Determining and Affirming Values of Care

Cultural tensions rise with proliferating perils of climate change, global food security needs, and concern about impacts on soil biomes and wildlife. Establishing balance involves mediation of the ancient urges for veneration and exploitation, and consideration of technocratic limits and trade-offs in agricultural improvement. Soil scientists estimate that no-till chemical intensive farming has reduced erosion on American farms by 40% while also creating conditions for the emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds. Yet less tillage in such systems reduces American diesel consumption by two-thirds for some 280 million gallons of annual savings. For Promethian bioentrepreneurs CRISPR gene modification and related technologies offer prospect of crop improvement although prominent biologists acknowledge that cellular arrangements can be altered in ways that are poorly understood. Reengineering life forms raises uneasy questions about the complicated relationships between the natural and unnatural, and theological distinctions between obeying God and playing God, or between earthly tenancy and proprietorship. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman likened the complexities of modern science to a cosmic chess game at which we are only observers with limited capacity to predict outcomes regardless of worthy intentions.

Wendell Berry explores these tensions and offers a fertile field of practical recommendations for how anyone can apply the useful habits of memory, attention, and reverence. He recognizes the primacy of earth care to support all other human endeavors, and likens this to holy service: “The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it…. It keeps the past, not as history or memory, but as richness, new possibility.” In this sense the urgent partisanship in political and economic affairs becomes secondary to stewardship of land and life, and the function of healthy community for enduring fulfillment.

Whether on a Midwest farm or in a Chicago high-rise, one may live with fidelity to place by learning and practicing domestic arts and community building. Family care and homemaking need not require moving “back to the land,” though new paradigms for remote working are faciliating rural residency. In any setting folks can summon moral courage to eat together, shop locally to support practicioners of local crafts, connect young people to worthwhile endeavors, and affirm the values of environmental care. Policies and practice of self-reliance and promotion of the common good that characterized republicanism in the ancient world are relevant more than ever in an era of threatened landscapes, endangered species, and marginalized labor. Ethicist Julie Crouse characterizes Berry’s ongoing literary conversation about these matters as a “sacred harvest” for renewing the common good by promotion of connections among people, landscapes, and spirituality. In the context of farm work for participation in the market economy, or mental work for healthy imagination and discernment, Berry calls the external standard of such endeavors the “Great Economy,” or the “Kingdom of God.” The goal is to promote abiding, abundant harvests and the longterm wellbeing of individuals in community. In spite of dreams of space colonization, exploration of extraterrestial neighbors near and far has shown that, in the words of science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, “There is no Planet B.”

Berry has explored ideas of earth care most fully in his novels and short stories about the Coulter, Catlett, Branch, and other families. They dwell together in imaginary Port William, for which the author’s native Port Royal, Kentucky, serves as a touchstone. The place is not a utopian metaphor as its residents navigate with failure and success through cross-currents of old ways and modernity’s encroachments and benefits. In “That Distant Land” (1965), a rural neighborhood crew gathers for tobacco harvest in the sweltering August heat, and Berry casts a scene that resembles field laborers of ancient times: “They dove into the work, maintaining the same pressing rhythm from one end of the row to the other, and yet they worked well, as smoothly and precisely as dancers. To see them moving side by side against the standing crop, leaving it fallen, the field changed, behind them, was maybe like watching Homeric soldiers going into battle. It was momentous and beautiful and touchingly mortal.” The classical allusion is not incidental. In “The Agrarian Standard” (2002), Berry invokes lines from Virgil’s Fourth Georgic about “an old Cilician” who cares for a small plot of land that produces abundantly because of an ethic “rooted in mystery and sanctity” that values giving back to the health of the soil—an affectionate agarian stewardship for the sake of present and unborn generations.

Meaning-making in classical thought came through an honorable paideia of civic engagement and reflection. Intellect detached from action risks loss, and empathy apart from action is purposeless. Apparent in literature and art from Virgil and Horace to British Georgics, French Rustics, and Russian Itinerants, a holistic life of labor—such as Port Royal harvesting, craft,  and community, promotes personal as well as cooperative wellbeing. A related education grounded in distinctly local connectedness through stories and art, mealtime fellowship and field study offers prospect of cultural renewal.

