Scythes, Sickles, and Mr. Tusser

A vivid memory from my Palouse Country boyhood is watching Dad cut tall grasses and weeds around our farmyard with an exceedingly old scythe. He was fond of saying, “There’s a right way and a wrong way” (to just about everything), and I remember him showing my brother and I how to properly hold the handles (“nibs”) and set a rhythm to the cutting. Early cradle scythes appeared in the thirteenth century and are depicted in paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525-1569). These featured a small half-circle loop attached to the base of the handle that caught the entire mowed gavel that was dropped at the end of each stroke for gathering into piles. Some ten swaths by an experienced fieldworker typically provided enough stalks to fashion a sheaf about one foot in diameter, and a long day’s labor with a scythe kept keen could cover from one to two acres depending on field conditions. A customary fieldworker echelon of four reapers followed by a binder could then harvest about five to six acres per day. The improved cradle scythe featuring a long scythe blade connected to four to six long wooden ribs that could hold several swaths eventually appeared in nineteenth century America. Its more substantial cuttings were then dropped in the stubble to be bundled and placed into rows of shocks. Using the more modern method, a single cradler-bundler pair could cover about the same area as the medieval five-member team.

Cradle Scythe (c. 1890), Columbia Heritage Collection

In medieval times, a landowner typically appointed a bailiff to preside over the day-to-day operations of the manor’s agricultural enterprises. Reporting to the bailiff were the reeve (Old English gerefa), the workers’ representative in civil affairs, a hayward (heggeward) responsible for safeguarding fields of hay and grain from theft and roaming livestock, and harvest overseer (“lord”) who urged timely completion in Thomas Tusser’s sixteenth century poem, “The End of Harvest.”

COME home, lord, singing,

Come home, corn bringing.

'Tis merry in hall,

Where beards wag all.

Once had thy desire,

Pay workman his hire:

Let none be beguil'd,

Man, woman, nor child.

Thank God ye shall,

And adieu for all.

 Tusser’s classic was among the most popular printed works in Elizabethean England and reflects his own experience as a small farmer. Some proverbs on thrift and country life that appear in his verse may not have been original with him, but appear for the first time in such writings from the period and also testify to harvest labor and equipment from the time (“Threshe sede and go fanne”). Tusser also offers qualified support to the era’s controversial enclosure of open fields which was widely opposed by rural commoners who had long benefited from access to the commons (“champion farming”). But Tusser saw economic benefits for all from individualized stewardship of natural resources that would improve efficiency and diversify crop production (“More profit is quieter found / Where pastures in severall be; / Of one seely acre of ground / Than champion maketh of three”).

Century of Change

Stories and paintings that relate unpleasant interpretations of contemporary and future existence add voice and visibility to a diverse literature of the land. 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. As elsewhere across the country today, those who harvest crops in the Palouse Hills of my youth have reduced water and wind erosion and increased crop yields. When Conrad Blumenschein told me 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 Endicott, 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 in the 1960s when I began interviewing first generation immigrant elders like Mr. Blumenschein, 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. 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 the Department of Agriculture’s “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 economic stagnation in the countryside.

Another fifty years has since passed, and today the same area of several thousand acres that had been home to about fifty souls a century ago is comprised of just eight farms. All but one are part of larger operations tended by families who also own or lease other cropland in the area. (The average Palouse Country farm size in 2018 was 1100 acres.) Only four households are located on the same seven-mile stretch that supported ten families a century ago, and these are comprised of just five adults whose grown children live elsewhere. In between these habitations today are found the lonely clusters of dying locust trees, broken fences, and rusted equipment of abandoned farmsteads. The trend has brought debilitating effects on rural communities with closures of local stores, banks, and public services.

Nostalgia for some halcyon past contributes to the popularity of rural art, but should be tempered with consideration of what has been lost and what has been gained. These contrasting themes are considerably explored in contemporary photographic art and are the special interest of Pacific Northwesterner John Clement and Canadian John Malone. Ambivalent considerations about such trends are expressed in “Palouse” by Lewiston, Idaho, poet William Johnson:

There is always an empty house

by the road at the edge of town,

its windows whiskered with lilac

and letting in rain. Nearby,

a barn drags itself home,

and in May, daffodils trim the yard

against an ocean of wheat

that rolls in on a slow inexorable tide.

