Reflections on Summer 2023

Greetings blog readers. It was another active summer for us here at Palouse Heritage. We also noticed several other interesting updates that are relevant to our mission of re-establishing heritage grains into our food systems using regenerative practices, so we wanted to highlight a few.

First, Ali Schultheis and other friends of ours at Washington State University announced their Soil to Society pipeline project. The initiative researches strategies necessary to reinvigorate our food system with higher quality, more nutritious whole grain-based foods and making them affordable to all levels of society. We certainly applaud that cause. A very cool aspect to the work is what our friends at WSU’s Bread Lab are doing with the Approachable Loaf Project:

“an affordable, approachable, accessible whole wheat sandwich loaf.” For a loaf to be considered an Approachable Loaf, it must be tin-baked and sliced, contain no more than seven ingredients, and be at least 60-100% whole wheat. It must also be priced at under $8 a loaf, setting it apart from other whole grain, artisan loaves.

Read more about the entire Soil to Society project here.

Another important happening from this past summer was that the respected scientific journal Nature published a paper measuring harmful environmental impacts from agricultural pesticides leeching into ecosystems and freshwater resources:

Of the 0.94 Tg net annual pesticide input in 2015 used in this study, 82% is biologically degraded, 10% remains as residue in soil and 7.2% leaches below the root zone. Rivers receive 0.73 Gg of pesticides from their drainage at a rate of 10 to more than 100 kg yr−1 km−1.

The journal paper is located here. The findings reiterate the importance of our values, which include truly sustainable and regenerative farming practices for the sake of soil and environmental health.

Last but certainly not least, harvest 2023 at our Palouse Colony Farm was a success. Andrew and team had a great crop in spite of low moisture conditions throughout our region. The combination of our farm’s healthy soil along with our hearty landrace grains (and Andrew’s farming talents!) shielded us from the environmental circumstances that significantly reduced average yields around us. Enjoy some photos from harvest, including one of Andrew’s son kneading dough from our grains. Artisan baker in the making!!

A 2022 Harvesttime Collage of Sights, Sounds, Smells & Tastes

Harvest since time immemorial was understood in ritual terms as the principal duty in humanity’s relationship with Mother Earth for the perpetuation of life. This was essentially the purpose of existence…. —J. Katarzyna Dadak-Kozicka

Harvest… the “purpose of existence.” These are stirring words from Polish anthropologist Katarzyna Dadak-Kozicka who has devoted many years to studying the traditions, music, and labors of those who gathered the earth’s bounty for the benefit of consumers worldwide. Today one hears of many “purposes of existence” with a glance at news headlines suggesting GDP growth, political influence, material comforts, and even entertainment. But these lines above sagely observe that benefits individuals enjoy in various realms as well as the prosperity of nations rest on our stewardship of Mother Earth’s resources.

The recent harvest of heritage grains on our Palouse Colony Farm and fields of our neighbors and partners Joe DeLong and Neil Appel was among the latest in memory. Late season seeding, equipment repairs, and other obligations conspired to push harvest from the weeks of August well into September. But the good news is that the work was completed and the unusually hot spate of weather in July that we feared might damage the crop seems to have little effect as the yields were among the best we’ve ever had. So as we move now to fall tillage and seeding this post will be more visual than verbal with images of our small part of “humanity’s principal duty.”

Purple Egyptian Barley

Harvesting Purple Egyptian Barley at Palouse Colony Farm

Purple Egyptian Barley

31 Totes of Purple Egyptian Barley—we expected no more than 20

Sunflowers

Colony Garden

Giant Pumpkins

Colony Garden

Palouse Heritage Hulless Spelt

Palouse Heritage Hulless Speltat Joe & Sara DeLong’s Farm

Evening Harvest Cloud Formation

A Beautiful Evening Harvest Cloud Formation—thought we might get rained out but passed right over us with a few drops and some lightning.

Sara DeLong Photograph

Palouse Colony Farm Harvest Lunch with Friends

Don’s Palouse Colony Farm Harvest Lunch with Friends—sausage, cheese, whole grain bread, garden fresh tomatoes, bread & butter pickles topped off with Grain Shed-Palouse Heritage Purple Egyptian brew.

