Daily Bread, Liberty, and the Orphans of Ukraine

Ethos Stone Mill Ukrainian Grain Loaves
Richland, Washington

If you’ve ever eaten a slice of bread you can thank Ukraine. That’s not an exaggeration. The flavorful grains that transformed the North American prairies during the nineteenth century into a continental breadbasket were varieties native to Ukraine’s famed Black Earth districts of Crimea and Galicia.  To be sure, Americans had previously consumed something called bread, but virtually all colonial and early American wheats were soft white and red varieties that made exceedingly dense loaves and are used today for scones, biscuits, and pancakes. The pedigree of most any modern hard kernel bread wheat can be traced back to famous “Turkey Red” and “Scotch Fife” that actually have nothing to do with Turkey or Scotland. Through happenstance of pioneer delivery and cartographic misunderstanding, Ukraine’s proper claim as historic and contemporary provisioner to the world is often overlooked.

Putin’s campaign to annex substantial portions of its peaceful southern neighbor is inflicting trauma upon its residents on a scale unprecedented since World War II in a twisted quest to restore some semblance of great power status. Today Ukraine’s annual production of some thirty million tons of wheat accounts for 12% of the global export supply. Together with Russia’s output, annual wheat production of the two countries exceeds the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Australia combined and represents one-third of world wheat exports. Ukraine is a leading supplier to Moldova, Lebanon, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Indonesia to which deliveries are now at risk. As a result of the present conflict grain prices have soared. Much was made by Kremlin spokesmen before the outbreak of war about the need to reaffirm a broader Slavic cultural solidarity from western influence. But in the wake of Russia’s declining population and moribund economy, Ukraine’s agricultural bounty has surely been an important factor in Putin’s malevolent calculus.

This is not the first time that someone has terrorized the inhabitants of the fertile steppes. Russian demographers have documented how the murderous calamities of Stalin claimed more innocent lives than did Hitler. None was more horrific than the 1932-1933 Holodomor when as many as ten million peasants were starved to death in southern Russia during Stalin’s campaign to expropriate grain for Russia’s industrial cities to the north. No greater genocide has taken place in modern times, and the experience remains a searing legacy among Ukrainians. In 1930 and 1931, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty wrote from the comfort of his Moscow apartment in flattering terms about Kremlin initiatives to modernize the Russian economy. He also pointed out that leaders in the United States and Great Britain had not appreciated Stalin’s genius. Duranty even received a Pulitzer in 1932 for his series on the Bolshevik Revolution which he composed against the backdrop of show trials in Moscow that led to the imprisonment and mass executions of Stalin’s rivals.

Enter essentially unknown but courageous young Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who decided to do more than parrot official accounts of conditions in Ukraine after hearing rumors of catastrophe. At great risk to his own safety, Jones donned the clothes of a Soviet commoner and journeyed by rail to Ukraine in the spring of 1933 where he witnessed unimaginable carnage and reported it to a skeptical world press. Once bustling villages were eerily silent except for the occasional cry of children, imposing church edifices had been boarded up on orders from above by burly militiamen who forbade public worship. Within two years Jones himself would be executed in likely retaliation by the Soviet secret police for daring to write the truth. Since Putin’s rise to power, at least forty-four Russian journalists investigating his doings have been murdered, as have numerous political rivals. The ministries of evangelically minded Russian Orthodox leaders in the spirit of martyred priest Alexander Menn have also been significantly obstructed.

Those of us with ancestral ties to the region recall stories of family elders’ distress that the emerging evidence of evil in the 1930s seemed lost on so many fellow Americans. Our grandparents recalled the feeling of helplessness when they gathered with neighbors after Sunday church services to read the latest news from relatives who remained in Russia. We have kept these yellowed pages all these decades as reminders to never take freedom for granted, to help others in dire straits, and to affirm inconvenient truths. One of our letters from that time reads: To begin with, we send you greetings in the name of the Holy Spirit. I will let you know that we are without parents. Where they are is unknown to us [and] only to God. We think they received the same treatment as others so is very bitter for us children. Will you not take mercy on us because we are lost children and will not be long on this earth. …Please send us help because we are orphans.

