Hacking the yack: A farm/history thought experiment

Two events a couple of weeks apart have helped me think more clearly about the food/farm/history intersection that I've been working on for a while now, and particularly about the tension between two approaches to knowledge about the agricultural past:  (1) putting it to immediate, practical use, and (2) using it to build more complex, informed analyses of the development of the food systems we're attempting to change.  Farmers tend toward the first, historians toward the latter, and the difference between them is the one that's sometimes characterized as "hack vs. yack--people who build and do things versus people who mostly talk and analyze.  I've been pondering ways to nudge the two into a more active dialogue with each other, on the theory that we desperately need both.  But these two events, and a little thought experiment that I've been playing around with, have made me realize that there's still a long way to go, mostly because of the hierarchies and distinctions embedded in these two ways of knowing about the past.

Dean Koyanagi of Tree Gate Farm in Ithaca with new-old electric tractor

The first event was FarmHack Ithaca, which I wrote a bit about in my most recent post.  Farm Hack was created to bring IT folks and young farmers together to design and build  things, ranging from electric tractors (like the one at left, a repurposed 1949 Grand Haven) to digital spaces for expanding and strengthening the local/sustainable food movement (like FarmHack's online forums).

As with other projects that embody the DIY/hacker/maker ethos, FarmHack is active, experimental, and radically collaborative.  When it comes to how they're approaching history, though, that DIY mindset leads them to see the historical record mainly as a transparent source of usable, practical information--plans for forgotten tools and methods, data about what was grown and marketed in particular places, inspiring statements from earlier farm activists.  Their tool kit for thinking about history doesn't include the kind of assessment of sources and contextualizing of different kinds of data that historians see as crucial to putting together a bigger, more balanced picture.  It also doesn't include an awareness of the lens  of "doing history" itself--that is, the selectivity, motive, and interpretation involved not only in approaching the historical record but also in making the materials we're examining in the present. 

During the discussion in Ithaca about putting historical materials and collections to use in the young-farmer movement, I found myself in the unusual (for me) position of being the most cautious and conservative voice in the room, urging that it might be smarter to slow down and try to connect with people and institutions who are already collecting, curating, and interpreting farm-related materials rather than jumping feet-first  into the history business themselves.  But I also appreciated the sense of politicized urgency driving the FarmHackers.  And I loved the way the structure of the entire event reflected the less-hierarchical society these farmers and activists would like to see.

Lunch prep at FarmHack Ithaca (Photo:  The Greenhorns)

That challenge to hierarchy was clearest at lunch.  Like just about every other food-movement gathering I've ever attended, this one included a communal meal, in this case prepared on the spot using food grown by local farmers.  (That's me in the middle, attempting to slice very large beets with a very dull knife;  my friend Anna Duhon of the Farmscape Ecology Program is on the right.)  We all pitched in;  we had a great healthy meal;  we all washed our own dishes.  The leveling effects of this are profound:  sleeves get rolled up, skills get shared, and everyone participates in "menial" tasks and services that are revalued here as an essential aspect of participation.

And here's my thought experiment:  I've been asking myself whether the same kind of leveling is possible within the "yack" side of the equation where I spend most of my professional time.  Can we envision public historians and other knowledge workers at a professional gathering sharing the labor of making a communal lunch and cleaning up afterward?  An event I attended at the University of Massachusetts Boston campus on Friday gave me a chance to picture that, and I have to say I couldn't quite do it.

Read or download the full report here

The event was a "Critical Conversation" about the recent "State of History in the National Park Service" report from the Organization of American Historians.  A standing-room-only crowd gathered for the afternoon to discuss some of the findings and implications of the study, which calls on the NPS to devote far more attention and resources to supporting and disseminating high-caliber historical scholarship at its sites. One point that recurred throughout the discussion (as it tends to do at public history events) is that historians, by and large, really haven't done a very good job of convincing the public of the value of the kinds of careful, provisional, critical knowledge they produce. A list of general recommendations did emerge from the conversation, but these weren't tied to any definite, consequential next steps or any specific forum for effecting change, and I left with a strong sense that while the discussions had been terrific, the immediate future would hold a lot more words than actions.

