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.

Of Hackles and Scutching— Old World Flax for New World Linen

My granddaughters explaining flax and linen production to George Washington
Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

Last week our three granddaughters and their parents had the exciting opportunity to visit Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. The experience gave them an chance to dine at restaurants that serve from menus that would have been familiar to 18th century America visitors to the colony’s capital and immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of this special place. Several years ago our Palouse Colony Farm supplied Williamsburg’s Great Hope Plantation with the seed of grains like Red May and Virginia White that are known to have been grown in that region during the colonial period, and farmer Ed Schultz kindly hosted our family members for their recent visit. The farm was in the midst of flax harvest so visitors could participate in the kind of “living history” for which Williamsburg is famous, and their time included a memorable conversation with George Washington who surprised them with his extensive knowledge of his extensive Mt. Vernon farming operation.   

The girls had great fun splitting the fibrous plants in the first stage of turning flax into linen, and they learned some new vocabulary about the process. Their stories reminded me of interviews I had done years ago with community elders who had grown up on the Volga and knew this very work first-hand. Diminutive, cheery Mary Morasch and Mollie Bafus told of Old Country flax and hemp harvests and the laborious process of transforming the dried stalks into beautiful silvery-brown thread, yarn, and fabric.

These spring-sown crops were pulled out by the roots, tied into small bundles, and first broken down by either dew or soak retting. After drying workers then used a wooden “breaker” to crush the outer, brittle layer for separation with knives from the strands of soft inner bast that extend into the roots. After this peeling process (scutching) the threads were pulled through combs of thin, sharp prongs (hackling) to clean, split, and straighten the fibers. The long, hair-like threads were then spun and woven into three grades of fabric that was patiently boiled and sun-bleached to made into linen tablecloths and bedspreads, heavier work clothes, and coarse material for tents and sacks.

Puget Sound Flax Harvest (c. 1900)
Columbia Heritage Collection

In the 1890s Northwest farmers began experimenting with flax cultivation using plants and techniques introduced from Russia, Belgium, and Holland. Russian Riga and White Blossom Dutch were the most widely cultivated American varieties with vast acreages raised along Puget Sound and in the Willamette Valley. Substantial quantities were exported to Ireland and Scotland. While wistful at memories of life in the Old Country, our immigrant elders we knew did not paint a pastoral idyll. They had willingly left and were grateful to have come to America and Canada.

Volga German speech was heavily seasoned with Russian loanwords, especially in areas like our ancestral village that were located on the periphery of the colonial enclave and closer to ethnic Slavic settlements. Our immigrant elders’ word for granary, ambar, was from a Russian peasant term for barn, ambary, that is probably Persian and came to southern Russia through the region’s Tatar tribes. Like inhabitants of many rural communities, the Volga Germans were very clannish and residents of our people’s village divided it into the Galmucka and Totten sections. These names were derived from the native Buddhist Kalmyk and Muslim Tatar tribes.

Mary Morasch identified two plants used for processing into fabric—Höneft and Fabel, possibly localized Volga German terms for hemp and flax. Dominant Russian flax varieties of the era were Slanets (dew-retted) and Motchenets (water-retted). Lower Volga River production of colorful Sarpinka gingham from cotton was a thriving business originally established in the late 1700s by colonists from Sarepta near the Sarpa River. On Northwest American flax production origins, see A. W. Thornton, European System of Flax Culture Americanized and Adapted to Local Conditions of U. S. A., c. 1917.

Van Gogh’s Landscapes—Agrarian Beauty and Life’s Renewal

In Memory of Micala Hicks Siler (1978-2020)
Devoted Wife and Mother, Humanitarian, West Point Graduate and Soldier

“Van Gogh & European Landscapes” Exhibit Entry (March-September 2022)
Dayton Art Institute; Dayton, Ohio

This day dawned for us in Dayton, Ohio, while on a cross-country road trip to the East Coast and where we enjoyed the fellowship of longtime friends from the Siler and Hicks families who visited Palouse Colony Farm in 2018. Micala served as founding director of A Family for Every Orphan which has found caring homes for children in need inside their countries of origin in eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Since we are exploring sites of interest along the way during our trip, a chance viewing of the Dayton Art Institute’s website this week reported on a special exhibit of masterful paintings by prominent 19th century European landscapists. It included works from Vincent van Gogh’s acclaimed Wheatfield series—the great artist’s last creations. Although I had read about his remarkable life, I had never seen one of van Gogh’s landscapes in person so took advantage of our stay to do so.