Our elders did send help that made all the difference for those who managed against human odds to survive and build a new life in the aftermath of famine, war, and the USSR’s eventual collapse in 1991. I was in Russia numerous times that year and afterward in response to overtures from the Russian Academies of Sciences and Education to establish faculty and student exchanges between universities in Russia and Ukraine and members of the U. S. Consortium of Christian Colleges and Universities. Dozens of these relationships flourished until Putin rose to prominence. Under his oppressive regime such relationships summarily ended as well as the collaborative social services programs they had fostered to address the challenges of foster care and orphanhood in our countries.

Vibrant democratic initiatives and educational exchanges did continue in Ukraine. I traveled to Crimea in the summer of 2010 for meetings on global orphan care and was amazed by the vibrancy of life in the capital city of Simferopol. My gracious hosts were local residents who expressed hope for the future under Ukraine’s nascent democracy. They smiled, talked of prospect for better lives, and enjoyed relationships with Americans and other Europeans. We drove south across the undulating expanse of recently harvested grainlands to the historic Black Sea port of Sevastopol where a double row of massive steel silos glistened alongside ships being loaded for delivery worldwide. Our conversation turned to opportunities for service that would have been impossible before Ukraine’s independence. Now after three decades an unprecedented interfaith consortium of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant church leaders was forming an indigenous “Ukraine Without Orphans” (UWO) movement to find caring homes in-country for Ukraine’s 30,000 adoptable orphans.

The number seemed staggering, but “UWO” was no mere slogan. Sasha, Marina, and my other new friends were seriously committed to a nation without orphans. They found inspiration in a theme verse about seemingly overwhelming odds: “There is a lad here with five barley loaves and two fish, but what are these for so many people?” (John 6:9). If divine provision could feed 5,000 using an anonymous lad’s unselfish offering, why couldn’t a nation without orphans be possible? (And perhaps, they wondered aloud, a “World Without Orphans”?) To this end the UWO consortium soon grew to involve 400 churches of all confessions in Ukraine as well as 110 public and charitable organizations that included a presidentially appointed Commission for Children’s Rights.

As a result of this commitment and as a percentage of its population, no nation on earth has accomplished more to address orphanhood in the last decade than Ukraine. In 2010 Ukrainians adopted 2,247 orphans while 1,202 were adopted internationally, and by 2015 the total number of in-country adoptions since 2010 reached 11,300. By 2021 the number of children eligible for adoption had fallen to 4,920 for a dramatic 83% reduction of adoptable orphans. (In Ukraine as elsewhere, significant numbers of children have been in residential care who have at least one adult who retains parental rights.) UWO leaders pledged to not rest until all such children had been placed in caring homes, and their dedicated efforts attracted the attention of care givers worldwide. Their inspiring example helped launch “Without Orphan” movements elsewhere in Europe as well as in Africa, Asia, and South America, and has also contributed to improved foster care initiatives in the U. S. and Canada.

The tragic aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now threatens to undo the remarkable progress UWO childcare providers have made and has greatly complicated conditions for orphans and vulnerable children. Ukraine’s unfolding national nightmare is also presenting Americans with fundamental choices about civic and moral responsibility given the consequences of our own domestic politics and foreign repercussions. Authoritarian rulers of the past century like Stalin, Hitler, and now Putin have zealously applied the propagandistic “Big Lie” approach to obscure their nefarious intentions. Hitler blamed the Jews, Stalin blamed peasant farmers, and Putin astoundingly is blaming Nazis. Historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny (2017) of cardinal lessons we should have learned from 20th century experience. Number 10 reads: “Believe in Truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” 

We must brace for the fallout of economic dislocation that will test the mettle of any who subscribe to core principles of liberty and justice for all. They aren’t free. Standing in solidarity with Ukrainian freedom fighters will come at a cost. “Give me liberty or give me death!” can be easily thought or shouted, but the events of the past century have abundantly shown that American freedom and prosperity is inextricably linked to the wellbeing of like-minded nations throughout the world. Americans aren’t being asked to put their lives on the line in Ukraine, but we will pay more for a gallon of gas and loaf of that bread with Ukrainian roots.

