More Supply Chain Disruptions Threaten Global Food Security

In a world increasingly fraught with geopolitical tensions and supply chain disruptions, local and regional food systems are proving to be crucial buffers against these risks. A recent Financial Times article, "Local Food Systems: A Buffer Against Global Food Insecurity," highlights the resilience that localized food networks provide in maintaining food security. As global trade faces unprecedented challenges, the ability to produce and distribute food closer to home is becoming ever more critical.

The article discusses how reliance on global supply chains for staple foods makes nations vulnerable to geopolitical conflicts, trade restrictions, and climate-induced disruptions. By contrast, local and regional food systems offer a more stable and secure alternative. These systems are less likely to be affected by international disputes and can adapt more quickly to local conditions and needs. The decentralization of food production and distribution not only enhances food security but also supports local economies and reduces the environmental footprint associated with long-distance food transport.

At Palouse Heritage, we have long championed the benefits of local and regional food systems. Our dedication to cultivating heritage grains in the Palouse region reflects a commitment to sustainability and resilience. By focusing on local production, we ensure that our grains are not only of the highest quality but also contribute to the stability and self-sufficiency of our community. This approach aligns with the insights from the Financial Times article, reinforcing the idea that local food systems are a vital part of a robust and secure food supply chain.

The current global landscape underscores the importance of rethinking how we produce and distribute food. Investing in local and regional food systems is not just a strategy for resilience; it is a pathway to a more sustainable and secure future. As we continue to navigate these challenging times, Palouse Heritage remains committed to fostering a resilient food system rooted in local traditions and practices!

New Research Uncovers Immense Value from Old Wheat Varieties

A treasure trove of century-old wheat varieties holds the promise of restoring long-lost traits that modern agriculture has nearly forgotten. A recent article from Science.org highlights the exciting potential these heirloom grains possess, offering new pathways for breeders seeking to enhance resilience and nutritional value in contemporary wheat. This discovery is not just a nod to our agricultural past but a beacon for future sustainability.

In the early 20th century, wheat varieties were incredibly diverse, each adapted to specific regional conditions. Over the years, however, the drive for higher yields led to a narrowing of this genetic pool, often sacrificing traits like disease resistance and nutritional content. The Science.org article delves into how researchers are now turning back the clock, mining these ancient grains for the genetic diversity needed to combat modern agricultural challenges.

At Palouse Heritage, we celebrate this resurgence of interest in heritage grains, which aligns perfectly with our mission to preserve and promote these ancient varieties. Our own work with landrace grains reflects the rich agricultural legacy of the Palouse region, where traditional farming methods and heirloom seeds come together to produce crops that are both flavorful and resilient. The insights from the Science.org article underscore the importance of these efforts, highlighting how historical knowledge and modern science can synergize to benefit both farmers and consumers.

As we continue our journey at Palouse Heritage, we remain committed to honoring the wisdom of the past and resurrecting the amazing heritage grains that have helped sustained humanity for ages. The rediscovery of these century-old wheat varieties is a testament to the enduring value of agricultural biodiversity.

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.

Friends of the Land and Sustainable Agriculture (Part 2)

Commenting on a 1950s summertime visit to Malabar Farm by the French Minister of Agriculture and sustainable farming advocates, Louis Bromfield observed, “Every good farmer is a mystic at heart and religious, but a good farmer’s mysticism and faith are founded upon the base of the earth itself, and so very different from what to me is that implausible mysticism of the detached spirit. I am Protestant enough and Anglo-Saxon enough to demand concrete results.” Bromfield concluded that biodynamic farming offers but “vague plans for a return to nature and a new agriculture,” ignores the benefit of modern machinery, and is blind to ill-fed world populations. At the same time, material gain and labor-saving devices are insufficient for meaning in life, “and if the spirit and nature itself are ignored, they lead only to the blind alley of defeat…. Mankind can do without plumbing, but not without St. Frances of Assisi.” Lord echoed the convictions and warning of his longtime friend in his last book, The Care of the Earth (1962). He emphasized the connectedness of a healthy biosystem to a flourishing society: “Man… is in dependent alliance with everything; …and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible chain, which binds together things most distant and most different.”