Trends in the substantial depopulation of the countryside are found throughout the nation, even as affordability of houses in small towns has helped keep some inhabited with newcomers to sustain local schools, churches, and clubs. Shrinking numbers of farmers remain as vital carriers of intimate knowledge about the land and growing conditions, and of practical skills that keep bringing forth the crops. The broader impact on rural life and labor is consistent with studies that show in 1840s pre-industrial America a farmer could produce an acre of wheat yielding about twenty bushels. This required approximately sixty hours of annual work using primitive implements like a single-shear plow and scythe. A single day’s harvest by an able-bodied reaper on as much as an acre could yield up to thirty bushels of cut grain. By 1900 a farmer equipped with horse-pulled gang plow, harrow, and drill produced a similar yield on one acre in about ten hours. An experienced crew operating a mechanical reaper and steam-powered thresher at that time could cut about forty-five acres a day for some 1,200 bushels (31 tons) of grain.

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 $700,000 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. Such production represents the output of a thousand reapers and twice as many binders before the Industrial Revolution. (Substantial numbers of others were tasked with carting unthreshed stalks to barns, flailing grain, tending livestock, and other related tasks.) Yet 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.

Crace, Berry, and Progress in Modern Times

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

National Colonial Farm, Piscataway Park, Accokeek, Maryland

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

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

                  Harvest will fill the barn; for that

                  The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

                  And yet no leaf or grain is filled

                  By work of ours; the land is tilled

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

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

Barn and Fence Rails, National Colonial Farm

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

Community in the Heartland

Pope John Paul II made explicit reference to farmers’ charitable obligations to the poor during an unprecedented papal visit to the American heartland in October 1979 hosted by the Diocese of Des Moines, Iowa, and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. The pope celebrated an open air Mass where a vast crowd of some 300,000—the largest in Iowa history, had assembled on a broad hillside at Urbandale, Iowa’s Living History Farms. Local St. Mary’s parishioner Joseph Hays had sent a hand-written letter to the Pope inviting him to witness the church’s “Community in the Heartland” ministry of rural study and outreach. The pontiff’s decision to visit the Iowa countryside led to weeks of preparation by members who broke from customary harvest routines to host the special ecumenical event. Surrounded by area church and civic leaders, the pope led the service from a massive platform fashioned of white oak from a century-old corn crib. The temporary sanctuary was draped with an enormous quilted banner designed by Fr. John Buscemi of Madison, Wisconsin showing a cross with four colorful contoured field patterns symbolizing the seasons. From this peculiar setting, Pope John Paul II delivered a homily urging his hearers “in the middle of the bountiful fields at harvest time” to embrace “three attitudes… for rural life”—humble gratitude, land stewardship, and generosity toward the poor.

Jeff Whitton, Northwest Harvest Poster Art (2010), Columbia Heritage Collection

General Convention of The Episcopal Church Banner, Salt Lake City (2015), Elizabeth DeRuff

American farmers participated more directly in domestic gleaning programs in the 1980s as well as in similar global aid projects. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, a group of Pacific Northwest growers formed WestWind Ministries in 1991 in response to appeals from newly independent Russian leaders to provide food and medical assistance to schools and orphanages in the Russian Far East. A coordinated effort involving the National Association of Wheat Growers, Washington-Idaho Pea & Lentil Association, and The McGregor Company of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon led to delivery of over a thousand tons of aid to areas in greatest need. Farmers hauled truckloads of wheat for processing into flour while Northwest barley, lentils, and beans were combined into nutritious soup mixes.

When Russian President Boris Yeltsin made an unprecedented visit to Seattle in September, 1994 to report on newly normalized relations between the two countries, he cited “this help in our hour of need” in the context of the food campaign as a key factor in his historic decision. Yeltsin’s gala reception was hosted by Washington Governor Mike Lowry, himself a native of the Palouse Country hamlet of Endicott, Washington, where his father had managed the local grain growers cooperative in the 1950s. Lowry’s dedication to humanitarian causes and migrant farm worker causes was the subject of many tributes following his passing in 2017. Officiant Kacey Hahn of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Renton opened the late governor’s memorial with explicit reference to moral responsibility from Leviticus 23:22: “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner.”