Although Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) never met famed “painter of peasants” Jean Millet (1814-1875), he was familiar with the artist since working enthusiastically as a young man in his uncles’ print-dealer firm at The Hague. In 1875 van Gogh attended an 1875 Paris exhibition of Millet’s larger works which greatly impressed him. Van Gogh also studied religious prints by socially conscious Gustave Doré (1832-1883) and agrarian works by Jules Breton (1827-1906) like The Blessing of the Wheat and The Gleaner. He came to speak of Millet and Breton in the same breath as kindred spirits whose art he called “the voice of the wheat,” and found the form of a sheaf an “enchanting symbol” of the infinite.

A profound intellectual and prolific correspondent despite mental and physical ailments, van Gogh read Zola, Dickens, and the classics, studied Delacroix and Rembrandt, and acquired engravings by Millet and other artists. Soon after deciding to become an artist in 1880, he read Alfred Sensier’s influential biography, Le Vie et L’Oeuvre de Jean-François Millet. The young artist found revelatory meaning in its portrayal of Millet akin to his own search for meaning through a consilience of faith and art in the natural world. In van Gogh’s Noon: Rest from Work, after Millet (1890), poet Allen Braden viewed the revolutionary artist’s depiction of Ruth and Boaz “serene in their exhaustion” and a kind of noble statement “…on the balance / between art and whatever is perfectly ordinary.”

Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners (1857)
Oil on canvas, 33 x 44 inches
Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Wikimedia Commons

Through his older contemporaries’ romanticized depictions of peasant endeavor, van Gogh saw the primal values of stoic faith, dignified simplicity, and honorable toil. His supremely passionate landscapes and portraits are devoid of complicated narratives. Rather, van Gogh chose commoners and the commonplace to show forth the everyday glories of faces, fields, and flowers in ways never before expressed. These views he enveloped in exaggerated colors from light lemon to orange, Prussian blue, Veronese green, and other seasonal shades of that anticipated Modernism. Few Impressionists apart from Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), however, had painted peasants, and his “Independent” version represented serious regard for the sufferings of the poor which he understood to foreshadow the emerging era’s granulation of the individual.

Pissarro found the self-reliant ways of rural cooperatives to offer the most practical means of cultivating humanity. This relationship is seen in the laboring souls depicted with hopeful, well-tended terrains of blue greens, russets, and pale yellows of in his masterpieces The Harvest (1882) and The Gleaners (1889). Summer, from the Four Seasons series (1872-1873) painted for the dining room of his patron Achille Arosa, shows three approaching peasants in the center of the canvas who are dwarfed by a prodigious field of dappled bundles and standing grain beneath an immense blue sky. In contrast to traditional allegorical themes, Pissarro’s painting is without religious or other cultural symbolism in testimony to exquisite vernacular beauty.

Pissarro met van Gogh in Paris in 1887 and encouraged him to brighten his somber palette. Amidst the Provençal mistral winds in June 1888, van Gogh passionately painted a group of at least nine “Harvest” paintings which provided opportunity to experiment with technique and color. He worked quickly in the vicinity of Arles, often reveling in the heat of day, “just like the harvester, …intent only on the reaping,” and blended striking hues of gold, copper, and bronze with yellow, red, and brown. In a letter to his brother and abiding benefactor Theo the following June, van Gogh expressed special interest in the patchwork of green and yellow grain fields surrounding the town.

