muscle; but as little of the latter as possible.”

Stunning assemblies of paintings, etchings, and sculpture greeted visitors to the Arts Palace where throngs waited patiently in long lines for admission to two main entry courts and a central rotunda that contained works by artists from the United States and Canada, Germany, Russia, and Spain. Prominent American representations on agrarian themes included Harvesting on the Meadow by Alice Barber Stephens, Guy Rose’s stoic End of Day, Tonalists Edwin Evans’ Grain Fields, and Bruce Crane’s The Harvest Field. (The latter was on loan to the exposition from Andrew Carnegie.) The American Tonalist style of the 1880 and ‘90s generally featured landscapes characterized by neutral atmospheric gray, blue, and brown hues. Such “tones” were evident in agrarian scenes by the Barbizon masters who had been using dark colors to emphasize shadow and mood.

Bruce Crane (1857-1937) and Edwin Evans (1860-1946) both studied in France where Evans, a native of Lehi, Utah, had been a founding member of the Latter-Day Saints French Art Mission with Lorus Pratt, John Hafen, and John Fairbanks. In the spirit of John Hafen’s observation that talent is “a duty we owe our Creator,” the group studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, a popular studio school for foreigners, to develop their mural painting skills for church structures. They took regular trips to the French countryside where Evans painted Grain Fields in 1890, which was awarded honorable mention three years later in Chicago.

German artists Rudolf Lehmann (1819-1905) and Ernst Henseler (1852-1940) were among the few artists with two paintings selected for display at the Chicago fair. A native of East Brandenburg (in present Lubuskie, Poland), Henseler was known for realistic depictions of country life based on summer visits to his Prussian homeland and by 1893 had taught for a dozen years at Berlin’s prestigious Museum of Decorative Arts. One of the most significant German works exhibited was The Roller Mill (1875) by Adolph von Menzel (1815-1905). Although Menzel’s painting shows a factory interior rather than a rural landscape, his freer style and deep colors capture the figures’ intense motion, and the painting is a landmark in the emergence of a European Realism that would profoundly influence a new generation of artists including Ilya Repin and Edgar Degas.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Harvesters (1873), Wikimedia Commons

A sense of fulfillment in labor is also expressed other agrarian paintings from Europe on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition like George Mason’s serene Harvest Moon, Pierre-Emmanuel Damoye’s Breton Wheat Field, and Jules Jacques Veyrassat’s cheery Last Load of Wheat. Landscapes by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet gave many Americans their first exposure to Impressionism. The three French artists had been principal organizers of the inaugural Impressionist exhibition just ten years earlier in Paris where Renoir had presented Harvesters (1873). The painting is remarkable not for the hedonistic colors and softly blurred forms commonly associated with Impressionism, but for the peculiar arrangement of the subject matter. Rather than placed near the middle of the canvas, three field workers are to the right of a central pathway that divides the grainfield from a vegetable patch. Two black-clad women stroll down the trail seemingly indifferent to their surroundings. Old emotions once inspired by such agrarian themes are now directed to new appreciation of light and shape. Yet Renoir, who more commonly painted cityscapes and voluptuous females, also famously decried used of the metric system for its replacement of human measures like the foot and league with arbitrary standards. Yet the promise of industry so prominently displayed at the Columbian Exposition also stirred suspicions elsewhere abroad in John Ruskin and William Morris. This would contribute an important stream to the development of Modernism. 

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To view part 2 of this blog series, click here.

Perennial Grains and "Centers of Origin"

“Feeding the New Global Middle Class” Illustration, The Atlantic

I read with special interest the article “How Will We Feed the New Global Middle Class” by Charles C. Mann in last month’s issue of The Atlantic (March 2018). It not only addressed this pressing question in terms amply supplied with meaningful examples and disturbing statistics, but referenced the important research long undertaken by a longtime friend and supporter of our work at Palouse Colony Farm, WSU plant scientist Dr. Stephen Jones. Mann’s article casts the controversy about supplying a growing world population’s food supply as a century-long contest between the “Wizards” and the “Prophets.” He characterizes the former as advocates of commodity production and scientific innovation exemplified by Norman Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution,” and the “Prophets,” or proponents of natural ecosystem conservation like William Vogt. I commend the entire article for your review of this complex question, but thought Mann’s discussion of Stephen Jones’s research on perennial wheat to represent a rare convergence of Wizard-Prophet interests.

Perennial grains do not exist in nature so cereal crops must be planted year after year which necessitates field tillage and attendant labor and other inputs. Development of a crop like the Salish Blue wheat hybridized by Jones and his agronomist colleague Steve Lyon offers hope for a grain of sufficient milling quality that can produce from the same plant for two to three years. Jones and Lyon have told me that the pioneers of perennial grain research were a team of Russians headed by Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943), a brilliant scientist who paid for his independent thinking by perishing in one of Stalin’s GULAG prisons. Vavilov formulated the “Centers of Origin” theory (a phrase first used by Darwin) for the geographic origins of the world’s cereal grains. Vavilov had been a protégé of Robert Regel, Russia’s preeminent pre-revolutionary era botanist. Regel had appointed the brilliant young Saratov University scientist head of all Russia’s agricultural experiment stations on the very day the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in 1917. Vavilov became a prime-mover in the organization of the first All-Russian Conference of Plant Breeders in Saratov in 1920.