Heritage Grain Harvest

Heritage Grain Harvest at the Neil Appel Farm on Union Flat near Colfax

Ethos Pancake Mix

Ethos Pancake Mix, Ethos Café & Bakery, Richland—from farm to griddle and table. 100% heritage whole grains—“flavorful authencity”!

Amber Eden Grain and a Memorable Harvest

On a collecting trip to a popular Persian grain market over a century ago, near the location of ancient Sumer in present Iraq, a USDA official found a vendor of an exceptional bread wheat said by locals to have come from the Garden of Eden. The American likely thought it an entertaining story with little significance. But the grain was tested soon after it arrived here in the US and found to be something indeed spectacular—a hard white landrace (pre-hybridized heritage) wheat. Virtually all wheat flours used for breadmaking come from hard red grain which is healthy when milled as whole grain to preserve the nutrient-dense germ and bran as well as interior endosperm. For this reason whole grain breads tend to be dark compared to white breads typically made from those made from flour that has been sifted to remove much of the kernel.

The existence of this exceedingly rare hard white “Eden” grain offered the prospect of whole grain nutrition in a light-colored loaf! And after considerable searching facilitated by friends at WSU’s Bread Lab in Mt. Vernon, our Palouse Colony-Ethos Stone Mill team was able to procure a sample from a European seedbank. After several years of patient increase, we were pleased to harvest a sufficient crop of this remarkable grain this summer that we will soon be marketed as flour.

Harvesting Hard White Amber Eden Wheat
Palouse Colony Farm (August 2021)

The Bible and other ancient literatures open with divine creation of the world and living things including seed-bearing plants. Genesis 1:11-12 states, “And God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees….’ And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds…. And God saw that it was good.” The concept of Creator as First Agrarian offers two related guiding principles for humanity’s sacred relationship to the land: (1) The earth and its bounty is to be treated respectfully (e.g., Psalm 24:1); and (2) people are to cultivate it responsibly (Genesis 2:15). Grains, grapes, and olives—the so-called Mediterranean triad—dominated the Hebrew diet (Deuteronomy 7:12-13, II Chronicles 31:5-6) and provided a wide range of flavorful, nutritious foods made from flour, wine, and oil. So heavy was their reliance on bread that the Hebrew term for it, lehem, is synonymous with food in general (Genesis 28:20, Ruth 1:6, Psalm 132:15).

Folk Tunes and Corn Dollies in Merry Olde England

English folk tunes sung during harvest time and other field labors took various forms including ballads with charming melodies and lively tunes of ribald verse. The final cutting of grain after weeks of arduous work was commonly assigned to the youngest girl present. “O’ tis the merry time,” wrote cavalier poet Matthew Stevenson (c. 1654-1684), “wherein honest neighbours make good cheer and God is glorified in his blessings on the earth.” In some parts of Scotland the last sheaf was called the Cailleach (Old Wife), on the Isle of Skye the Boabbir Bhacagh (Crippled Goat), and the “Gander’s Neck” in western England. Cutting the last sheaf was considered unlucky in some folk traditions, perhaps a relic of pagan memory since the dwindling patch of standing grain was seen as a sanctuary for the field’s fertility spirit sometimes represented by a hare, bustard or crane, or other creature seeking refuge among the stalks. For this reason, workers might simply toss their sickles at the hallowed last stand in half-hearted effort to complete the harvest and begin celebrating.