Both courageous and vainglorious voices have been raised in the drama that is being played out on the world stage these dark days. The courageous promote the general welfare of the community, nation, and world. They have names like Zelensky and Blinken, and those who have been prime movers in the Ukraine Without Orphans movement like Sasha and Marina of A Family for Every Orphan. The people of Ukraine, whose harvests have long been blessed as daily bread for millions throughout the world, now need our support as they face a humanitarian disaster that may well drag on.

Facing invasion from the north in ancient times by powerful aggressor Assyria, the Prophet Isaiah asked how the religious might live out their faith. He answered: “Share your bread with the hungry and provide the wanderer with shelter” (Isaiah 58:7). Patriots young and old of Ukraine who have hosted our visits are putting their lives on the line for faith and freedom. They have shown me up at gatherings by loudly singing from memory all six verses of the Woody Guthrie classic, “This Land Is Your Land” about the “sun come shining” and “wheat fields waving.” They also know the somber refrain sung throughout the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, Gospodi, pomiluy—"Lord have mercy.” Let us pray that it may it be so, and instead of complaint that good hearts here and abroad will help sustain their deliverance.

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Dr. Richard Scheuerman resides in Richland, Washington, and is a founding board member of A Family for Every Orphan, which promotes indigenous adoption in Ukraine and a dozen other countries. A longtime school administrator and professor emeritus of education at Seattle Pacific University, he is also author of Hardship to Homeland: Pacific Northwest Volga Germans, and Harvest Heritage, a history of agriculture and heirloom crops. Please consider a one-time donation to A Family for Every Orphan’s Operation Harvest Hope fund.

A Medieval Bread Buffet in the Tri-Cities!

Thanks to our Palouse Heritage crop plots tended by a dedicated group of local school students, we were able to supply some heritage bread wheat flour to legendary baker Angela Kora at Ethos Bakery in Richland. Angela has kindly provided her incredibly flavorful creations for museum events and we enjoy visiting with her about agrarian traditions from long ago (see below). Responsibility for care of the fields from seed time to harvest through the centuries substantially rested with young adults and older children. Villages from Eastern Europe to the British Isles were generally synonymous with a single religious parish and many inhabitants shared ties of kinship that fostered social cohesion. But responsibilities and obligations rested with family units to care for the land. To be sure, all able-bodied workers of both genders were deployed during the crucial weeks of harvest, and important roles were also assigned to older children and elders to care for the youngest and provision reapers and binders. But prevailing economic norms that tied family units to individual holdings, tenancies, and leases limited greater cooperative economic development.

Angela Kora, head baker at Ethos Bakery in Richland, WA

Ethos Bakery Bounty

The wider availability of cereals led to greater specialization in food production. As early as the 1360s records from the Poitou region of central France reveal the grading of four types of wheat bread likely typical in other parts of Western Europe: superior white choyne made from sifted flour of highest quality and salted, unsalted choyne (Russian krupichataya), high extract reboulet likely made from approximately 90% whole flour with the heaviest bran removed (Russian sitnaya), and unsifted, whole grain safleur bread (Russian resheto).

Commoners also made coarse flour from barley, rye, and oats for flavorful, dense breads, and remained faithful into modern times to old culinary traditions using toasted grains for an array of such nutritious soups and porridges as Italian polenta (barley), Brittany grou (buckwheat), Russian kasha (rye), and Scottish porridge (oats). Raw grain was commonly stored in well-built wooden chests (known as “hutches” or “arks” in Britain) that rested upon the kitchen or pantry floor.

“What is Art?”

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, Wheat Field with a Reaper (1888), Van Gogh Museum

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.