Harvests Then and Now

Stories and paintings that relate a range of interpretations regarding contemporary and future existence add voice and visibility to diverse perspectives on land use. Consolidation of family farms in recent decades into larger corporate enterprises and the commodification of grain—William Cronon’s “transmutation of one of humanity’s oldest foods,” warrant high regard for stewardship of the land. Reinvigoration of Americans’ deep-seeded social memory and cultural capacity can guide landowners and public officials who contend with environmental challenges and finite production acreage. When Conrad Blumenschein told me in the 1970s about leaving Russia for America just before the outbreak of World War I, ten families lived on a dozen farms of about 320 acres each scattered along the road between my hometown of Endicott and the Palouse River some seven miles to the north. (The other two landowners lived in town.) Numbering some fifty people, most attended one of two Lutheran churches in the area—the Missouri Synod in the country, and the Ohio in town, and two country schools enrolled the area’s children through the eighth grade. Many of these families were related to each other, and regularly gathered for summer harvest labors, fall butchering bees, and various ceremonies and celebrations.

A half-century later when I began interviewing first generation immigrant elders like Conrad Blumenschein and Mary Morasch, the number of farms had fallen to nine with some consolidation of property holdings among the seven families of thirty-two individuals who remained. The size of area farms had increased to an average of 550 acres, and both country schools had consolidated with the larger town district that offered instruction through grade twelve. My father was able to complete our month-long harvest on about that much acreage by keeping in good repair the old tractor and pull-combine that had teamed up for at least a quarter-century to make the annual run. Based on a photograph from the time, family member Rob Smith captured the scene in the watercolor A 3L-160 Harvest, c. 1970 (2012, named for the equipment model numbers). The price of a bushel of wheat rarely rose to $2 from 1960 to 1973, when a controversial U. S. trade deal to supply the Soviet Union with grain boosted prices to as much as $6.25. The long-sought optimism felt by growers ushered in a year of equipment upgrades and land purchases encouraged by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz’s 1973 “get big or get out” slogan. Favorable Russian harvests the following year coupled with reduced federal subsidies contributed to America’s 1970s “farm crisis” followed by years of rural economic stagnation.

The year of Butz’s remarks was coincident with publication of British-German environmental economist E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (1973). The contrast in perspectives regarding the wellbeing of farmers could not have been starker. Schumacher (1911-1977) considered federal promotion of larger production acreages and related needs for more expensive equipment to be a reckless hubris of domination. Inspired by thinkers like Tolstoy and Gandhi, Schumacher understood the forces of modernity to be complex but fueled by a blinkered preoccupation with short-term solutions that ignore ancient ways of sustainable living. He invoked a sovereignty of reason to advocate for enterprising farmers who valued the longstanding natural and social commons that provided economic benefits well worth protecting. Without such public policies vast numbers of younger farmer families would be driven from the countryside. And so they have been. (Ohio farmer-essayist Gene Logsdon, author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse [2007], responded to Butz’s admonition with advice on how to, “Get small and stay in.”)

Palouse Harvesttime Smoky Sunset and Pine City Grain Elevator Firestorm Aftermath (2020)

Columbia Heritage Photographs

In the fifty years that has now passed since my 1960s high school FFA speech on world hunger, global population has increased by four billion and the world has consumed some 1.3 trillion barrels of oil. (Approximately one and a half trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide have been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.) The result has been a warming of the earth’s surface by 0.6 degrees C. and the disappearance of a million square miles of spring snowpack in the northern hemisphere. The pace of change has led to devastating impacts on biodiversity and prospect of neo-Malthusian food security crises. Regional trends can only be discerned over time but already some disturbing patterns are evident. Since 2020 annual precipitation has declined across the Columbia Plateau and in the summer of that year the only firestorm in living memory made national headlines when it devastated the Palouse hamlets of Malden of Pine City and destroyed vast areas of standing grain. Notable modern writers like James Rebanks, author of Pastoral Song: A Writer’s Journey (2021), reflect upon the impact of climate change upon agriculture and natural systems in passionate and informed prose as compelling as Rachel Carson. The urgent planetary imperative is to live within the biosphere’s means through new economies and methods of sustainable production. 