Penry Williams, Mass for the Reapers (1858), National Museum of Wales

Kansas farmer-philosopher Oren Long has contributed for decades to agrarian periodicals and his local paper, the Valley Falls Vindicator, to offer insight on topics ranging from food security and social unrest to seed rates and meaning in art. In a 1983 New Farm article, Long underscores the vital understanding that rural experience is at once terrestrial and transcendent. “My farm is my refuge from the deception and hopelessness that haunts this intrusive commercial world. …I am an inseparable part of a great biological scheme of things and the greater contribution toward the complexity and harmony of that scheme, the greater will be the beauty of my world and the greater my significance to it.” In this way rural experience is understood to impart beauty to life in ways long expressed by agrarian painters and writers who have shown the abiding value of sowing, reaping, and other “cooperative arts” practiced with attention to land care and the less fortunate.

A Mystic Sheaf and the Origins of Farming

Harvest season back home in the Palouse Hills often brings to mind bygone high school days. Trips from our Palouse Colony Farm to nearby Endicott lead past the school where I attended all twelve years, and where I served as principal in the 1990s. One of the great privileges of my education career was to return as a colleague with Mrs. Louise Braun, who had been my high school English teachers. She was a woman of capacious mind with expectations that students read and appreciate Shakespeare and Robert Frost with the same enthusiasm shown for sporting events. A native of tiny Viola in the Idaho-Washington Palouse borderlands, Mrs. Braun guided our uncharted literary journeys across time and place with the peculiar incentive—highly controversial among faculty and parents, that once a week we could spend class time reading Farm Journal, Field & Stream, or any other periodical of our own choosing. “Reading is the main thing,” she would say in the context of expanding young minds. 

To my mind, our most formidable high school read was the epic poem Beowulf through which we battled for many days to make sense of alliterative Old English expressions that related ancient Scandinavian lore. This was a time before Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings had ushered in a resurgence of interest in classical fantasy literature. Mrs. Braun’s reminder that many of us had descended from these tribal peoples provided modest encouragement to continue our study of this oldest English long poem. The poem’s opening lines in Lesslie Hall’s modern translation, however, invoked intriguing agrarian reference:

Lo! the Spear-Danes’ glory through splendid achievements
The folk-kings’ former fame we have heard of,
How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle.
Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in numbers
From many a people their mead-benches tore.

Queries about Old English “Scyld the Scefing,” which may be translated “Shield Sheafson” or “Scyld of the Sheaf,” provided an remarkable glimpse into mystical realms also described by Tolkien in his legendarium of Middle-earth. The namesakes of the eponymous Scyldings’ (Sköldings) Danish royal house founder in Beowulf are associated with the crucial roles as historical protector of the people (Shield) and as agri-cultural hero (Sheaf). In the mythic past he arrived as a foundling from the west who washed up in a boat on the shore of Jutland’s Old Anglia. The golden child’s head rested on a pillow of grain stalks, and he would grow into a strong and wise ruler who was the ancestor of Beowulf. Like a medieval Triptolemus, Scyld also taught his adopted people the first principles of farming and husbandry. Tolkien further explored aspects this legendary figure who is also mentioned in lesser known works of Old English literature like William Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum (“Deeds of the English Kings,” 1125) and the eighth century Historia Langobardorum (“History of the Lombards”). Tolkien’s imaginative rendition drawn from these several accounts is beautifully expressed in the poem “King Sheave,” published posthumously with “The Notion Club Papers” in Sauron Defeated (1992): 

In golden vessel gleaming water
Stood beside him; strung with silver
A harp of gold neath his hand rested;
His sleeping head was soft pillowed
On a sheaf of corn shimmering palely
As the fallow gold doth from far countries
West of Angol. Wonder filled them. 