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with a Reaper (1889)
Oil on canvas, 28 ⅖ x 36 ½ inches
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Wikimedia Commons

While still in Provence the following July, van Gogh painted the lush expressionistic masterpiece Wheat Field with a Reaper that gleams with a swirling sea of grain in impastoed layers of yellow-orange with white highlights seen in many of his later Saint-Rémy paintings. A benevolent sun stands against a sky of aquamarine and seems to radiate from the canvas. The view is from the upper story of the building where van Gogh had sought recovery from depression and obsession, and shows the field’s gray-white boundary wall but without any sense of confinement. The painting was one among his final Harvest (Wheat Fields) ensemble of a dozen double-square, horizontal works that joined numerous other previously completed agrarian scenes including the masterpiece of harmonic yellows, creams, and greens featured in the Dayton exhibit, Field with Wheat Stacks.

The impassioned visionary 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. In describing another of his 1889 paintings, Evening: The End of Day, van Gogh made explicit reference to the influence of Millet’s Return from the Fields coupled with Breton’s verse “Return to the Fields” (which had been dedicated to Millet): “…The peasant twice browned / By the twilight and suntan / Forehead bathed in the pale light / Makes his way home, his labor done.”

The harmonious interweaving of van Gogh’s “ideal” religious faith and “real life” agrarian experience represented the mature spirituality the troubled artist had long been seeking. Art and religion—the lodestars of his life, converged in the fields beneath before him. Struggling to contain such revelation amidst the mundanity of daily affairs, he also realized its significance to art. Van Gogh’s embrace of a divinized nature celebrating spiritually aesthetic force swelled beyond his pastor father’s severe Protestant didacticism to embrace both humanity and the natural wonder of crops and trees and sky. He perceived the mission of preacher and painter alike to express the creative force evident in the humble truths of Christ’s parables and the expressive powers of form and color. Such grace pervades nature and everyday community experience without need for miracles, material possessions, or complicated doctrine.

Millet had become his “father” and “eternal master,” van Gogh had written to Theo in 1884, and had offered insight into his own motivation: “Painting peasant life is a serious business, and I for one would blame myself if I didn’t try to make pictures that could give rise to serious reflections in those who think seriously about art and life.” Van Gogh likened his sketches and studies to the sowing of seeds by a farmer but, “I long for harvest time” he explained to his brother, and labored over final works on canvas with knife and brush.

Van Gogh’s association of grain and sheaves with life suggested humanity’s vulnerability and resiliency. The passionate reds and golds of his art are composed in balanced synthesis with the greenery and browns of verdant earth. He complemented these colors by mysterious orange and blue tones of the cosmos—a palette strikingly seen in his The Resurrection of Lazarus (1890). Despite the susceptibility of grain 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.

Vincent van Gogh, Field with Wheat Stacks (1890)
Oil on canvas, 28 ⅖ x 36 ½ inches
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland

Van Gogh expressed these beliefs to his sister, Wilhelmina, from Saint-Rémy in the summer of 1889: “What else can one do, when we think of all the things we do not know the reason for, than go look at a field of wheat? The history of those plants is our own; for aren’t we, who live on bread, to a considerable extent like wheat, at least aren’t we forced to submit to growing like a plant without the power to move, by which I mean in whatever your imagination impels us, and to being reaped, when we are ripe, like the same wheat?” The comment foreshadowed the artist’s increasing vexation and demise in the face of his own troubled soul’s harvest. The reaper as death fulfilled the sower’s purpose in the grand mysterious cycle of life and death seen in van Gogh’s beatified landscape where the finite and infinite coalesce.

The farmer motif is a profound and vital expression of life’s purpose, with figures cast differently from the plodding toilers in Millet’s paintings. Van Gogh’s harvesters are proud and purposeful workers whose faces shine with the luminous golden light that surrounds them and the grain. Reapers go forth blending into the contoured fields, gathering wheat and clutching sheaves as if holy ritual to feed heart and soul. Farmers, fields, and firmament are seen in throbbing, vital wholeness. Some of his magnificent harvest compositions like soothing imperial yellow and lavender Sheaves of Wheat and one in the magnificent Dayton exhibit, Field with Wheat Stacks (July 1890), present arrangements of nodding bundles and piles of stalks as if tender family portraits.