My boyhood rural neighborhood of several thousand acres that had been home to about fifty souls in 1900 is comprised today of just eight farms. All but one are parts of larger family-owned operations whose members also own or lease other cropland in the area. (The average Palouse Country farm size in 2020 was approximately 1200 acres.) Only four households are located on the same seven-mile stretch that supported those ten families a century ago, and today are populated by just five adults whose grown children live elsewhere. In between these habitations one can now see lonely clusters of dying locust trees, broken fences, and the rusted equipment of abandoned farmsteads. The trend has brought debilitating effects on rural communities that contend with closures of local stores, banks, and public service by reaffirming pioneer values of hard work, integrity, and teamwork.

The broader demographic impacts on rural life and labor are consistent with trends over the past two centuries that have changed the nature and necessity of worker communities. In 1840s pre-industrial America, for example, a farmer could produce an acre of hand-broadcasted wheat yielding about twenty bushels from approximately fifty hours of annual work using simple implements like a single-shear plow and scythe. (Soil exhaustion and other factors in early nineteenth-century France and Germany contributed to average yields of less than half that amount, or about ten bushels per acre; yields on unmanured fields in England were in the range of fifteen. Continental Europeans commonly faced substantial crop failure and famine at least once every ten years.) A single day’s harvest by an able-bodied reaper could cover up to one acre. By 1900 an American farmer equipped with horse-pulled gang plow, harrow, and mechanical drill still produced about twenty bushels from an acre but in some ten hours. An experienced crew operating a reaper-binder and steam-powered thresher at that time could cut about forty-five acres a day for some 1,200 bushels (31 tons) of grain. A farmer in 1940 using a gas-powered tractor, three-bottom plow, and combine with 12-foot header further reduced annual per acre labor to 3.5 hours.

Harvests Yesterday and Today—Different Times, Identical Location

Lautenschlager & Poffenroth (1911) and Klaveano Brothers Threshing Outfits (2019)

Four miles north of Endicott, Washington

 Dryland grain yields increased three-fold nationally during the twentieth century and Palouse Country yields of eighty bushels per acre are common today along with diesel-powered, satellite-guided equipment that make crop rows of linear perfection. High-capacity combines now cost as much as a million dollars and feature sidehill leveling, cruise control, and electronic monitoring of threshing functions that automatically adjust to crop load. Modern farmers invest scarcely fifty minutes in total annual per-acre labor, and can harvest three hundred acres in a ten-hour day with a combine header forty feet wide to yield some 30,000 bushels (900 tons) of wheat, or 72,000 bushels of corn. Sickles endure. Modern versions feature four-inch-wide chromed, serrated triangular sections arranged toothlike in a row that runs the length of the header and moves back and forth at lightning speed. Such mechanical marvels represent the output of a thousand reapers and twice as many binders laboring in harvest fields before the Industrial Revolution. (Substantial numbers of others were tasked with carting unthreshed stalks to barns, flailing grain, tending livestock, and other related tasks.) A phalanx of these modern behemoths cruising through a field of golden grain evokes appreciation for techno-mechanical ingenuity, and still stirs ancient feelings of gratitude for agrarian bounty. Dayton watercolorist Paul Strohbehn’s dramatic Sorghum Hollow Gold (2018) shows three immense John Deere Titan combines rising from a Palouse hillside chaff cloud.

Among the most recent developments in farm mechanization is the application of autonomous driving capabilities to tractors and combines. Technology has also transformed bulk grain handling facilities at strategically located places like Endicott and other locations along railroads and river ports. Endicott was platted in 1882 by the Oregon Improvement Company, a subsidiary of the Northern Pacific Railroad, on its Columbia & Palouse branch line. This route tapped the fertile grain district along a route from the main NPRR transcontinental line at Palouse Junction (present Connell, Washington) eastward to Endicott, Colfax, and eventually Pullman and Moscow. An extensive network of feeder lines later fanned across the northern and southern Palouse to other farming communities.