Through a range of literary, scientific, and political endeavors, Lord, Bromfield, Jerome Rodale, Wallace Stegner, and other influential voices in land stewardship raised important questions about agricultural production and notions of progress. Their work would give rise to a new era of environmental activism seen in the arts, public policy, and grassroots farmer initiatives. Publication of The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (1953) by political historian Grant McConnell (1915-1993) charted the conflict between the USDA’s Farm Security Agency and American Farm Bureau that led to government policies favoring larger producers and economic elites. McConnell’s research documented how New Deal, Grange, and Catholic Rural Life Conference initiatives aimed at preventing erosion and improving soil was overshadowed by other interests in the 1940s. The department’s broader public service and extension education mission shifted to commercial priorities while the Bureau launched mutual insurance programs and lobbying efforts. McConnell’s book documented the negligible effect of these changes on “common man” small farmer recovery and how the war economy enabled larger growers to increase their holdings and influence land-grant college agricultural research.

SARE Heritage Grain Plots (2017), Washington State University Bread Lab, Mt. Vernon, Washington

Columbia Heritage Collection Photograph

Tension between advocates of conventional farming methods using synthetic inputs and those promoting sustainable organic approaches has continued since the invention of artificial nitrogen in the early twentieth century. Productive dialogue took place in the late 1970s during the Carter administration when Secretary of Agriculture Robert Bergland formed the USDA Study Team on Organic Farming which was headed by alternative agriculture researcher Garth Youngberg and soil scientist Robert Papendick. Both men were familiar with Grant McConnell’s studies and conducted dozens of interviews with small farmers throughout America and in Europe and Japan who operated viable organic and other alternative production enterprises. The team released its Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming (1980) that included a series of practical recommendations to support production of organic heritage grains and other crops.

The study was strongly criticized by many conventional farming advocates within the department and commodity organizations. It did succeed, however, in establishing the USDA Office of Organic Resources Coordinator. Although the position was terminated soon afterward in the Reagan administration, Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy reestablished the office. Several of the 1980 report’s recommendations were subsequently implemented including creation of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition in 1988 and subsequent Sustainable Agriculture, Research, and Education (SARE) grants. Among numerous other initiatives, SARE funding has supported National Institute of Food and Agriculture programs to promote farm-themed arts education in public and private schools. Following his departure from the USDA, Garth Youngberg established the D.C.-based Institute for Alternative Agriculture and published The American Journal of Alternative Agriculture (now Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems). Robert Papendick directed the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service soil studies at Washington State University in Pullman where he also taught in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences.

Friends of the Land and Sustainable Agriculture (Part 1)

Ohio farmer and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Bromfield deeply loved farming as cooperative art in the classical sense of working in partnership with nature. He combined experience from a rural upbringing with agricultural studies at Cornell and in journalism at Columbia to author nineteen novels and eight books of non-fiction. Bromfield established Malabar Farm in 1939 on a thousand acres near his native Lucas, Ohio, to promote soil conservation, animal husbandry, and sustainable “permanent” farming. Bromfield explained his agricultural principles in a book named for the farm which had become an enormously popular tourist attraction and is now a state park and living history farm. Malabar Farm (1948), illustrated with woodcuts including scenes of wheat, oat, and corn harvest by Kate Lord, is based on Bromfield’s 1944 journal “written when the weather was bad and the work was light.” The book relates dinner table conversation and musings on a range of wartime economic issues, talk about Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton, “farmer religion,” and political constraint on human tendencies to exploit and do harm.