The softer palette of van Gogh’s later works was influenced by his high regard for the paintings of Impressionist leader Claude Monet (1840-1926). In popular discourse such works have been considered objects of enjoyment more than understanding, but plein air landscapes by Monet and Pissarro are more than passive depictions of location and light. Impressionistic views often show “fields of vision” selected for particular forms like sheaves, rows, and stacks of powerful meaning for artist and viewer.        

Arles
Harvest at La Crau with Montmajour (June 1888) — VGM, Amsterdam
Haystacks in Provence (June 1888) — K-MM, Otterlo
Summer Evening in Arles (June 1888) — Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
Wheat Field (June 1888) — Private Collection
Wheat Field with the Alpilles Foothills (June 1888) — VGM, Amsterdam
Arles: View from the Wheat Fields (June 1888) — Musée Rodin, Paris
Wheat Field with Stacks (June 1888) — Private Collection
Wheat Field with Sheaves (June 1888) — Honolulu Museum of Art
Harvest in Provence (June 1888) — Israel Museum, Jerusalem
The Sower (at Sunset) (June 1888) — K-MM, Otterlo

Saint-Rémy
Wheat Field with Reaper and Sun (June 1889) — K-MM, Otterlo
Wheat Field with Cypresses (June 1889) — MMA, New York
Evening Landscape with Rising Moon (July 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
Wheat Field with Cypresses (September 1889) — National Gallery, London
Wheat Fields with Reaper at Sunrise (September 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
Peasant Woman Binding Sheaves (September 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
Reaper with Sickle (September 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
The Reaper, after Millet (September 1889) — Private Collection
The Thresher, after Millet (September 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
The Sheaf-Binder, after Millet (September 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
Wheat Field with Cypresses (September 1889) — Private Collection
Wheat Field Behind Hospital (December 1889) — VMFA, Richmond
Noon: Rest from Work (January 1890) — Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Auvers-Sur-Oise
Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers (June 1888) — Toledo Museum of Art
Wheat Fields near Auvers (June 1890) — Belvedere Gallery, Vienna
Peasant Woman Against Wheat (June 1890) — Private Collection
Wheat Field under Clouded Sky (July 1890) — VGM, Amsterdam
Wheat Fields at Auvers under Clouded Sky (July 1890) — Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh
Wheat Field with Crows (July 1890) — VGM, Amsterdam
Field with Wheat Stacks (July 1890) — FB, Riehen/Basel
Wheat Field with Cornflowers (July 1890) — FB, Riehen/Basel
The Fields (July 1890) — Private Collection
Wheat Fields with Auvers in Background (July 1890) — Private Collection
Sheaves of Wheat (July 1890) — Dallas Museum of Art 

Van Gogh Wheat Field Series Paintings, 1888-1890
FB: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland
K-MM: Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands
MMA: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

“Modern US Wheat Has Roots in Ukraine” - My Interview With NPR's The World

I (Richard) was recently contacted by Bianca Hillier from National Public Radio’s PRI The World national radio program. Given the current food crisis stemming from the conflict in Ukraine, she asked to interview me regarding our work with heritage grains that have ancestral ties to that region. Our conversation ended up lasting over forty-five minutes as we covered a range of related topics, including our recent charitable work in Ukraine. For time’s sake, she could not include our full discussion in the show’s finalized segment (which you can listen to here). However, I wanted to share more of my comments from our conversation here in case it would be of further interest to any of our readers.

As further background, The World is public radio’s longest-running daily global news program. Their goal is to engage domestic US audiences with international affairs through human-centered journalism that consistently connects the global to the local and builds empathy for people around the world. 

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Interview with Dr. Richard Scheuerman; Richland, Washington
Bianca Hillier, The World; Broadcast June 20, 2022

The US is a major exporter of wheat around the world. But according to experts, most modern US wheat can be traced back to Turkey Red Wheat, which Mennonites brought from present-day Ukraine in the late 1800s. The World's Bianca Hillier reports.