Columbia & Palouse Railroad Grain Storage Flathouses, Endicott, Washington (c. 1910)

Northwest Grain Growers High-Capacity Unit Train Loading Facility, Endicott (2022)

With the recent merger of the local Endicott-St. John grain storage cooperative with Walla Walla and other groups to form Northwest Grain Growers, the new entity constructed a storage and 110-car unit train loading facility in Endicott since the line there had been constructed with heavier rail weight capacity. The project called for construction of seven immense steel silos located to bring total capacity there to approximately 3,100,000 bushels. The new facility, which became operational in 2020, is designed for rapid one-day loading of the trains which are capable of holding 100 tons of grain per car for a total capacity of 420,000 bushels. Grain is trucked from farms and other elevators for rail shipment and barging along the lower Columbia River to Portland and Kalama for distribution worldwide.

Questioning Popular Assumptions

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

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

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

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

Columbia Heritage Photograph

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

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

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

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

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

Cover Photo: Measuring a Case thresher operating speed

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

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

Perilous Bounty vs. Golden Wheatfields

As a boy raised between the rural grainland communities of Endicott and St. John, Washington, I was surrounded by first-generation immigrant elders who had been born in Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. I enjoyed listening to their tales of “Old Country” life which seemed in many ways like other-worldly experience with heavy doses of folklore and traditions on the cusp of vanishing. Investigating their stories later introduced me to the remarkable work of British folklorist George Ewart Evans who ever remained hopeful about contemporary smallholder and rural community prospects. He recognized the possibilities of new cooperative relationships by which growers could pool resources to buy machinery and share storage and marketing facilities. He characterized these arrangements as “a return on a higher level to the structure of the Middle Ages.” The situation was not unprecedented in Evans’s view, as he cited the introduction of the heavy Saxon carruca plow to Britain in early medieval times and the enclosure movement as changes that necessitated innovative cooperative practices. The “break” in apprecation of the old ways of labor, thrift, and economy, Evans wrote in the 1960s, “has chiefly been in the oral tradition: a farm-worker of the old school, a horseman for instance, had latterly no apprentice to take up his lore; and the young—the true bearers of the tradition—have in this respect been receiving a speedily diminishing heritage. It is not so much that they are not interested…; they have now so few points of reference against which to measure it.”

Mutual dependance among neighbors and community members was more than virtue. It was necessity when harvest-time was essential endeavor and ritual for all able-bodied persons including field laborers, cooks, and craftsmen. The rise of mechanization that has reduced exhausting manual labor and technologies to facilitate communication and transportion will not abide nostalgic appeals to preserve the old ways. Evans characterizes such doomed efforts as “misguided romanticism” that is impossible in practical application and ignorant of the abiding dynamics of rural life through the ages. Aspects of social cohesiveness evident in harvest operations of former days have also diminished an isolated parochialism that limits wider multicultural understandings as well as individual opportunity in life. Moreover, a host of politicial and environmental conditions that threaten the wellbeing of farmers and rural communities cannot be understood apart from participation in global solutions.

Needlepoint Grain and Grapes Altar Kneeler, National Cathedral, Washington, D. C. (2019), Columbia Heritage Collection Photograph

 Public awareness of land stewardship takes on special significance in a day of unprecedented industrial and technological change as world population and pressure for land use continue to grow. The number of farm residents declined during the twentieth century from 42% of the nation’s population in 1900 to just 1% in 2000. After peaking in 1935 at 6.8 million, the number of U. S. farms and ranches fell sharply until the early 1970s and today there are about two million. Moreover, just 5% of farms now produce approximately 75% of the nation’s food supply. Science writers now contribute to a new literary genre of environmental despair in the wake of global warming and food insecurity with such troubling titles as The End of Plenty, Red Sky at Morning, Perilous Bounty, and cultural critic Brian Watson’s big picture Headed into the Abyss. (The phenomenon started with publication of The End of Nature in 1989 by mild mannered Methodist Bill McKibben, who now warns in Falter [2019] of significant disruption to world crop production and decrease in grain protein levels due to climate change.) Contemporary science fiction has likewise shifted in tone from the fantasy upheaval of alien invasions or asteroid impacts to speculative dystopian thrillers.