Wheat Wreath, Columbia Heritage Collection

Solomki Straw Art Overlay, Columbia Heritage Collection

Harvesters typically adorned a young girl with a wreath of woven stalks and wildflowers and carried her in a jubilant procession led by a boy carrying the hallowed last sheaf. A “Kirn Baby” deftly woven of straw—the “Harvest Queen,” “Harvest Maiden,” or “Harvest Child,” depending on regional tradition, and honored sheaf typically served as table centerpieces for the annual Harvest-Home feast. Afterward the effigies of these “dollies,” which could also be made from barley, oats, and rye, were hung in the farmhouse or barn as a talisman to provide safe haven for the spirit of fertility until threshed for release with the seeding of spring crops. Scottish classicist and folklorist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) identified such mother-maiden traditions that continued into modern times as personifications of the ancient Demeter and Persephone myth without the elements that typically perpetuate such beliefs—a priestly class, designated holy places, or rites of propitiation. In parts of Scotland, Silesia, and Saxony, the maiden was chosen as the Wheat-Bride, Oat-Bride, or Rye-Bride according to the crop, and was joined by a respective Grain-Bridegroom to represent the productive powers of vegetation. The pair was honored at the local harvest celebration to which they came gaily dressed and tended by friends to imitate a festive marriage procession.

Old World traditions honoring the grain’s vitality by weaving “Kirn Babies” (“Corn Dollies”) of artfully twisted shapes have endured since medieval times and has been revived for exhibition at rural county fairs and craft displays. Popular traditional designs include the Cambridge Umbrella, Norfolk Lantern, Durham Chandelier, Devon Cross, Worchester Fan, and Irish Countryman’s Favor. The related agrarian folk art of solomki still popular in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine involves the meticulous design of grain straw marquetry overlay on wooden boxes bowls, plates, and other objects.

Among the most magnificent and monumental examples of golden straw weaving and wickerwork are three sets of Orthodox Holy Gates appropriately located in a restored nineteenth century church which serves as the Belarus Museum of Folk Art in Raubichi near Minsk. Dating from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, these exquisitely crafted panels served as centerpieces for Orthodox cathedral iconostases which formed the high wall of framed icons that divided the sanctuary from the nave where worshippers assembled. Skillfully drawn gold-colored thread fashioned from wheat stalks was also for exquisite decoration of white silk religious fabrics. Among these treasures’ earliest extant examples are The Good Shepherd and Jesus and the Samaritan altarpieces (c. 1650) that were deftly embroidered by nuns of the seventeenth century Order of Celestial Annunciades in Nozeroy, France, and preserved in the city’s Collegiate Church of St. Antoine.

Crace, Berry, and Progress in Modern Times

Jim Crace’s 2013 dystopian novel, Harvest, transports readers to a sixteenth century English village to experience a week of celebration, intrigue, and disturbance that marks the end of harvest. Area residents gossip and gather in the barley field but are more concerned with the recent arrival of several vagrants than the momentous events about to engulf them. The story is told from the standpoint of Walter Thirsk, who after residing there for a dozen years is himself a relative newcomer to a place. “We should face the rest day with easy hearts,” he muses, “and then enjoy the gleaning that would follow it, with our own Gleaning Queen the first to bend and pick a grain. We should expect our seasons to unfold in all their usual sequences, and so on through the harvests and the years.”

National Colonial Farm, Piscataway Park, Accokeek, Maryland

The strangers who camp nearby are refugees from enclosure of open lands, and their coming coincides with that of a man of uneasy silence the villagers call Mr. Quill for the peculiar instrument he carries for his work: “We mowed with scythes: he worked with brushes and quills. He was recording us, he said, or more exactly marking down our land.” Quill is making a map and compiling numbers, measuring locations of streets, houses, and fields. He informs his rustic hearers that such work is about “improvements” being done on behalf of the manor estate’s absentee heir who is zealous for improvements to enlarge the estate by enclosure and replace fieldworkers with sheep which will also render gleaning obsolete. “We know enough to understand that in the greater world,” Quill explains, “flour, meat, and cheese are not divided into shares and portions for the larder, as they are here, but only weighed and sized for selling.” The old order of Enough is being displaced by More. To be sure, pre-enclosure landscapes were not idyllic spaces since commoners depended on hard labor and the vagaries of the seasons for their welfare. But conditioned by faith and custom, daily anxieties were moderated by community fellowship and shared resources from the commons.