NPR: Tell us a little about your background and where you live.
Richard Scheuerman: My wife, Lois, and I reside here in the Tri-Cities of Washington State which is located in a region of remarkable agricultural bounty known as the Columbia Plateau. We were raised in the rolling hills of Eastern Washington’s scenic Palouse Country where our family farm was located between the rural communities of Endicott and St. John. Among the earliest immigrants to the area were Germans from southwestern Russia who had settled in the Volga region under Empress Catherine the Great in the late 1700s, while others established farming colonies in the Ukraine’s Black Sea region in the early 1800s under Catherine’s grandson, Tsar Alexander I. My great-grandparents immigrated from Russia to Kansas in 1888 and continued on to the Palouse in 1891. They first resided in what our elders called the “Palouse Colony” which was a small agrarian commune along the Palouse River where today we operate Palouse Colony Farm.

We raise non-hybridized landrace “heritage” grains for artisan baking and craft brewing used at places like Ethos Bakery and Stone Mill in Richland and The Grain Shed in Spokane. We began the work of identifying and propagating “Palouse Heritage” varieties in 2014 with Stephen Jones, Steve Lyon, and Kevin Murphy of Washington State University and Alex McGregor of the McGregor Company, and established demonstration plots at our farm and at the Franklin County Museum in Pasco. The community of Connell in central Franklin County was first called “Palouse Junction” for its strategic location as an important Northern Pacific Railroad grain terminal. Numerous Germans from Russia and Ukraine settled in that vicinity as well, and the area figures prominently in author Zane Grey’s 1919 best-seller The Desert of Wheat in which Turkey Red might well be called a principal character.

NPR: How did you come to be interested in Russian and Ukrainian agriculture?
Richard: When you’re raised in rural communities many of your nearest neighbors and best friends are elders in their 80s and 90s! I came to enjoy visiting with first generation immigrants who told captivating stories about life in the Old Country—riding camels, encounters with the peaceful nomadic peoples of the steppes, raids by roving bandits, and the beauty and bounty of the native grasslands which their ancestors transformed into one of the world’s breadbaskets. I gathered many of their tales and later published them as books of history and short stories in works like Hardship to Homeland and Harvest Heritage.

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the late 1980s, I traveled to Russia and Ukraine over a dozen times to assist in establishing a series of student and faculty exchanges between schools of higher education there and in the US. During those years I also visited the ancestral villages of my ancestors and arranged with various archives to duplicate about 10,000 pages of original source material related to various aspects of Volga German and Black Sea settlement. Having been raised on a farm where my elders shared many stories of Old Country rural traditions I had special interest in their accounts of farm life.

NPR: How have grains from southeastern Europe influenced American agriculture and culinary history?
Richard: Well it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that before pioneering Midwestern immigrant farmers started raising “Turkey Red” bread wheat in the 1870s that there was no bread such as we know it today made in America. Of course folks were baking breads since early colonial times, but it was made from soft white and red “Lammas” wheats from the British Isles and western Europe that is better suited to flatbreads, scones, biscuits, pancakes, and the like. Production of many of these varieties like White “Virginia May” Lammas, which we have worked to revive and was used to make Northwest Indian frybread, were devastated in the 1770s by Hessian fly infestations. So our early “Founding Farmer” families like Washington, Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams—Abigail supervised most of the farm work—and others devoted considerable attention to acquiring new grain varieties.

Among those they introduced by the 1790s was semihard Red Mediterranean, and Red Fife in the 1840s to Canada which was actually a bread grain from the western Ukraine district of Galicia. But it was not until German Mennonites from the Ukraine settled in central Kansas in the 1870s that one of their leaders, Bernard Warkentin, began raising Turkey Red. It was a hard red bread grain native to the Crimea, and its seeds began an agricultural and culinary revolution in the US in figurative and literal terms.   

NPR: How was Turkey Red different from other grains raised in the US?
Richard: Turkey Red was America’s first true hard red bread wheat. That is, the kernels possess gluten proteins with a cross-hatch molecular structure that traps gases produced by yeast that makes bread dough rise. Not only that but the nutritionally dense inner endosperm and fiber make for an incredibly delicious loaf that has a naturally sweet, nutty flavor. Many farm families safeguarded their Turkey Red for personal use and sold other modern varieties they raised. Turkey Red was hard on early milling equipment, but once folks found out how wonderful the bread tasted they wanted more. And concurrent with production of Turkey Red was the advent of improved hammer-milling technology that produced a better quality of flour. Of the many modern varieties of bread grains raised throughout North America, virtually all can trace their lineage back to the Turkey Red native to Ukraine.