Books like American-Canadian writer William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020) depict a menacing state of corporate control and online existence substantially disconnected from the natural world. Instead of a single make-believe threat, Gibson’s characters face a convergence of intractable problems exacerbated by climate change, pandemics, and authoritarianism enabled by high tech mass communication. More disturbing if absurdly entertaining are novels by Joy Williams like The Quick and the Dead (2000) and Harrow (2020) in which characters vainly navigate through primal social upheaval in the aftermath of environmental spoliation. Williams’s latest title alludes to the ancient farm implement as cipher for humanity’s relationship to nature, and recalls a passage from Job (39:9-10) about the foolishness of tethering a wild ox to a harrow. This varied literature disdains the arrogance of publically invoked cultural pieties about responsible living. Such stories often invoke ancient myths bearing the common assumption that the wellbeing of humanity is inextricably linked to respect for the natural world’s titanic potential.

Societal expectations for tomorrow are strikingly varied. As a boy I experienced our family’s 1962 cross-state trip from the Palouse Hills to Seattle’s optimistically titled “Century 21” World’s Fair. Visitors were dazzled by exhibits on space travel and consumer abundance. A half-century later Milan, Italy, hosted the 2015 “Feeding the World” Fair with themes related to the problems of food security, sufficiency, and safety. A UN-sponsored session discussed the disturbing flatline of world grain yields since 2000, and how one billion developing world inhabitants were at risk of chronic malnourishment after decades of decline. Medieval era population peaked at approximately 300 million inhabitants but rose to a billion by about 1800, doubled to two billion in 1927, and reached three billion in 1960. Demographers at Milan predicted this exponential growth rate would result in ten billion by 2050 and bring attendant challenges for food resources, species diversity, and stewardship of soil.

Good Scythes, Thresholds, and Eating

Whenever a younger member of the clan mentions being bored I ask if they’ve been to the library lately. While the flood of resources available online is endless, I often find time in our local public library relaxing and more manageable. A vast collection of current periodicals is readily available and since I tend to spend more time reading non-fiction books, I also use trips to the library to scan what fiction works might expand my horizons. Recently I happened upon Jim Crace’s 2013 dystopian novel, Harvest, that transports readers to a sixteenth-century English village to experience a week of celebration, intrigue, and disturbance that marks the end of harvest. Area residents gossip and gather in the barley field but are more concerned with the recent arrival of several vagrants than the momentous events about to engulf them. The story is told from the standpoint of Walter Thirsk, who after residing there for a dozen years is himself a relative newcomer to a place. “We should face the rest day with easy hearts,” he muses, “and then enjoy the gleaning that would follow it, with our own Gleaning Queen the first to bend and pick a grain. We should expect our seasons to unfold in all their usual sequences, and so on through the harvests and the years.”

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

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

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

Lewiston, Idaho artist W. Craig Whitcomb has painted rural scenes for a half-century in watercolor and acrylic with subject matter ranging from isolated Northwest grain elevators to English thatched cottages and Japanese landscapes. His Amber Waves (2008), finalist for the first annual “H’Art of the Palouse” Banner Competition, shows an immense abandoned grain elevator in vivid rusty reds and blues rising from a field of ripe grain. Vibrant watercolors of Northwest grain and legume fields scenes by Andy Sewell of Viola, Idaho, have appeared on posters for the Pullman-based National Lentil Festival. His dramatic Doubletime Before the Storm (2021) shows the skillful choreography of two John Deere combines moving in tandem with tractor-pulled grain carts in the face of threatening clouds and lightning. Sewell, a graduate in fine arts from the University of Idaho in Moscow, spied the late afternoon scene near his eastern Palouse home. The golden browns and dark shadows of land and sky express Sewell’s appreciation for the primal forces of nature that make harvests possible. Other richly colored agrarian landscapes by Sewell include Palouse Summer Glory and Palouse Country Summer.