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 their 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 engender struggle and beauty by depicting meaningful ideas or memorable associations with 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.

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, considerations of Ruth and Boaz, Barbizon harvesters, and Port William farmers continue to offer meaningful interpretations of land use, technology, 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)

Northwest Colonial Festival — Heritage Grains under the Big Top

The Northwest’s Olympic Peninsula is famous for hosting continental America’s only rain forest which averages about 150 inches of annual precipitation. That fact might make ocean-side grain culture there a hopeless prospect, but far from it on the dry and sunny north side of the Olympic Mountains. To the contrary, the imposing mountains shelter the vicinity of Sequim, Washington, from the region’s prevailing southwesterly winds to create a rain shadow effect causing only about fifteen inches of rain to fall in that area. The peculiar semi-arid climate combined with fertile landscape create ideal conditions for raising wheat, barley, and oats. Match the geography with the patriotic dream of Dan and Jan Abbot to build a full-scale replica of Mt. Vernon as a five star bed and breakfast and you get… the spectacular George Washington Inn.

Barley Field near Sequim on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula (2018)

The Abbots have been friends of Palouse Heritage since we first met several years ago at one of the WSU Grain Gathering conferences. Dan shares our interest in health and history and wanted to learn about the crops of America’s Colonial Era in order to provide a “living history” experience to visitors to the Inn. He might not have expected them to harvest the crop, but thought that establishing test plots with actual varieties that once grew at places like Mt. Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello would be a fascinating project. And so was launched a partnership between Dan, the WSU Bread Lab in nearby Burlington, and Palouse Heritage.

British Army Reenactors approach the George Washington Inn (Mt. Vernon)

The third annual Northwest Colonial Festival was held at the Inn this past August with hundreds of visitors attending a series of special events and reenactor encampments of British regulars and American patriots. Along with demonstrations of tool making, cooking, printing, weaving, and other traditional crafts, the August sunshine brought the landrace grain plots to maturity. Many of the guests gathered under an enormous tent where longtime WSU senior agronomist Steve Lyon and I teamed up to tell about the various varieties and discuss the challenges and benefits of heritage grain production. Several once prominent early American grains like Virginia White and Red May also made their way to the Pacific Northwest by the late 1800s, and seeing bountiful stands again wave in the seaside breeze presents scenes worthy of a painting.

Three (Colonial) Musketeers

Early American Mediterranean Red Wheat Test Plot

One of the winter wheats planted last fall, Mediterranean Red, yielded terrifically and represents a remarkable chapter in the history of American agriculture. Most folks are familiar with the story of Hessian troops from Germany being used as mercenaries to fight for the British during the Revolutionary War. Many agricultural historians believe that these soldiers brought more with them to the Colonies that love of schnapps and sauerkraut. It seems that a tiny pernicious pest that came to be known as the Hessian fly likely arrived with the hay and grain brought over to provision the soldiers livestock. This insect wrought enormous havoc on cereal grains that had long been raised in North America, and local news and correspondence of George Washington and other farmers from the era is full of news about the calamity that ensured which threatened the food supply. Fortunately for the new nation, enterprising “farmer improvers” introduced Mediterranean Red which seemed to have a natural resistance to infestation. Scientists today study the remarkable genetic diversity of landrace grains that developed in locales throughout the world for millennia and continue to exhibit valued traits for hardiness, yield, and flavor.

Bridget Baker, Olympic Gold (oil on canvas, wheat field near Sequim), Palouse Heritage Collection

Hands to Harvest! “Bringing in the Sheaves” in 2018

Few words conjure up richer connotations of summertime, country life, and abundance than harvest. During the past three weeks we have commenced harvesting our Palouse Heritage grains and are pleased to report excellent quality and yield. Ever being interested in matters of origin, I decided to investigate the derivation of the word “harvest,” and learned that it is derived from German Herbst (autumn). That word in turn descends from a root shared by Latin carp- (“to gather”) and Greek karpos (“fruit”). “Harvest” in the sense of reaping grain and other crops came into vernacular use during the medieval era of Middle English.