Americans tend to like their bread lighter in color than other places where people routinely dine on whole grain brown breads, and Americans tend to prefer clear brews when various styles throughout the world are cloudy. A premium is paid today for hybridized hard white bread wheats but in extremely rare cases Mother Nature does create a naturally occurring hard white wheat so you can have a high fiber, light colored loaf. Over a century ago a USDA grain explorer was traipsing across Persia—present Iraq, and found a grain vendor in a bazaar who was said to have wheat from the Garden of Eden. I suspect the American politely smiled while gathering his sample and routinely sent it back home with others he had gathered. But the lab analysis later reported the variety was a rare hard white landrace, so we have been increasing this Amber Eden for the past couple years and bakers praise its quality.

NPR: What are your thoughts about the situation in Ukraine today?
Richard: The news of the war is deeply disturbing and I hope Americans will stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine for freedom’s cause. During our Revolutionary War notable help came from abroad in terms of material aid as well as the heroic service of foreigners. French commander Marquis de Lafayette and the Prussian general Baron von Steuben stood shoulder to shoulder with General Washington during the years of our struggle for independence. Perhaps lesser known but of special significance was the remarkable service of Polish officer Thaddeus Kosciuszko who helped win victory for the Continentals at the Battle of Saratoga which is considered the turning point of the war. He later returned to Europe and fought against autocratic rule in his native land as well as in Ukraine.

My special interest has been in joining with others to promote the work of A Family for Every Orphan (AFFEO) to provide safe havens for Ukraine’s most vulnerable children. AFFEO also provides food for those in need through its Operation Harvest Hope bakeries in Ukraine. Until the tragic outbreak of the war, no nation on earth had done more to reduce orphanhood than Ukraine through a remarkable collaborative of churches, government child protection agencies, and social service organizations. I hope work continues for these vital efforts in the land that has given so much to provision others throughout the world. 

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.

Goodness, Grain, and Humankind— Thoughts Concerning Ukraine and Our Nation’s Founders

Cabrini Brothers Plaster Bas-Relief (c. 1910)
After Emmanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851)
Endicott-St. John Middle School; Endicott, Washington

How happy to think to our self when conscious of our deeds, that we started from a principle of rectitude, from conviction of the goodness of the thing [freedom] itself, from motive of the good that will come to humankind.
—Thaddeus Kosciuszko to General O. H. Williams; February 11, 1783

Day after day throughout all twelve years in the stately three-story brick school in rural hometown Endicott, notable figures from America’s past stared down at us from each classroom in the form of substantial bas-relief sculptures. Bearing the incised manufacturer name “Caproni Brothers” of Boston, these substantial plaster works resembled carved marble and spoke to the value placed on public education and art by members of our farming community who built the school in 1911. The three largest Caproni masterpieces hung against a wall of the third floor auditorium and included the famous scene Washington Crossing the Delaware which was painted some seventy years after the event by German-American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816-1868). The painter had returned for a time to his homeland and sought to support the wave of democratic revolts against European monarchies in the late 1840s. Leutze painted several other American Revolutionary War views including Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (1852) which is now held by the Los Angeles County Art Museum.

Notable battles that changed the course of world history were famously fought on fields of grain including Caesar’s defeat of Pompei in 48 BC on Greece’s Thessalian Plain at Pharsalos (Farsala—birthplace of Achilles), and English King Henry’s victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years’ War. That large military engagements took place across vast rural areas is unsurprising and came to be associated with heroic sacrifice and symbolic harvests of souls. The Schuyler Wheatfield scene is especially notable for depicting an incident associated with the 1777 Battle of Saratoga that is considered the turning point of the Revolutionary War.