Roger Feldman, Threshold (2013), Laity Lodge near Leakey, Texas

Courtesy of the Artist

Works by my friend Roger Feldman of Seattle, winner of the 2005 Prescott Award in Sculpture, reflects his study of theology and art education. Raised in the Palouse Country community of Rosalia, Feldman has created large site-specific sculptures in the United States, Canada, and Europe. He meticulously plans each installation by visiting the location to “dream about the possibilities” before rendering a small 3-D scale maquette from mat board before fashioning a larger, more refined model from wood. For Threshold (2013) at Laity Lodge, an ecumenical retreat along the Frio River in Texas’s Hill Country, Feldman conceived of three interconnected chiseled limestone monoliths including a 15-foot-tall tower to represent the three-in-one concept of the Trinity. The work’s title is derived from Hebrew words used in the Old Testament (saph, miptān), a raised beam at the edge of a threshing floor, to signify the boundary between the outside world and sacred space for contemplation and worship.

Tradition and innnovation have presented cultural tensions since the dawn of civilization, and responsible influence from each has contributed to humanity’s wellbeing. Like van Gogh paintings of gleaners and reapers with factory smokestacks on the horizon, agrarian fine art and literature foster better understandings of tensions that involve emotion and reason, and local and universal values. Among other recent developments in grain production, the advent of minimal tillage operations using specialized power equipment has greatly reduced soil erosion on Amercan farms while increasing yields. The emerging New Agrarianism of the twenty-first century moves beyond nostalgic romanticism to moderate use of industrial energy within the context of natural systems for soil fertility. Wise approaches to innovation respect stewardship of land and the longterm wellbeing of others. Duke Divinity School environmental theologian Norman Wirzba writes of a New Agrarian ethic that honors modern science as well as ancient religious appreciation for the transformative mystery of soil, water, and grain for human sustenance. Implicit acknowledgement is also made of fair compensation for farmers and other workers. “How we make bread, how we share and distribute it, are of profound moral and spiritual significance,” he writes in Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (2011). “[E]very loaf presuppposes decisions that have been made about how to configure the social and ecological relationships that make bread possible.”

Tim Dearborn of Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Taste & See: Awakening our Spiritual Senses (1996) tells of Jesus’ reference to bread in the context of material well-being and spiritual strength. During his temptation in the Wilderness (Luke 4:4), Jesus quotes the familiar Old Testament passage, “[M]an does not live by bread alone” (Deuteronomy 8:3), which recognizes legitimate needs for “daily bread” physical sustenance (Matthew 6:11) provided through divine provision and sacrifice. Sharing food and faith goes hand in hand with prayer (“grace”) and communion with family and friends for the vital, senuous experience of daily feasting. In this way, meals can transform mundane consumption into enriching spiritual experience that honors grains, greens, and other foods, but recognizes their material essence, cultivation, harvest, and preparation as rooted in meaningful service. The tragedy of religious piety is not materialism Dearborn writes, “but that in a particular way we are not materialistic enough.” By dividing aspects of human existence into sacred and secular realms, one can also render possessions, physical needs, and the land into domains separate from their divine source and protection.

Frustrations with equipment repair and long hours of solitary fieldwork may appear scarcely related to religious faith. But farmers and other members of St. Macrina’s Episcopal Church near San Francisco regularly meet to share the challenges of twenty-first-century farming with area millers, bakers, brewers, and consumers.  All contribute perspectives on grain as a “community crop” and how each group can participate in consequential efforts to strengthen cultural ties and serve as stewards of the land. In 2015, St. Macrina co-founder and Agricultural Chaplain Elizabeth DeRuff established The Bishop’s Ranch Field on Russian River Valley church property near Healdsburg, California. Young and old gather there throughout the year to plant, till, and harvest heritage grain that is milled for communion bread and distributed throughout the diocese. “We want to see local farmers succeed and be part of local communities,” explains Rev. DeRuff, “and to learn with them about ‘belonging’ as well as ‘having.’”