Beyond that, I was struck by how faithfully this gathering--like virtually every academic conference or symposium--reproduced the kind of intellectual politics represented by the hack/yack divide.  Purely talk-oriented forums delegate everything having to do with hands-on skills (making food, setting up and running AV equipment, and the like) and expect participants to show up dressed in ways that don't really enable us to do anything but talk, even if we were to want to do something as startling as helping out with the more menial side of the event.  The hierarchical implications of this are subtle but profound:  we are the ones who have risen above the hands-on tasks, whose time and ideas are important enough that we have other people take care of those more material needs for us.  Most of us don't believe those things consciously, but our patterns of gathering and working reinforce them on every level.

It was particularly striking at this event because one of the things we were discussing was whether front-line historical interpreters at national parks could give enough attention to upgrading their historical skills if they were also expected to perform jobs like checking on the toilet paper supply in the bathrooms.  The sense of the gathering, needless to say, was that the historical skills should take precedence.  In other words, we were talking about how to extend the hack/yack divide rather than challenge or undo it.

This isn't entirely illogical.  IT hackers make things with code and farmers grow food, but historians' "making" is inherently less tangible in many ways. But the higher status that has historically become attached to professional "hands-off" labor means that this is the logic of the compartmentalized, hierarchical society that has created such vast distances between farmers and eaters, between service work and knowledge work, and between embodied place-knowledge and more abstracted ways of learning about the world.  Those distances, I think, help to account for the strange absence in much of the yacker realm of the sense of urgency that motivates young farmers and food activists.  Even in the wake of this week's "superstorm" (which kept a number of would-be NPS participants in their own parks dealing with Hurricane Sandy's aftermath), only one speaker--Rolf Diamant, the recently-retired superintendent of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park--connected those dots, arguing that climate change has pushed its way to the top of the agenda for all national parks.  "If you're not talking about the issues of the day and connecting them to the place that you're at," he said, "you're not preparing the American people for the issues that they're going to face."

When I started this post, it was going to be a high-falutin piece about the essential contributions that professional historical skills can make to rethinking our current food systems.  But I've really said most of that elsewhere (for example, this previous post).  And as I ponder these two gatherings more deeply, I'm left feeling that historians need to find ways to sit down at actual, literal dinner tables with farmers and foodies, as an essential first step toward making the case for the importance of the more abstracted kinds of knowledge we can bring to the metaphorical table.  The young farmers are ahead of the historians on this, and if we're going to bring these two together, maybe those of us in the yacking sector need to be prepared to roll up our sleeves a little more often.

What would keep us from going down the same path to "big ag" all over again?

As I've been pondering local food networks and activism over the past couple of years, one question keeps coming to mind.  It's all very well to be rediscovering smaller-scale modes of production and consumption, but our current large-scale systems developed for reasons that seemed wise at the time (trying to help farmers make a secure living, make food more affordable, reduce the back-breaking labor of cultivating land).  What would keep us from enacting the same cycle again, and ending up with just a nouveau version of today's "big ag"?  How do we hold the line at things that work at a local or regional level, rather than letting market logic push things toward the national and global?  As the networks of distribution and supply in the local food realm become more extensive, with "food hubs" and other intermediaries, aggregators, and specialized services of various kinds now appearing all over the landscape, this seems worth considering.

What happened the first time around is that competition and economies of scale came to favor larger producers, companies, and distributors, beginning as early as the mid-19th century but really becoming entrenched after World War II.   So if we're going to create and maintain small- and mid-sized systems, there needs to be something that can counter that trend toward bigness.

I spend a lot of time critiquing tourist-oriented development, so I feel a bit funny saying this, but I really think that tourism (and the whole repertoire of tourist-oriented techniques of publicity and experience-marketing) might help us here.  I wrote about this elsewhere in relation to fuels, cars, and railroads, and I wonder if the same thing might apply to local food.  At the moment, the case is being made for relocalizing/regionalizing in ways that are largely touristic, focusing on creating "hereness" and branded identities or products and locating local food within constellations of other heritage- and recreation-oriented attractions.  But that's not to say that the infrastructure that's being built in the process won't have its own staying power if and when times get tough(er).

Agritourism and selling experience rather than just food may not seem like smart strategies for the long-term survival of small food producers, but it's worth remembering that domestic tourism actually flourished in the Great Depression, as people saved money by taking vacations closer to home.  More to the point, the emerging networks we're now seeing may be building systems and connections and knowledge that will be highly serviceable for robust local and regional food systems down the road. If present-day tourism helps us do that, then I'm all for it.