We learn in school about the nation’s Founders—men and women like Washington and Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, James and Dolly Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and others who pledged their “sacred fortunes” to procure a free if imperfect nation based on democratic values. As part of this effort begun nearly 250 years ago other influential names are also familiar—army heroes Marquis de Lafayette of France, and stern Baron von Steuben of Prussia who became General Washington’s Chief of Staff and helped bolster patriot forces amidst the baleful conditions of Valley Forge. Another formidable if lesser-known foreign officer in freedom’s cause was cavalry general Thaddeus Kosciuszko (ko-choose-ko) who played a leading role in the Continental victory at Saratoga.

Emmanuel Leutz, Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (1852)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Painting at the distance of many decades, Leutze took liberties for his masterpieces of patriotic romanticism and the dramatic view of harried Catherine Schuyler, wife of Continental General Philip Schuyler and in-laws of Alexander Hamilton, combines elements of fact and legend. She is shown clad in red, white, and blue setting fire to a field of wheat on the family’s Hudson River estate presumably in September of 1777 to prevent its harvest by British troops approaching in the distance. The subsequent defeat of British General Burgoyne at the nearby Barber Wheatfield during the Battle of Saratoga in early October is considered the turning point of the American cause. The painting is remarkable not only for its depiction of a female figure in heroic wartime action, but she is shown being assisted by an African-American boy who carries a metal lamp.

Kosciuszko was a Polish nobleman and idealist, whose own privileged position in life contrasted with the democratic values he came to champion in peacetime and war. Commissioned a brigadier general by the Continental Congress and later made a member of the American Philosophical Society through Benjamin Franklin’s support, Kosciuszko nevertheless returned to Europe and helped lead the fight against autocracy in Poland as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the 1790s. Russia with far superior forces under Catherine the Great eventually prevailed against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Turks in order to gain strategic access to the warm water Black Sea ports. Russia emerged victorious in 1792, and two years later Empress Catherine herself initiated the founding of Odessa which soon became Russia’s third largest city. Russia’s roots in Ukraine stretch back much further as Kyiv is considered Russia’s founding capital and flourished in a cultural Golden Age from the 10th to 12th centuries until its devastation in 1240 by the invading Mongols.

To secure her vast newly acquired southlands from such foreign threats, Catherine instituted one of the largest and most diverse settlement campaigns in European history. Substantial numbers of Armenians, Greeks, Italians, and other ethnic groups were directed to Ukraine to live among native Crimean Tatars and Turkic peoples. Beginning in the 1760s Catherine arranged for the relocation of 27,000 peasants from her native Germany to the lower Volga region, and some 50,000 followed until the 1830s to establish Black Sea colonies throughout Ukraine. Many came in the aftermath of Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812 that inspired Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. A century later the prolific Black Sea German colonists needed more land to farm and faced increasing cultural threats from ascendent Slavic influences. Some chose to relocate as their ancestors had done, and many found new homes in America’s fertile farming districts—the Chesapeake Peninsula’s red loam country of Maryland and Delaware, southeastern New York’s “black dirt” area, the vast Midwest’s Great Plains, Pacific Northwest’s Columbia Plateau, and Canada’s prairie provinces. Black Sea German Mennonites brought Crimean “Turkey” Red wheat seed to Kansas in the 1870s which revolutionized American grain production and breadmaking.

Massey-Siemens Family Black Sea German Samovar
(c. 1890)
Palouse Heritage Collection

Those who appreciate this heritage have important reasons to be grateful their ancestors emigrated. European borders closed in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, the Communist Revolution and three-year Russian Civil War followed until 1921, and Stalin’s brutal war on religion and campaign of collectivization led to Ukraine’s catastrophic Holodomor that claimed some eight million lives in the 1920’s and 30’s. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR caused the death of 27 million people during World War II. (American World War II casualties were about one million.) No wonder Timothy Snyder’s excellent 2010 chronicle of this era and place carries the disturbing title Bloodlands.