The group’s June 4 opening session marked a milestone for world science as Vavilov delivered his famous paper, “The Law of Homologous Series in Hereditary Variation,” in which he put forth the first hypothesis on plant mutation. For subsequent related research that led to the formulation of a law on the periodicity of heritable characteristics, Vavilov came to be known as the Mendeleyev of biology. Although Vavilov’s enthusiastic grasp of problem definition in crop breeding proved easier than problem solving, upon Regal’s death later in 1920 he was named director of the Agricultural Ministry’s Department of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, and went on to organize the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences.  

Nikolai Vavilov (c. 1930), Library of Congress

Vavilov derived many of his insights from extensive travels “across the whole of Scripture” in Transjordan (Israel) and Palestine. He traveled widely in the Middle East and pored over religious texts in order “to reconstruct a picture of agriculture in biblical times.” His ideas were significantly influenced by the field studies of German botanist Frederich Körnicke (1828-1908), curator of the Imperial Botanical Gardens in St. Petersburg in the 1850s, and Aaron Aaronsohn, Director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Haifa, Palestine. In an article published in 1889 on the history of world grains, Körnicke had identified a specimen of wild emmer found in the collection of the National Museum of Vienna as the progenitor of all modern wheats. He urged botanists to conduct expeditions in the foothills of Mt. Hermon where it had been found in order to better document its origin and range.

Aaronsohn subsequently recorded his historic 1906 discovery of the grain: “When I began to extend my search to the cultivated lands [near Rosh Pinna], along the edges of roads and in the crevices of rocks, I found a few stools of the wild Triticum. Later I came across it in great abundance, and the most astonishing thing about it was the large number of forms it displayed.” Indefatigable Vavilov followed Aaronsohn’s itinerary to locate this relict stands of the famed “Mother of Grains” and found it growing nearly forty inches tall with stiff, six-inch long beards. His further research demonstrated that emmer’s ancestral range extended throughout northern Transjordan and into Turkey.

Vavilov met Washington State College agronomist Edwin Gaines and his celebrated botanist wife, Xerpha, at the 1932 Sixth International Genetics Congress at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. This celebrated gathering was attended by some 550 of the world’s leading geneticists. The conclave’s highlight was the much-anticipated delivery of Valvilov’s presentation on geographic distribution of wild cultivar relatives. His paper focused on the importance of preserving threatened landraces and their progenitors for future breeding stock and pure research. He further postulated the origin of modern hard red wheats in the Fertile Crescent (“southwestern Asia”) and soft whites in northwestern Africa. Vavilov also described ancient selection methods by which early agriculturalists unconsciously conducted spontaneous variety selections.

In spite of myriad challenges in hosting such a prestigious event in the midst of the Great Depression, the Gaineses invited Vavilov to Pullman while on his extended trip to several western states. Vavilov accepted the offer and spent several weeks in the late summer and fall of 1932 touring grain research stations in the Northwest clad in ever present tie and fedora. The time of year and fecund Columbia Plateau laden with grains spawned from his homeland may well have reminded Vavilov of lines from the celebrated Russian poet Pushkin extolling life on the steppe. He could quote verse at length in fluent English. The Gypsies imagines new life in fall-sown wheat even as hunters and their dogs trample fields underfoot. The image poignantly anticipates Vavilov’s own fate a decade later as a victim of Stalin’s purges: “…the winter wheat will suffer from their wild fun” while the stream ever “passes by the mill.”

Palouse Harvests and “Painterly Skies” — the Agrarian Art of Katherine Nelson and Hal Sutherland

Katherine Nelson’s reputation as artist, thinker, and friend of rural ways long preceded my meeting her several years ago. She had lived in the Spokane area in the 1990s and fallen in love with the rolling grainlands of the Palouse Hills. Although now living in Washington, D.C., Katherine has regularly traveled across the continent since the early 2000s to capture the Palouse’s summertime chiaroscuro of swirling slopes, saddles, and swales. She happened upon our cousin Tom Schierman’s “oasis” in the hills near the hamlet of Lancaster several miles north of our Palouse Colony Farm, and through Tom we came to be acquainted. Katherine traces threads of her fascination with the region to her diplomat father’s interest in Turkish rugs: “I remember their textures and shapes which influenced my affection for rolling landscapes. The Palouse is a tapestry of woven connections among seasons, fields, and people. The effect is thoroughly spiritual and provides a place of reflection, solace, and beauty that overcomes the noise of the outside world.”