In 1940 writer-conservationist Russell Lord (1895-1964) and Bromfield founded the Society for the Friends of the Land, a non-profit advocacy organization to publish the quarterly journal The Land (1940-1954) and promote sustainable agriculture. Honorary members included venerable environmentalist prophet Liberty Hyde Bailey, Soil Conservation Service founding director Hugh Bennett, Aldo Leopold, and other leading figures. The group envisioned an interdisciplinary forum as relevant to agrarian affairs as Atlantic Monthly was to urban interests by offering an enriching humus of pragmatic and cultural perspectives. Edited and illustrated by the Lords from their farm near Bel Air, Maryland, The Land was published in Columbus, Ohio, for fifty-two issues under Bromfield’s oversight and featured short stories, articles on farming, science, politics, religion, and poetry. It became an influential voice for a permaculture based on “interdependent” biodiversity and multinational cooperation. The approach contrasted with developments in a world of nationalist rhetoric growing out of rising East-West tensions and the advent of controversial new technologies. Bromfield expressed the group’s hopes for the movement with allusion to emerging issues of the time in a membership appeal:

 Friends of the Land attempts to create an awareness in the minds of all our citizens of the importance to them of the wise use of our soil and water, and to provide a forum for all points and shades of opinion on conservation, to the end that the people themselves shall form their own opinions and take proper action. …There is a great revolution going on in American agriculture. This is being brought about by economic and population pressures, including increasingly high taxes, mounting labor costs and mechanization. These pressures make it imperative that the farmer who is to survive must adopt new and more efficient methods for the production of food, feed and fiber. …Friends of the Land would have our people see that forests, cover crops, grassland farming, inter-row cropping, stream flow, water power, transportation, commerce, and flood prevention are all tied together to promote our prosperity and to determine our standards of living and therefore our health and happiness.

Bromfield’s words underscore the holistic nature of the founding Friends perspectives against the backdrop of events that profoundly affected American farming. They reveal the emerging fault lines between a new order of global cooperation and sustainability envisioned under Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and Gifford Pinchot in contrast to unilateral approaches pursued under the Truman administration to increase production at home and unilaterally advance American foreign policy objectives. Despite misgivings over Wallace’s progressive advocacy, his concern over the militarization of science, and conciliatory attitude toward the Soviets, Truman retained him as a cabinet member for six months until Wallace delivered a speech in September 1945 advocating conciliation with the USSR. The new president had given Stalin the benefit of the doubt but Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and the specter of totalitarianism led to a fundamental shift in his thinking by 1947 and the beginning of the Cold War.

Truman’s pick for Secretary of Agriculture, Clinton Anderson (1895-1975), reorganized America’s post-World War II agricultural economy to increase domestic food production, alleviate global post-war shortages, and enter the foreign policy realm to counter communist tendencies in developing nations. New Deal initiatives in soil conservation, rural electrification, and other realms celebrated by WPA artists and authors gave way to government contracts with industry scientists, university researchers, and corporate laboratories. Discussion of the contest over the future wellbeing of the planet played out on the pages of The Land throughout the 1940s and early ‘50s. Bromfield and Lord contributed numerous articles as did other notable figures in conservation including Wallace Stegner, Paul Sears, and William Vogt. A collection of popular selections illustrated with Kate Lord’s woodcuts appeared in 1950 as Forever the Land: A Country Chronicle and Anthology.

While soliciting a range of viewpoints on domestic and world affairs, plant genetics, global population growth, and other topics of agrarian relevance, Lord and Bromfield expressed concerns over “quick buck” policies they feared would transform fields into factories and enlist technologies that risked unintended environmental consequences. During the war years, the USDA had suspended publication of the annual Yearbooks but released a 900-page compendium titled Science in Farming—The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1943-1947. In the new volume’s introduction, Secretary Anderson dismissed fears about DDT, genetic testing, and “[concern] that life be too abundant.” A generally favorable review of the book by The Land’s assistant editor James R. Simmons included some skepticism: “I decline to eat the bread that is no longer bread but a puffed-up something that has about as much flavor as ground peanut shells…. I can’t understand why it is necessary to grind the nourishment out of our grain and ship something that must be ‘enriched’ with chemicals before it is fit to nourish the human body.” Simmons also touched on recent national changes that were detrimental to rural vitality—interstate highways that bypassed smaller communities, centralized processing and marketing facilities, and a growing societal affluence that prized consumerism above conservation. The Land’s summer 1953 issue featured “The World Gets Warmer” by meteorologist Harry Wexler, one of the first widely published articles on the likelihood of climate change due to burning of fossil fuels. Bromfield wrote passionately about the dangers of militarism and the nuclear arms race other Land contributors warned of potential dangers from atmospheric testing of atomic bombs.