 Eastern European immigrants and survivors came, and substantially remained, because Americans both new and old found fidelity in the ideas expressed in Kosciuszko’s 1783 letter about “deeds,” “principle,” “conviction,” and “goodness.” These terms may be variously debated today, but they did not have vague meanings to those who wrote or heard them. And while they have been lived out in ways that excluded many since the nation’s founding, they have provided a framework for freedom, security, and economic prosperity unknown on a national scale in previous history. Such core ideas are threatened today because of extremism on both sides of a political continuum that values personal benefit and perceived “rightness” above the common good—an inversion of American First Principles.

To be sure, Jefferson’s expression “pursuit of happiness” is eighteenth-century code talk for private enterprise which forms the basis of modern economic development. But in the same breath he writes of “promoting the general welfare” since he, Kosciuszko, and the Founders understood liberty to be the use of freedom to promote national wellbeing, versus licentiousness as use of freedom for selfish power and gain. The peoples of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus faced a momentous decision in 1991 when in the wake of the USSR’s collapse they voted to declare independence. Much has been written about the litany of events and political vacillations that have ensued since then. May the cause of Kosciuszko yet prevail on both sides of the Atlantic, and peace and prosperity return to the people of Ukraine’s fertile Black Earth grainlands.

Agrarian Landscapes as Serious Art

Jacob Ruisdael (1629-1682) was born to a prominent Haarlem artist family and became the preeminent landscapist of the Dutch Golden Age. His sweeping canvases included numerous coastal and Scandinavian mountain scenes, and twenty-seven views of grain fields also survive as paintings and drawings. In works like Wheat Fields (c. 1670), Ruisdael’s composition features a low horizon crowned with characteristic sweeping sky. In the foreground a traveler approaches a woman and child along a road leading between fields of ripened grain as if the awesome forces of nature dwarf humanity’s presence and manifest the inherent spirituality of creation.  The paintings of influential French artists Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (c. 1600-1665) also significantly contributed to recognition of landscapes as aesthetically and morally serious subjects even if referencing scenes from classical antiquity and the Bible. Poussin’s allegorical Summer (1660) shows a harvest scene with Ruth and Boaz instead of Ceres. The work of Ruisdael, Poussin, and Lorrain became well known in their lifetimes and would significantly influence the painting of the English Romantics, French Barbizon school, and American Hudson River artists.

Jacob Ruisdael, Wheat Fields (c. 1670)
Oil on canvas, 38 ⅜ x 51 ¼ inches
Metropolitan Art Museum, New York; Wikimedia Commons

Flemish painter David Teniers became one the foremost masters of the country scenes and clothed his field workers in the subtle earth tones favored by Brueghel and later artists like Millet. His canvases imparted the humanity of rural life with individuals even in worker groups and crowds painted with distinguishable characteristics. Teniers’ art became so synonymous with peasant genre that for the next century and beyond the name Teniers was a pseudonym for rustic views. The prolific painter married into the Brueghel family in 1637 when he wed Anna Brueghel, daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder. (Peter Paul Rubens, her legal guardian following the death of Anna’s father, served as witness at the wedding.) In the 1660s Teniers acquired a rural retreat, Drij Toren (Three Towers), at Perk in the Flanders countryside and often used the area as a backdrop for more Arcadian idylls, likely inspired by the bucolic writings of Virgil and Horace. Among his most notable of his many summer paintings are The Reaping (c. 1644), Peasant Kermis (c. 1665), and stately View of Drij Toren at Perk, with David Teniers’ Family (c. 1660), which shows a brigade of peasants harvesting grain beyond the family’s graceful pose.

Nicolas Poussin, Summer—Ruth and Boaz (1660)
Oil on canvas, 46 x 63 inches
The Louvre, Paris; Wikimedia Commons

Throughout the eighteenth century many of his paintings served as patterns for tapestries and other creations. Michel Picquenot (1747-1808) and other French engravers executed splendid reproductions of his works as seen in Picquenot’s extensive “cabinet” series. (The term referred to a room of curiosities in a château or country house.) For Du Cabinet de Mr. Poullian (1780), Picquenot likely based his ambitious recreation on one of Teniers’ many gaudy harvest festival paintings. The foreground shows feasting, dancing to a bagpiper, and other peasant revelry presumedly on the grounds of a tavern or inn. In the distance a small group of harvesters bind and shock a remaining stand of grain.