To emphasize the effects of light for line and shadow, Katherine works entirely in black-and-white which evokes heightened awareness of layering, texture, and movement. “My ‘Portraits of the Palouse,’” she explains, “are metaphors for the human prospect. ‘Harvests’ to me are exhibitions that depict the land as hallowed space through views of heritage farm architecture and landscape vistas. Implicit rural values relate to the natural environment, hard work, and community, and are relevant anywhere.” This coming July 14, Katherine’s work will be featured at Art Spirit Gallery in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and I’ll be on hand to give a talk about her remarkable art at 10 a.m. that morning.

Katherine Nelson, Palouse Harvest Oasis (2015), Charcoal on paper, 22 x 30 inches, Collection of the Artist

Another artist whose agrarian paintings recently caught my eye is Hal Sutherland (1929-2014). He became enamored with rural themes late in the 1980s after a distinguished career as a Hollywood animator and television producer. Born in Massachusetts amidst the onset of the Great Depression, Sutherland moved to the West Coast in the early 1940s and after military service studied at the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles. His skills and study led to work at Disney and he eventually acquired his own production studio. Sutherland overcame any limitations from color blindness by developing a color-coded palette and experimented with unusual color combinations. In 1974 he relocated to a small farm near Bothell, Washington, devoted the rest of his life to painting and became president of the American Artists of the Rockies Association.

Hal Sutherford's Wheat Harvest (c. 1985)

Although long interested with Western Indian and history themes, Sutherland turned his attention to landscapes late in his career and began touring the American countryside in the 1980s. “…[T]here’s a tremendous void regarding American farmers and the unbelievable hardships they endured,” he stated in a 1989 Art of the West interview. “It’s my hope to capture as much as I can so their stories can be remembered It’s hard to imagine the severity of the struggle confronted daily by those folks. …[Humor] helped carry them along in their various dreams of a new start in life, as they carved out the heartland of this country for generations to come.” In this spirit Sutherland painted with detailed realism such farm scenes as Wheat Harvest (c. 1985) with a team of sickle-wielding men and women binders, and a returning farmer and work horse in Day’s End. Regarding the latter, he commented, “Rewards are often meager for hard labor such as farming. But, after a long day struggling in the fields, it had to bring tremendous satisfaction to have accomplished the task and to be rewarded with one of God’s painterly skies as you headed homeward.”

“One Dinner” with Palouse Heritage and the Inland Northwest Food Network

Founder Teri McKenzie of the Inland Northwest Food Network is passionate about health and heritage! Since establishing the organization five years ago in the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene area, she has spearheaded dozens of events across the region to promote local agrarian economies through farm-to-table dinners, seed swaps, and cooking classes. Her friendship with my brother and Palouse Colony Farm co-founder, Don Scheuerman, led to a wonderful evening last month at Spokane’s acclaimed Ruin’s Restaurant for the Inland Northwest Food Network's monthly "One Dinner" featuring Palouse Heritage. We arrived right on time but were lucky to find a seat so were grateful we had made reservations. All the folks at our table were “Ruin’s Regulars” from the city who enjoyed hearing Don talk about life on the farm and the nutritional benefits of heritage grains.

Chef Tony Brown crafted an incredible menu of eight small plates paired with specialty drinks, which more than enough for the hearty appetites present around our table. Among my favorites were the farro risotto with white miso and crumbled cheese, Shaun Thompson-Duffy’s Culture Breads made with our Palouse Heritage Crimson Turkey wheat flour, and those incredible pulled pork sliders! My wife, Lois, raved about the braised beef and barley with sweet potato, and we both loved the rye bread pudding Tony devised with huckleberry curd and custard. Should have asked for that recipe! Since my German paternal grandmother made the most delicious rye bread while Norwegian maternal Grandma Peterson made every dessert possible out of huckleberries she loved to gather, I suppose I come by passion for Tony’s bread pudding naturally. Topping off our wondrous evening was Bellwether Brewing’s Smoked Palouse ESB made with our Scots Bere heritage barley malt.  

Something else we found interesting at our tables were colorful handouts listing “15 Reasons to Eat Locally Grown Grain.” Here are a few of the entries:

Local grains taste better. Farmers grow a diverse variety of wheat and other grains, and these products travel a more direct path from the field to your pantry. Without the conventional additives, local grains have more interesting flavor profiles and taste better.

Supporting local grains rebuild regional food systems and the regional economy. In addition to the on-farm jobs they support, local grains require processing, storage, and distribution. This means more regional-scale infrastructure and jobs in these facilities. It also paves the way to create other regional food infrastructure for products like meat, pickled and processed goods, and more.

Nothing makes truly “artisan” bread like truly artisan grains. Bakers using regional grains are constantly innovating to celebrate the diverse flavors and characteristics of local grains, creating a richer array of products.

You can cook it, bake it, and brew it.

Because the “staff of life” should be local too.

Bread is agriculture! And so is beer, cake, and granola.