Tolkien’s telling, the boy ascended a hill and sang a song of “sweet, unearthly, words in music woven strangely.” His hearers marveled at sounds miraculously dispelling the darkness and terror that had long gripped the region. From “King Sheave” descended many sons and their nations—Danes and Goths, Swedes and Northmen, Franks and Frisians, Swordmen and Saxons, Swabians and English. In the magnificent Scandinavian epic of Beowulf, Tolkien found a magisterial Anglo-Saxon antecedent of mythic grain king and culture hero skillfully interwoven with dynastic history to form an English national identity.
 

Sickles and Sheaves — Farming, Faith, and the Frye (Part 8)

This blog post is part of a series I (Richard) am writing about my past life experiences that helped develop a love and appreciation for agricultural heritage in general and landrace grains in particular. The series is called "Sickles and Sheaves - Farming, Faith, and the Frye" and you can view the other parts of this blog series here.

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Some of our local church traditions that were observed seasonally contrasted with some enduring aspects of agrarian folklore. We gleaned some of this from Norwegian farmer elders on Mother’s Sunwold side of the family who lived in the Palouse “upper country” environs of Fairfield, Waverly, and Oakesdale. I could grasp the significance of planting field potatoes on Good Friday, but among many members our grandparents’ generation the seeding of grain crops took place during a waxing moon, harvesting commenced when it waned, and in some cases women were not allowed out-of-doors during the combine’s first pass around a field of grain. Still in my day harvest concluded with spirited shouting and the ceremonial threshing of the straw fedoras worn by many of our fathers. Delving into the medieval European folk traditions occasioned by this study provides some explanation for why such traditions persisted through the years of my 1960s youth amidst harvest truck radios blaring rock music and news of Vietnam and moon landings.

Through verse by an accomplished local poet, Harry Helm (1906-1987), claimed as kin through some vague ancestral connection, we also knew poetic expressions about the beauty of area landscapes. Harry’s grandparents, John and Mary (Kleweno) Helm, had been among the first group of Volga German immigrants to settle in the 1880s in Palouse Hills not far from our country home. In a bucolic setting along the Palouse River, some half-dozen immigrant families established an Old World peasant commune using methods suggesting medieval origins—long, narrow Langstreifen fields (akin to English furlongs) in three-crop rotations (Dreifelderwirtschaft), Almenden commons for grazing and gardens, grain harvest with sickle and scythe, and “hoof-tread” threshing using horses led around a circle of piled stalks. Harry had grown up hearing stories about these ancient ways, and his reflective eye wove heritage and horizon into such poems as “Endicott Wheat Field” (1962):

Grandpa said:

The grass was like Europe’s grass,

Soft and waving like a sea.

It hissed and whispered like a friend

In well-known German words to me.

The hills were like German hills,

Green plumed against a feckless sky.

And I went riding bunchgrass trails,

Where the prairie chicken fly.

Clear waters tumbled through the trees

In every golden, sun-swept vale.

While flowers tipped their hats to me,

As they touched my prancing pinto’s tail.       

The Helm family’s aesthetic influence was prominently evident in the life and art of Robert R. Helm (1943-2008), great-grandson of John and Mary Helm. His mysterious, exquisite painted and collaged arrangements of landscape, rocks, and architectural fragments meticulously crafted oil on cherry, birch, and pine masterpieces reflected his relationship with heritage, terrain, and imagination. Though Helm’s style is sometimes associated with Surrealism and Luminism, its distinct physicality makes it more akin to that of a medieval artisan using unique combinations of format, composition, and color that explore meaning, reality and memory. Characterized variously as “icons of stillness” and “neo-trecento renditions of rural America,” Helm’s dreamy, rustic creations led to global recognition with his works exhibited in Paris and Berlin, and in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Louvre Gallery in Venice, California.

Although works by Helm evoke timeless themes of natural beauty and isolation, he drew inspiration from frequent travels along the Washington-Idaho rural borderlands between the Coeur d’Alene Valley and Palouse Hills where stories of his pathfinder ancestors were often retold in my visits with community elders. Oil on panel works like Spring Thaw (1985) and September Burn (1991) are notable for the placid depictions of hills, as well as for the artist’s meticulously crafted hardwood frames. “The Palouse has nurtured and reinforced his formal, psychological and metaphysical vision of life and its meaning;” writes Marti Mayo, director of the University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery, which hosted a one-man exhibition of Helm’s art in 1994. Northwest author William Kittredge offers further commentary on how place shaped Helm’s art, just as it has power to influence others who take time to know a landscape relationally:

Go back to a place, Helm knows, and purely physical memories of who you were when you were there before may begin to echo in your body. You may remember exactly how things first felt and something of how it felt to be the person you used to be.