Palouse Heritage Yellow Breton Wheat Harvest near Connell, Washington (July, 2018)

Likely due to the light color of a wheat kernel’s interior endosperm, the word “wheat” in many European languages meant “white,” as with Old English whete, Welsh gwenith, and German weizzi. The Latin term “gladiators,” hordearii, literally means “barley eaters” since they subsisted on high energy foods like barley, oatmeal, and legumes. Roman legionaries were routinely outfitted with sickles in order to procure their livelihood throughout the far flung empire, and probably used them more often that their weapons. The helical frieze on Trajan’s Column in Rome (c. 110 AD) features a dynamic group scene of soldiers in full uniform harvesting waist-high grain with prodigious heads.

These days we don’t need to rely on sickles and legionnaires to bring in the crop. Good friends like Brad Bailie of Lenwood Farms near Connell, Washington, raise bountiful crops of organic Palouse Heritage varieties like Crimson Turkey and Yellow Breton. The latter is a soft red variety native to the northern France where for generations it was used for the prized flour essential for flavorful crepes. Farther to the northeast in the vicinity of Endicott, Washington, our longtime friends Joe DeLong and Chuck Jordan are harvestings stands of Palouse Heritage Red Fife, a famous bread grain originally from Eastern Europe, Sonoran Gold wheat, and Scots Bere barley that has become one of the most sought-after craft brewing malt grains.

Although there are some variations in climate and soil across the inland Pacific Northwest, this fertile region lies within the great arc of the Columbia River’s “Big Bend” easily identified on any map. While reading through some old newspapers recently I encountered the following poem titled “The Big Bend” by Louis Todd that was published in 1900. Little else is known about Todd’s life, but his literary expressions here make it clear he greatly appreciated this land of harvest time “golden splendor.”

No other river to the ocean

   Will a tale like thine unfold,

Of the wealth seen in thy travels;

   Of the wealth thy borders hold;

For thy thoughts the grandeur bear,

   And thy breath the sweetness breathes,

Of the boundless fields and forests,

   Of the richly laden trees.

And there grows within thy roaring

   All the fairest of the vine;

Luscious fruits in clusters hanging

   From the north and southern clime.

Great fields of wheat in golden splendor,

   Waving like a mighty sea,

Holding safe their precious treasure

   ’Till the grain shall ripened be.

Where nature works with freest hand,

   Builds her greatest work of art,

Will the feeble life of man

   There most smoothly play its part.

Oh, leave the dreary course you travel,

   Spurn the rocky path you go,

Join again your life with Nature,

   Where the fragrant flowers grow.

Palouse Heritage Red Fife Wheat Harvest (July, 2018)

Zane Grey’s The Desert of Wheat (Part 3)

This post is the first of a three-part series about Zane Grey, the father of the modern Western novel, who spent time in Eastern Washington in the early 1900s to write his agrarian-themed novel The Desert of Wheat.

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Grey’s novel relates the tragic end of protagonist Kurt Dorn’s father, Chris, who collapses while fighting a crop fire. While recovering from the loss and challenge of bringing in his grain from the field, Kurt is unexpectedly greeted by “a wonderful harvest scene.” Neighbors from all around his home gather for a grand threshing bee to complete the harvest. Grey cleverly uses this special “American” event—commonly seen in rural areas for families in distress, to describe the complicated and labor-intensive process of grain harvesting operations in an era of horse- and steam-power. Kurt arose to see “the glaring gold of the wheat field… crisscrossed everywhere with bobbing black streaks of horses—bays, blacks, whites, and reds; by big, moving painted machines, lifting arms and puffing straw; by immense wagons piled high with sheaves of wheat, lumbering down to the smoking engines and the threshers….” Few other novelists provide such colorful and detailed narration of the harvesting sequence from cutting by combine and reaper to threshing and hauling the year’s precious yield to storage:

First Kurt began to load bags of wheat, as they fell from the whirring combines…. For his powerful arms a full bag, containing two bushels, was like a toy for a child. With a lift and a heave he threw a bag into a wagon. They were everywhere, these brown bags, dotting the stubble field, appearing as if by magic in the wake of the machines. They rolled off the platforms.