Kentucky farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry’s book A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (1998) is rooted in lifelong experience on the land and considerations of beauty, hard work, crops, and the natural world:

                  Harvest will fill the barn; for that

                  The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

                  And yet no leaf or grain is filled

                  By work of ours; the land is tilled

                  And left to grace. That we may reap…. (No. X [1979])

One of Berry’s first public addresses on trends in consolidation of family farms and land care took place in July, 1974, at the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium held in conjunction with Spokane’s “Expo ’74.” The world’s fair was promoted as the first international ecological exposition and Berry’s passionate talk, delivered from scribbled notes on a large yellow pad, included a call for “a constituency for a better kind of agriculture.” The presentation inspired organization of the Northwest Tilth movement for sustainable farming, and also became the nucleus of Berry’s best-selling book The Unsettling of American: Culture & Agriculture (1979). 

Barn and Fence Rails, National Colonial Farm

In his 1979 essay, “The Good Scythe,” Berry grapples with the meaning of progress in modern times. He recalls buying a “power scythe” for cutting grass on a steep hillside near his home, but soon found that the anticipated advantages of reduced labor were offset by the machine’s temperamental motor and considerable racket. The turning point came when a neighbor showed him an old-fashioned scythe that was comfortable to handle and efficient. “There was an intelligence and refinement in its design that make it a pleasure to handle and look at and think about,” Berry observed, and he promptly replaced the powered machine and gas can with a wooden-handled Marugg scythe and whetstone. Berry does not dismiss mechanical innovation; the scythe, after all, is an improvement on the sickle. But he found the episode to have “the force of a parable” about life, labor, and definitions of progress. He advocates a time-honored approach for judging claims of saved labor and short cuts, and warns against the embrace of technological solutions that tend to bring longer working hours with greater equipment expense.

“Header in the Wheat”—The 2019 Harvest Commences

Our grain harvest began the first week of August as we joined with our Palouse River neighbor Joe DeLong to cut our crop of Crimson Turkey (“Turkey Red”) wheat at his farm. The DeLong place is located several miles upstream from our Palouse Colony Farm between the communities of Endicott and St. John. We’ve been working with Joe for several years as he takes meticulous care of his land and is a master mechanic whose magic touch keeps equipment of almost any vintage purring like new. Below is a picture of the first round in the Turkey wheat with Joe at the helm of his Model 453 International Combine. (The “header” is the detachable assembly in front of the combine with sickle cutting bar and rotating reel that feeds the grain back into the machines threshing mechanisms.) Crimson Turkey is a high quality hard red winter bread wheat indigenous to the Black Sea’s Crimean Peninsula. Flanking the strip of ripe grain is a lower stand of green oats that Joe will use for livestock feed, and above is a colorful hillside of Sonoran Gold soft white spring wheat which should be ready to harvest in about two more weeks. The latter is one of the earliest grains raised in the Pacific Northwest as period accounts trace its origins to at least the 1850s after seed stock had likely found its way north from California. Sonoran is a Mediterranean landrace wheat that was introduced by the Spanish to Mexico as early as the 16th century and eventually became a staple of Southwest cuisine for flour tortillas, Indian frybread, and numerous other flavorful foods.

Crimson Turkey Harvest

The picture below was taken this past spring when colorful native “sunflower” balsamroot set the hillside overlooking our Palouse Colony Farm ablaze in vibrant yellow and greens. The brown summer-fallow field covering the lower flat now hosts a fine crop of golden Scots Bere barley, the “grain that gave beer its name.” This ancient variety has grown in the northern British Isles since at least the 4th century AD when it was likely introduced by Roman legionnaires sent north to occupy the region.

Arrowhead Balsamroot overlooking Palouse Colony Farm

Although we transport our grain to a cleaning and storage facility in the rural community of Thornton about eighteen miles northeast of the farm, grain handling modernization has recently come to our nearby hometown Endicott. In the early 1880s, Endicott was platted by the Oregon Improvement Company, a subsidiary of the Northern Pacific Railroad, on its strategic branch line that tapped the fertile Palouse 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. A complicated network of feeder lines then tapped the northern and southern parts of the region. Construction of the central line, known in the late 1800s as the Columbia & Palouse, led to use of heavier rail than along other tracks which came to be an important factor many decades later for upgrading regional grain shipping operations.

