The Harvest Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pendleton’s Umatilla County Museum and the Runquist Brothers

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

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

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

Arthur Runquist, Early Oregon Harvest Panels (1941)

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

Relocated to the Umatilla County Historical Society Museum, Pendleton

“Umatilla Gold” Exhibit Panel

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

Incredible Springville and Its Art

Next stop of agricultural interest on our summer road trip was Springville, Utah. Founded in 1937, Springville’s acclaimed Museum of Art Soviet and Russian Collection holdings are among the nation’s most extensive for rural subjects that include numerous harvest scenes painted in the 1890s by members of the Church of Latter-day Saints Paris Art Mission. I thank docent Judy Mansfield for helpful information on the remarkable story of the museum’s vast holdings. Springville’s Soviet and Russian Collection began unexpectedly in 1989 when museum director Vern G. Swanson first embarked on a series of trips to the USSR on behalf of the Grand Central Art Gallery Education Association. Swanson met Russian artist Vladimir I. Nekrasov (1924-1998) of Moscow’s Surikov Art Institute who introduced him to important works of Russian Expressionism and Social Realism that led to a major exhibition at Springville in October 1990 and eventual artwork purchases for the museum.

Springville Art Museum; Springville, Utah

Mahlon Young, The Farm Worker (1938)

Successive assaults upon the Soviet Union’s rural populace in the 1920s and ‘30s involved Stalin’s brutal campaigns to collectivize agricultural lands and against religion that led to widespread violence and famine. Millions of peasants perished or were displaced from their native villages through the imposition of these policies to abolish private property and modernize the economy. Russia remained a major producer of grain until this period which witnessed the expropriation of commodities from landed peasants (kulaks) who had withheld harvests in order to boost prices. Stalin’s push to industrialize the country at all costs required the provisioning Soviet cities, agricultural mechanization, the mass murder and exile of kulaks, and the exodus of vast numbers of younger rural residents to urban areas. The impact of these forces was devastating to traditional Russian village life and crop production. The nation was plunged further into cataclysm after war with Germany commenced in 1941.

As people and landscapes suffered, authors and artists sought memory for solace as well as lament. The glorification of communist principles through state-sanctioned Socialist Realism governed official Soviet art and literature from the 1930s to 1980s. Muscular representations of urban and rural life that lauded labor and socialist ideals generally characterized the approach, but later strains featured honest views of everyday life reminiscent of the French Impressionists and Taos Expressionists. Marx had viewed artists and writers as valued members of an intellectual vanguard promoting revolutionary change. Leon Trotsky later wrote in Literature and Revolution (1924) that their insights revealed the nature of society and if freely expressed would help guide the revolutionary struggle. Stalin, however, had no tolerance of art for art’s sake. His authoritarian policies sought conformity and denigrated individuality—the basis of creativity.

Konstantin Topuridze, People’s Friendship “Golden Sheaf” Fountain (1954)

Exhibition of Economic Achievements, Moscow; Wikimedia Commons

Unless about earlier periods or other places, Soviet depictions of internal discontent and tragedy were forbidden in favor of sentimentalized worker characterizations of the proletarian dream. The character of Soviet monumental art was famously exemplified in Vera Mukhina’s 80-foot steel sculpture Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer (1936) that was built to crown the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Plated in radiant chrome-nickel, the massive female figure designed by Mukhina (1889-1953) grasps a sickle alongside her hammer-wielding companion in striding poses that symbolized the nation’s aspirations. After the Paris fair, the sculpture was relocated to the entrance of Moscow’s sprawling All-Union Agricultural Exposition on the city’s north side where substantial halls showcased numerous aspects of crop, livestock, and food production. Architect Konstantin Topuridze (1905-1977) designed the enormous Golden Sheaf (People’s Friendship) Fountain (1954) as one of the park’s centerpieces that features a towering grain sheaf encircled by three colored glass cornucopias and sixteen bronze statues of young women who symbolized the Soviet republics. (In 1959 the complex’s name was changed to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements and has come to include a grandiose amusement park, year-round trade shows, concert hall, and pavilions featuring space exploration and technological advancements.)

Idealized paintings of country life like Arkady Plastov’s Harvest Festival (1937) and Field after Harvest—Sheaves (1954) by Yuri Kugach show bountiful fields and smiling brigades of kolkhoz (collective farm) laborers clad in red neckerchiefs and head scarves enthusiastically driving farm equipment or tending threshing operations. Plastov, born to a family of icon painters near Simbirsk on the middle Volga, also painted works like Harvest (1945) and Spring (1954) that risked official condemnation given his Impressionistic renderings of commonplace scenes devoid of political sentiment. Harvest is a discomforting view of an aged reaper sharing a meal in the field with three children scarcely old enough to shoulder such responsibilities. Completed in the last year of a war that had inflicted enormous suffering throughout Europe, the scene also inspires appreciation for the home front brigades of women, children, and the elderly who labored for years to sustain soldiers and civilians. Plastov’s dynamic, colorful Haymaking (1945) shows a shirtless teen flanked by two elderly men and a woman who cut grass near a copse of birch trees.