And my assumption is that by the time we find ourselves finally facing up to the realities of a carbon-saturated, fossil-fuel starved world (the imminence of which is becoming more apparent every day), many of the "externalities" inherent in the national and global food systems that now feed us will have shown themselves to be "unsustainable" in the long run.  The costs of obtaining oil, public subsidy of industrial food production and the transportation systems it relies on, reliance on below-market-value legal and illegal labor--our present way of producing food has multiple weak spots.  We may wake up one morning to discover that the smaller-scale, less energy-dense, more reciprocal networks we've been putting in place have simply become the new way of doing business.

So as corn and soy crops wither in this year's drought and Greenland's ice cap melts, the somewhat odd blend of people and motivations in the local food movement--boutiquey, nostalgic, and political in about equal parts--may offer some hope that in decentralized and sometimes contradictory ways, we're reinventing things right out from under the industrialized system.  I was heartened to read a recent Wall Street Journal interview with the chef at the upscale Stone Barns Center, running along these same lines.  "Five years ago," he says,  "I would have said that locavorism was at its height and that a new fad was coming to replace it. Now I'm actually convinced we're just beginning to see its potential." As we also see the potential of extreme weather and growing competition for fuel and other resources, that's a hopeful thought to hold onto.

Maple syrup is good to think

I had good intentions of writing a post week here every week, but inevitably, my schedule has been steam-rollered by the mighty force that is the spring semester. Now that we're into March, though, there's beginning to be a bit of light at the end of the teaching tunnel, and I'm aiming to start posting more frequently again.

March also means longer days (and changing the clocks last night) and rising sap, which in this part of the world translates into maple syrup season. Maple syrup has been striking me lately as being exceptionally "good to think with" when it comes to questions about food, farming, heritage, climate, and environment. For one thing, it occupies a possibly unique place between foraging and farming--more interventionist than gathering wild mushrooms in the woods, yet still deeply dependent on wild plants (that is, maple trees) and environmental conditions that are largely beyond producers' power to control or mitigate.

2011 was one of the best syrup seasons in several decades for much of New England, including Franklin County, Massachusetts, where I live. Average temperatures continued to rise as the climate has warmed, but many syrup producers were able to adapt by tapping trees at slightly higher elevations. This year, however, our strange "non-winter"--next to no snow, exceptionally moderate temperatures--apparently bodes very badly for syrup-makers. One farmer interviewed for a Boston Globe article this week reported that the sugar content in his trees' sap was only a quarter of what it usually is, meaning that the ratio of raw sap to boiled-down syrup will need to be much higher, possibly making it impossible to turn a profit. Beyond a certain point, sap-gathering forces humans to bow to the weather, and predictions about continued climate change show southern syrup-production in places like Pennsylvania and Connecticut disappearing within the next century, with the gains shifting north to Quebec and elsewhere.

Maple syrup also seems poised almost perfectly between "pastness" and and the present-day farm economy.  It invokes a time when imported sugars hadn't yet established a monopoly on sweetness in this part of the world. Its association with the coming of spring and with rural landscapes, and the fact that it's one of the few modes of food production that still relies largely on burning wood as fuel, makes it inherently nostalgic for a lot of us. Whenever I taste good maple syrup (and by "good" I mean hefty Grade B, not that light amber stuff), I get a memory hit: Easter visits to my grandparents in rural Ontario, where my grandfather presided in patriarchal splendor over operations at the sugar shack. With help from male relatives and neighbors, he turned out gallons of syrup every spring, which went onto the breakfast tables at the family hotel all summer. I suspect that the sense memories associated with syrup-making--the crackling fire, the smoke and sweet steam from the condensor, the feel underfoot of ground just beginning to soften--works in a similar way for many people.

On the other hand, maple syrup is a "real" product that helps keep a lot of small farms in this part of the world economically viable. Particularly in Vermont, which produced 41% of all American maple syrup last year (and where maple syrup accounted for about 15% of overall farm product sales), those sugar shacks are big business. (Here's a PDF with all the 2011 maple syrup statistics your heart could desire.) For all the nostalgia associated with those old galvanized sap buckets hanging from trees at this time of year, producers have been understandably quite unsentimental about switching to plastic tap lines that bring the sap to them rather than requiring a trek through snowy or muddy woods to collect it. And this industry's vulnerability to weather patterns makes it a site where discussions about climate change are especially sharp and salient.