Go back enough times and your sense of yourself in that place may begin to stack up before you in layers. It’s a way to recall your story of yourself through the years of change and to relearn the reasons for your work and the consequences. It is a way to keep reinventing your knowledge of who you are and how you are trying to make your work matter in the world.

Sickles and Sheaves — Farming, Faith, and the Frye (Part 7)

This blog post is part of a series I (Richard) am writing about my past life experiences that helped develop a love and appreciation for agricultural heritage in general and landrace grains in particular. The series is called "Sickles and Sheaves - Farming, Faith, and the Frye" and you can view the other parts of this blog series here.

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Our high school English teacher, Louise Braun, was a woman of prodigious intellect with expectations that students read and appreciate Shakespeare and Robert Frost with the same enthusiasm shown for sporting events. A native of tiny Viola in the Idaho-Washington Palouse borderlands, Mrs. Braun guided us on uncharted literary journeys across time and place with the peculiar incentive—highly controversial among faculty and parents, that once a week we could spend class time reading Farm Journal, Time Magazine, Field & Stream, or any other periodical of our own choosing. “Reading is the main thing,” she would say in the context of expanding young minds. In response to adolescent complaint that poetic expression in our anthology of world literature seemed as foreign as many authors, Mrs. Braun confided that poetry was commonly composed for spirited oral delivery. Soon afterward local farmer Leonard Jones arrived as a guest speaker but had undergone a stunning transformation on the school stage into Leonard Jones, country bard. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” he thundered in the first dramatic recitation by an adult that I had ever heard. His delivery of “The Road Less Traveled” was made even more memorable in the knowledge that Mr. Jones was one of us, and obviously and unashamedly relished the written and spoken word. Soon Mrs. Braun had us wondering about just what Frost’s “long scythe” was “whispering to the ground” (from “Mowing”), and if “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” might mean that mature thinking could question some assumed claims of science and religion.

FFA advisor Dan Birdsell introduced us to Demeter and the classical symbolism of ancient farm tools by having us memorize the organization’s opening ritual. As youth we may not always have understood the meaning behind these emblems, but we came to know spring from fall barley, sickles from scythes, and that a bushel of wheat weighed about sixty pounds. Mr. Birdsell also arranged to have us periodically attend local Grange meetings in the neighboring hamlet of Winona for extracurricular practice in parliamentary procedure. Members met monthly for rural fellowship and to promote agrarian interests in state and national politics, and raised the roof with the Patrons of Husbandry unofficial anthem, Knowles Shaw and George Minor’s familiar hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves” (“Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping….”). The organization’s official songbook, The Patron (1925), contained numerous selections commemorating the significance of field labors:

 “Harvest Song”

 “Grain that was in verdure waving,

Weareth now a hue of gold,

And the yellow heads are bending,

With the fruitage they hold.

That the ripened fruit be gathered,

Speed the sickle to and fro;

For the countless hosts of kernels,

Snowy loaves ere long will show.”

 “Soon from out the noisy thresher,

There shall golden streams be pour’d,

That the farmer’s heart will gladden,

And shall bring his just reward.

Smiles the land today with plenty,

Plenty for the needy throng;

Let all classes and conditions,

Join to swell the harvest song.”

“The Gleaner”

“When the earth is crowned with fatness,

And the yellow harvest yields

To the sickle of the reaper,

Toiling in the sunny fields;

Mark the glad, contented gleaner,

Gather one by one her store—

Ev’ry act of cheerful labor

Makes her richer than before.”

“Golden treasures, thickly scattered,

Strew the world’s surface o’er;

Man is but a humble gleaner,

Finding knowledge, seeking more.

Step by step he plods his way,

One by one his blessings rise;

He who binds his store together,

He alone is truly wise.”