Kugach, who settled in the Tver countryside after the war, went on to establish the Moscow River School in 1974 to revive the dramatic style of Repin, Levitan, and other Russian Realists. Ambidextrous painter Nikita Fedosov (1939-1992), Yuri Kugach’s nephew, became a prominent member of the group and painted numerous country scenes including Last Rays and Overcast Field (1966). Muscovite Victor Ivanov studied with Kugach at Moscow’s Surikov Institute of Art in the late 1940s and in the 1960s became a leading member of the Avant Garde Severe Style that depicted the grim austerity of post-war Soviet life in opposition the naïve depictions of Socialist Realism. Artists like Ivanov risked establishment censure but painted throughout the Khrushchev reform era in ways that recalled the 1910s Futurism of Kazmir Malevich and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Ivanov painted numerous harvest scenes like Harvesting near Ryazan, Men Resting at Harvest, and Women Harvesting (1965). These spare, balanced compositions in irregular blocks of olive, mustard yellow, and chestnut contrast rural toil with the rustic beauty of the Russian countryside.

Dmitry I. Slobodin, Untitled Donbas Harvest Scene (1982)

Gouache on paper, 17 ¼ x 22 inches

Columbia Heritage Collection

A native of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, Dmitry I. Slobodin (1929-2005) graduated from the Art College of Lugansk and became a master of Impressionistic palette-knife paintings in tempura and oil earth tones that depict the quiet beauty of his native land while resisting the artificiality of the regime’s officially sanctioned Socialist Realism. Slobodin’s untitled Donbass Harvest (1982) shows mottled field rows of tawny cream with shadowed forest greens beneath a gleaming orange ribbon of setting sun. At left far in the distance beyond a darkened tree-lined swale one can almost hear the hum of a late model Rostelmash self-propelled combine throwing a roiling cloud of yellow-white chaff. The red machine appears to be opening up a field of ripened grain at day’s end near at base of a broad gentle slope in a scene of bounty and peace.

Founding Farmer Art and Architecture

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

George Washington Presidential Library Reading Room, Mt. Vernon

Fred Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington

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

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

Mt. Vernon Threshing Barn

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

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

Columbia Heritage Collection Photographs

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

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

U.S. Department of Agriculture Inner Court

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

Of Grains and Domes: Jefferson and U. S. Capitol Building Design (Part 2)

After Thomas Jefferson returned to the United States in 1789, he began the extensive rebuilding of Monticello. He added the distinctive second-story octagonal dome that included design elements of the Halles aux Blés to become the first feature of its kind for an American residence. As president in 1805, Jefferson directed British-American architect Benjamin Latrobe (1764-1820) to construct the ceiling for the new Capitol Building’s House of Representatives chamber based on the Paris grain market design. Despite Latrobe’s concerns about leakage, Jefferson’s intentions to build “the handsomest room on the world” prevailed although it was destroyed when the British burned the Capitol in 1814. Latrobe applied similar principles in the design of the first cathedral in America, Baltimore’s Basilica of the Assumption (1806-1821) to form the skylit lumiere mysterieuse (mysterious light) that to this day still hovers above the altar.

Visiting Jefferson’s Monticello with family

The Founders’ grand visions for New World prosperity was translated into Charles Bulfinch’s neoclassical Federal Style design and decoration of the United States Capitol Building that featured numerous agrarian associations. The massive inner and outer domes crowning the original central 1800 structure were completed in the 1860s with an inner oculus that reveals an enormous fresco covering approximately 5,000 square feet, The Apotheosis of Washington (1865) by Italian-American artist Constantino Brumidi (1805-1880). The painting depicts George Washington enthroned amidst the heavenlies above six allegorical perimeter scenes. Brumidi’s Agriculture shows Ceres with a wreath of wheat and cornucopia perched atop a mechanical reaper assisted by a capped Young America who holds the reins of the horses. Flora gathers flowers nearby.

Constantine Brumidi, The Apotheosis of Washington—Agriculture (1865)

United States Capitol Building Rotunda Dome, Washington, D. C.

Architect of the Capitol Collection

Brumidi had trained at Rome’s Academy of St. Luke where he mastered trompe l’oeil (“fools the eye”) depiction of human forms on flat surfaces in three dimensions, and restored frescoes at the Vatican. His Summer in the House Appropriation Room’s four-panel Season’s series (1856) shows Ceres attended by cherubs who tend to an enormous grain sheaf and cornucopia. Bulfinch’s work influenced versatile Salem architect-woodcarver Samuel McIntire (1757-1811) whose designs of New England homes frequently featured sheaves of wheat and garlands for wall frieze and mantel ornamentation as well as for furniture.

Monticello Farming Exhibit

Protecting the Common Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Praise God for the harvest of farm and field,

     Praise God for the people who gather their yield,

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

     The patience of science, the power of machine.

     Praise God for the harvest of conflict and love,

     For leaders and people to struggle to serve,

     To conquer oppression, earth’s plenty increase,

     And gather God’s harvest of justice and peace.

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

Questioning Popular Assumptions

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

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

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

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

Columbia Heritage Photograph

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

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

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

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

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

Cover Photo: Measuring a Case thresher operating speed

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

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