…From that he progressed to a seat on one of the immense combines, where he drove twenty-four horses. No driver there was any surer than Kurt of his aim with the little stones he threw to spur a lagging horse. …[H]e liked the shifty cloud of fragrant chaff, now and then blinding and choking him; and he liked the steady, rhythmic tramps of hooves and the roaring whir of the great complicated machine. It fascinated him to see the wide swath of nodding wheat tremble and sway and fall, and go sliding up into the inside of that grinding maw, and come out, straw and dust and chaff, and a slender stream of gold filling the bags.

A Northwest Harvest Scene Postcard, c. 1910, Palouse Heritage Collection

With the successful completion of harvest providing payment on the farm’s mortgage (Kurt sought no favors from Lenore’s sympathetic landlord father) and resolution of further WWI turmoil, young Dorn finally feels free to enlist in the army. Following basic training in the East, he is transported to the front lines in France where he experiences the brutalities of war. Grey paints the ugliness of battle in vivid terms that also express the wastefulness of violent conflict. While an ardent patriot who decried foreign aggression, Grey also uses dialogue and description to relate the horrific long-term consequences of war for survivors frequently overlooked in contemporary press accounts. The injuries Dorn incurs going over the top of a trench amidst machine-gun fire, panic, gas-shelling, and bombardment nearly end his life. The scene is less heroic than nauseous in “pale gloom, with spectral forms,” and death. He returns home as a broken man haunted by hideous dreams and devoid of hope for the future. Once again the abiding power of love and land shown through Lenore in their native fields of Columbia grain bring forth meaning and restoration:

Then clearly floated to him a slow sweeping rustle of the wheat. Breast-high it stood down there, outside his window, a moving body, higher than the gloom. That rustle was the voice of childhood, youth, and manhood, whispering to him, thrilling as never before. …The night wind bore it, but life—bursting life was behind it, and behind that seemed to come a driving and mighty spirit. Beyond the growth of the wheat, beyond its life and perennial gift, was something measureless and obscure, infinite and universal.

Suddenly he saw that something as the breath and the blood and the spirit of wheat—and of man. Dust and to dust returned they might be, but this physical form was only the fleeting inscrutable moment on earth, spring up, giving birth to seed, dying out for that ever-increasing purpose which ran through the ages.

With the completion of The Desert of Wheat in 1918 and lucrative contracts from Harper’s for future works, Grey and his wife, Dolly, relocated from Pennsylvania to southern California in 1920 and acquired a Spanish-Mediterranean Revival mansion near Pasadena. He had long been an avid outdoorsman, and his financial success led to worldwide fishing expeditions and support of conservation efforts. Although one of America’s most prominent authors, Grey had still harbored doubts about his continued capacity for creative writing. But the recent Western travels and popular acclaim for The Desert of Wheat fostered renewed commitment and a turning point in his career. His journal entry of February 16, 1918 records, “…[M]y study and passion shall be directed to that which I have already written best—the beauty and color and mystery of great spaces, of the open, of Nature and her wild moods.”

The commercial success of Grey’s books led in 1920 to his formation of a motion picture company, Zane Grey Productions. The company released a silent movie version of The Desert of Wheat which played in theatres nationwide as Riders of the Dawn. He eventually sold the company to Paramount Studios but continued writing short stories novels for the rest of his life and consulted for later Hollywood productions of dozens of films based on his books.