Whitgro Unit Train Loading Facility, Endicott, Washington

With the merger of local farmer Endicott and St. John grain storage cooperatives in recent years into a larger entity known as Whitgro, a decision was made to construct a new storage and train loading facility in Endicott since the line there had been constructed with rail weight capable of carrying 110-car unit trains. The project called for construction of seven new immense steel grain silos to be located adjacent to a series of several other larger ones which brought total capacity in Endicott to approximately 3,100,000 bushels. The new storage facility was designed for rapid one-day loading of the trains which are capable of holding 100 tons of grain per car for a combined unit capacity of 420,000 bushels. Grain is trucked to town from farms and other elevators in all directions for shipment downline to tiny Hooper and then on to Portland for shipment worldwide. Work commenced on the enormous project last fall and the facility became operational just in time for this year’s bountiful harvest. The two R. R. Hutchison photographs below show grain storage at Endicott about 1910 when men worked long hours to carefully arrange 110 pound sacks along the railroad in tall stacks and in wide wooden flat-houses. Makes one grateful for trucks and augers.

The McCormick Reaper

I couldn’t help but smile at the special childhood memory brought to mind recently when local historian Manton Bailie, lifelong resident and farmer in rural community of Mesa, Washington, showed me some old farm equipment in rusty retirement at this place. When Manton told me about playing on the old horse-powered mechanical reaper it instantly brought back memories of my own Palouse Country boyhood. Although the old McCormick reapers on the hillside above our house had largely been invaded by the branches of cherry tree, a skinny youth could still wiggle down between wooden draper roll and outside iron wheel and dream of driving a tank.

Edwin Fulwider, Manton Poe (Manton Bailie’s grandfather of Mesa, Washington), The Ford Times (September, 1953)

The effectiveness of mechanical reapers like Manton’s and my grandfather’s equipment led to their widespread use throughout the country and subsequent improvements further reduced the need for rural laborers and rendered traditional field gleaning virtually impossible. While some loss of kernels took place as grain heads could shatter from the reaper’s wooden reel paddles, the stalks were effectively captured to be bound, carted, and threshed. But the ancient grain varieties native to Europe for thousands of years and introduced to the New World as early as the 1500s remained essentially unchanged until twentieth century plant genetics spawned hybridized cultivars resistant to shattering and lodging. The inexorable shift to technological modernity eclipsed eons of social and economic relationships that had guided human endeavor since the beginning of recorded history.

Reaping in the Olden Time; Above: Reaping in Our Time (1857)

“Reaping at Syracuse,” Harper’s Weekly (August 1, 1857)

The momentous tilt that brought greater productivity can be dated with some specificity through art and literature from the period. Explicit depiction of the new horse-power order was shown graphically in an August, 1857, issue of Harper’s Weekly. The unattributed author and artist depicted a gathering during the previous week of the influential U. S. Agricultural Society near Syracuse, New York. Crowds had surrounded a grain field there to witness a competition among ninety-five different mechanical reapers. A grand parade of contestants preceding the event led through an impressive castle façade adorned with colorful flags and banners casting mythic significance on the mechanical marvels, jousting drivers, and patron inventors.

“…[T]he days of the sickle are over,” proclaimed the reporter, who advised readers, “Lay it up—the old tool—in a museum, on a fair cushion; label it, number it, …for the time is coming when the sickle will be as rare as the headsman’s axe or the Spanish blunderbuss. We must have a machine like a steam-engine, with two horses to draw it, which shall tear devastatingly through a field of oats or wheat, cut ten feet wide of grain at a stroke, and lay it all ready for sheaving.” The advent of this “startling mechanical enterprise” would lead to the manufacture of an estimated 200,000 machines the following year, with one of the biggest beneficiaries of such land office business being the manufacturer of the Syracuse contest’s gold medal winner—the McCormick’s Reaper.