Although based in Baltimore, landscape artist Katherine Nelson has regularly traveled cross-country since 2001 to the Palouse’s undulating grainlands. Her fluid charcoals and dye sublimates capture the summertime chiaroscuro of swirling slopes, saddles, and swales laden with wheat, barley, and legumes. Nelson has also contributed to Oregon State University’s Art About Agriculture program and to Glen Echo, Maryland’s Yellow Barn Gallery exhibitions. She traces threads of her fascination with the region to her diplomat father’s interest in Turkish rugs: “I remember their luxuriant textures and shapes which influenced my affection for rolling landscapes. The Palouse is a tapestry of woven connections among seasons, fields, and people. The effect is thoroughly spiritual and provides a place of reflection, solace, and beauty that overcomes the noise of the outside world.” To emphasize the rhythmic effects of light for line and shadow, Nelson works entirely in black-and-white which evokes heightened awareness of layering, texture, and movement. “My ‘Portraits of the Palouse,’” she explains, “are metaphors for the human prospect. ‘Harvests’ to me are exhibitions that depict the land as hallowed space through views of heritage farm architecture and landscape vistas. Implicit rural values relate to the natural environment, hard work, and community, and are relevant anywhere.”

Mirabilia and the British National Service

In the fall of 2012, the congregation of Toronto’s St. Anne’s Anglican Church teamed with the NetherMind artist collective to sponsor Mirabilia (meaning “Things causing wonder”). Some 2500 people attended the nine-day festival exhibition, lecture, and worship series held in connection with the church’s 150th anniversary. The contrast between contemporary experimental art and ancient architectural setting could not have been more striking. Designated a national historic site, St. Anne’s features an imposing Byzantine Revival dome supported by Caen stone columns and decorated with religious scenes painted in 1923 by J. E. H. MacDonald and other members of Canada’s famed Group of Seven. Mirabilia’s large-scale installations included Mary Catherine Newcomb’s immense Osiris’ Advance (Ten Thousand Soldiers) of upright grain stalks covering a wide circle between several rows of pews and a priest’s table draped in a green and gold altar cloth embroidered with heads of wheat.

St. Anne’s longstanding ecumenical tradition involves local artists and musicians for church programs, and in his festival sermon, “What Does God have to do with Art?”, Rev. Gary van der Meer noted that some visitors had found some of the art insufficiently religious. His message opened with the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zaraphath (I Kings 17:8-16) in which the prophet is divinely directed in a time of famine to ask a desitute widow for bread. Such pitiful circumstances put the woman and her son at risk of starvation, but she consents to feed the stranger. Showing remarkable generosity, she shares their meagre supply of flour and oil. Elijah then miraculously restores their provisions until the famine ended. “Wonder is happening at St. Anne’s,” proclaimed Rev. van der Meer in his Mirabilia homily, and explained the sacred nature of creative expression in theological terms:  “We are created in the image of God and therefore are creators. Our artists are living with God’s image in them by creating the art that is here. Artists are engaged in the sacred by living out God’s creating image in their own creating. …God is the first and supreme artist. …[W]e should learn more about art to learn more about God.”

In an effort to revive Great Britain’s traditional Anglican Harvest Service and promote stewardship of land and food, members of the royal family joined with civic and business leaders in 2010 to launch a series of agrarian-related initiatives including British Food Fortnight to foster school gardening projects and charitable food distribution. Royal patronage in cooperation with church leaders also sponsored the first National Harvest Service in a half-century which was held at Westminster Abbey on October 16, 2013. The service opened with Henry Alford’s popular congregational hymn, “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” (“…raise the song of harvest-home!”), followed by homilies from Owen Patterson, Secretary of State for Environment and Rural Affairs, and Dr. Richard Chartres, Bishop of London. Actor Damian Lewis read lines from Henry Birtles poem of unpretentous gratitude, “The Harvest”:

     Let’s  gather as a band of one, in symphony

          across the land
     To thank our Lord for Harvest reaped and

           gratefully as one let's stand
     To think of those, for all their toil who've readied

          plough, who've nurtured soil 
     The farmers in the fields, the cold; the hardened

           hands, the fens, the wold
     So many aspects of a life, a challenge most will

          never know
     For we in houses snugly sleep, whilst in the biting

          winds and snow
     …And through this nation memories walk, depth

          of image ever strong

     Of distant days and innocence; of man and Shire

     Horse ploughing on
Of wheat sheaves standing in the sun and

      laughing girls coming home
…For all the romance of these scenes, look not

     through glass of tinted rose
Ask farming people what it's like and though the job

     is one they chose

It takes its toll; the troughs are long and cold and

     deep
The flattened barley, missing sheep and so much

     more that blights their show
But on and on and on they go, until that day of days

     has come
The tractor's parked, the combine's quiet; the crop

     is in, the Harvest done.

---

Since the revived Westminster commemoration, the National Harvest Festival has grown to some 400 parishes and schools in Great Britain and includes services at the grand cathedrals of Canterbury, Lincoln, and Ripon. One of England’s most prolific hymnodists of the past century, Fred Pratt Green (1903-2003), composed numerous songs for these occasions including “For the Fruit of All Creation” (1970) and “Come, Sing a Song of Harvest” (1976). Pratt’s verses for these and other music show regard for earth care and social justice seldom expressed in Wesley’s generation, as well as the benefits and limits of science:

Shall we, sometimes forgetful / Of where Creation starts,

With science in our pocket / Lose wonder in our hearts.

Related National Harvest Festival events now include British Fortnight restaurant menus to “rekindle the tradition of regional British foods and the harvest,” designation of farm discovery trails and heritage crops, and community harvest celebrations and concerts. Devon Master Blacksmith Andy Hall created the official traveling British Harvest Torch sculpture that features a wrought iron vessel holding a grain sheaf and is hosted by participating churches in accordance with the National Harvest Service schedule.

BBC Television’s critically acclaimed documentary Victorian Farm (2009) drew up to four million viewers for some of its six episodes which included a mid-nineteenth-century wheat harvest. Filmed at Acton Scott Historic Farm in Shropshire, the programming was extensively based on Dr. Henry Stephens’s The Book of the Farm (1844) and other original sources that were also used by Ruth Ellen Goodman and a team of other agricultural historians to create the 2009 best-selling book Victorian Farm. The documentary’s phenomenal success rekindled widespread public interest in British country life, and led to the sequels Edwardian Farm (2010, filmed at Morwelham Quay in Devon) and Tudor Monastery Farm (2013 at Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Singleton, West Sussex). Both series also included segments on stooking and threshing grain and other period harvesting operations.

European living history (“open-air”) museums have undertaken heritage grain demonstration projects and reconstruction of harvest equipment from ancient and medieval to early modern times. The “Year on the Field” Project organized by the International Association of Agricultural Museums (AIMA) was launched in 2021 to facilitate a global exchange of ideas and experience on historical methods of grain cultivation and harvest and to promote sustainable agriculture. The project includes living history farms and museums around the world where heritage grains are cultivated and is coordinated through the Lauresham Open-Air Laboratory near Worms, Germany, which also operates Lorsch Abbey Manor Farm. Participating locations in North America include the Canada Agriculture and Farm Museum (Ottawa), Carter Historic Farm (Bowling Green, Ohio), Greenfield Village Firestone Farm (Dearborn, Michigan), Genesee Country Village (Rochester, New York), Howell Living History Farm (Titusville, New Jersey), Pleasant Hill Shaker Village (Harrodsburg, Kentucky), and Sterling College-Berry Center Farm (Port Royal, Kentucky). AIMA was founded in Prague in 1966 to facilitate East-West scholarly exchange and communication among agricultural museum staff worldwide. Headquartered in Rochdale, Massachusetts, AIMA’s North American affiliate, the Association for Living History, Farm & Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM) was founded in 1970 and publishes a quarterly Bulletin and annual Conference Proceedings.

Friends of the Land and Sustainable Agriculture (Part 2)

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

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

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

Columbia Heritage Collection Photograph

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

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