Paxton Farrar, “Zane Grey House” from Starry Night (2016)

The Desert of Wheat also inspired Paxton Farrar’s award-winning 2016 short film Starry Night funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Farrar cited “the vastness of the landscapes” and “melancholic romance that permeates the land” as important cinematic influences. In Farrar’s presentation the main character is a young woman who seeks escape from small town life  to pursue her passion to become an astronomer. The film’s starlit scenes evoke young Dorn’s evening soliloquy as he surveys the cosmos and expresses an eloquent philosophy of life uncharacteristic of a Western novel: “Material things—life, success—such as had inspired Kurt Dorn, on this calm night lost their significance and were seen clearly. They could not last. But the wheat there, the hills, the stars—they would go on with their task. …[S]elf-sacrifice, with its mercy, succor, its seed like the wheat, was as infinite as the stars.” Whether returning to familiar Southwest scenes and frontier action for new novels, or while sailing to the South Pacific, Grey’s time on the Columbia Plateau left a favorable and enduring impression.

Comparing Old and New Grain Varieties

This post will highlight some of the points I have presented at recent gatherings like the Spokane Farm & Food Expo and the WSU Grain Gathering at The Bread Lab in Mt. Vernon.

Richard and WSU/Mt. Vernon Agronomist Steve Lyon leading heritage grains field trip tour; Mt. Vernon, Washington (August 2017)

This past June my wife, Lois, and I led a tour of the Baltic countries which provided an opportunity to see first-hand American and European farming systems and to meet agronomists from abroad. Of course agriculture in any single nation is an exceedingly diverse enterprise, so meaningful comparisons invariably require considerable explanation and generalization. At the same time, trends in nutrition and crop production are evident in important studies conducted in places like the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alarp. 

Savijäri Organic Grain and Livestock Farm
Porvoo, Finland (2017)

Cereal researchers there conducted chemical analysis using plasma spectrometry on several hundred spring and winter wheats. In order to determine nutritional variations among the genotypes, these were divided into groups including primitive “pre-wheats” like emmer, landrace “heritage” grains like we raise at Palouse Colony Farm, old cultivars (1900-1960s releases/hybrids), and new cultivars (varieties released since 1970). The grains were grown at several locations in Sweden and under organic conditions in order to provide comparative results without influence of synthetic soil amendments, herbicides, or other chemical inputs. Results of the study were published in “Mineral Composition of Organically Grown Wheat Genotypes” in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (September 2010) and indicate substantial variation among the various groups. 

Primitive and landrace grains were found to have the highest concentrations of the most minerals with selections highest in manganese, phosphorus, and selenium. Landrace wheats showed the highest concentration of calcium and high levels of boron and iron. Spelts were highest in sulfur and high in copper. The Alnarp researchers suggest that the negative correlation between recent cultivars and mineral density indicated in their study and similar investigations elsewhere is likely due to a dilution effect given the increased yield of most modern varieties. In other words, available minerals are dispersed more widely so require higher amounts of food to receive similar amounts. Another factor may be the deeper root systems of pre-wheats and landrace grains which enable the plant to tap minerals available at greater depth. 

These studies indicate that mineral levels in whole grain kernels depend on absorption in the soil by the plant’s roots and subsequent redistribution to the kernels through vegetative tissues that are also influenced by photosynthesis. Higher chlorophyll content, for example, is positively correlated to iron concentration, as is availability of nitrogen which facilitates photosynthesis. The Alnarp study also indicates that grain type is more influential than location for mineral content in primitive grains. Finally, growing environments significantly contribute to variations for others, and high organic matter and increased soil pH also favor mineral concentration. 

Research by cereal chemists and soil scientists are contributing to new understandings of the complex biological systems that contribute to healthy crops and people. We at Palouse Heritage look forward to sharing news with you about this vital work and doing our part to promote health, heritage, and rural renewal.  

The Bread Lab, WSU/Mt. Vernon

Bill Gates visiting the Bread Lab

Heritage Grain Friends (l to r): German Miller Wolfgang Mock, San Francisco Episcopal Agrarian Chaplain Elizabeth DeRuff, Richard, WSU Agronomist Steve Lyon, New York Artist Katherine Nelson, OSU Cereal Chemist Andrew Ross