This is something that actually gives me hope (aside from the fact that it's just inherently hard not to feel more hopeful at this time of year). Intersections--of past and present, nostalgia and innovation, winter and spring--can be fruitful places for thought and potential change. Most people have so lost touch with the realities of seasonal food gathering and production that maple-syrup season means just a spring jaunt in the car in search of pancakes, but at least that's something. If it helps to maintain places and practices where more serious economic and environmental realities come to seem real and perhaps urgent, that's all to the good.

Getting history to the table

When I finished my dissertation in 2003 and was casting around for a new research project, I thought I would study the ways that dairy farming has been used to create an image for Vermont as a tourist destination. Although I hadn’t articulated it clearly for myself at that point, I think I was looking for some way to investigate places where the “real” business of agriculture overlapped with the expanding realm of agritourism, all out of some vague sense that this was something that increasingly mattered as the consequences of our mobile, industrialized, petroleum-based food industry (and society) became clearer and more distressing to contemplate. I did some preliminary exploration, read enough about American agricultural history to recognize that it was far more complicated than I’d ever imagined, and then got too busy with other things to pursue the full-scale ethnographic project I’d had in mind.

Six years later, I was handed a wonderful chance to return to a subject that had only gotten more interesting and urgent in the meantime. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been completing an Ethnographic Landscape Study for Martin Van Buren National Historic Site in Kinderhook, NY, a national park that preserves the rural estate of America’s eighth President. The park has recently expanded its boundaries to take in more than 200 acres of farmland that Van Buren cultivated in his post-Presidential years. The fields are now being worked by a large CSA farm, and so the park, which is used to thinking of itself as a purely historical site, is having to reenvision itself as to some extent an active participant in the working agricultural landscape of the area. The representational is beginning to overlap with the real at this site, a merger that my study was intended to clarify and support.

What’s really been interesting to me is the way that this historic site and many others seem to be trembling on the verge--or are maybe just beyond it, in a few cases--of reintegrating historic and supposedly obsolete farms and farming methods into vital present-day efforts to rethink and remake our contemporary world. The past few years have seen an enormous broadening of public awareness and concern about climate change, peak oil, global capitalism, and all that connects to them (which is just about everything). And food and farming seem to be the entry-points through which people can most readily address this daunting and often depressing set of issues. Even in the few years between my initial forays into the local-food scene and today, there’s been an exponential increase in farmers markets, CSA farms, local and regional “food hubs,” and other projects that to varying degrees work to rebuild the kinds of food production and consumption that existed in most places until the mid-20th century.

There’s a potentially exciting role for historic sites and organizations to play in all of this as sites of research, cultivation, and exchange. As I’ve been talking with people in the public history and museum fields about these ideas over the past couple of years, I’ve had a sense of a groundswell of interest and activism that is just beginning to build and that's casting around for ways to root itself in practice and networks of association. This blog is intended to be a node in that emerging conversation, one that I hope will help to coalesce some of the bits and pieces swirling around out there at the moment.

At the same time, I hope the blog can help to explore and counter the insidious association of small-scale farming with “pastness.” The best historical inquiry helps us build knowledge about the past that isn’t colored by nostalgia, wishful thinking, or romanticism. But historic farm sites tend to be imbued with all that stuff--what I think of as the “baby lamb effect” that shapes visitors' experiences of farms that are outside the present-day agricultural economy. The rosy glow that surrounds “old tyme” farmscapes makes it harder to see the harder-edged histories of how and why we ended up with the food system we now have, and what it would take to invent (or reinvent) and sustain something different.

So the big question that this blog poses is: How can historic sites help with the hard task of creating broad, historically-informed civic and policy discussions about food, farming, and all the complex issues connected to them? In other words, how can we make sure that history is at the table as we’re figuring these things out?

That’s a big question, and I’m hoping some answers may emerge in the field over the next handful of years. In a more concrete sense, I’d like to ask you where you see examples of this already starting to happen. Where is history already at the table, and what good things (in addition to the list that’s started here) are underway at the intersection of historic preservation and working agriculture?