Where slow food meets slow knowledge

I shed 40 pounds this week, and it feels great.

The weight was in the files and materials from the Ethnographic Landscape Study that I’ve been working on for the last three years for Martin Van Buren National Historic Site.  The project is now officially finished, and the final report is printed and also posted as a PDF on the park’s website.  And so I was able to move the files out of my office and take them to the park for eventual accessioning in their library collection.  

Even with an amazing amount of material stored on a tiny flash drive (how did we get along without those things?), there was a substantial pile of paper.  That, plus the fact that we were covering anthropology's "historical turn" in my "History of Anthropological Thought" class at Tufts this week, has got me reflecting on the slow, meticulous process of doing ethnographically-oriented research that covers a long span of time. 

The laborious pace of that kind of study was in sharp contrast to the let's-get-it-done-now approach of an event I attended right after my visit to the park:  a Farm Hack in Ithaca, New York.  Farm Hack is part of the expansive and communitarian DIY movement that's making itself felt in many communities of knowledge and practice these days--part Maker Faire, part barn-raising, part engineering design lab (but with really good food).  Farm Hack is a project of the National Young Farmers Coalition, itself an outgrowth of the Greenhorns, probably the central hub of information-sharing and activism for the burgeoning young-farmer movement.

I was there as part of a nascent conversation about what's happening at the intersection of new farm activism and existing (or emergent) networks of historical collections and study. Our discussions were fascinating, wide-ranging, and sometimes frustrating, and I left feeling confirmed in my hunch that the gap between the slow-food world and the slow-knowledge realm presents an incredibly interesting tension which could be enormously creative if it can be negotiated thoughtfully.  (Beginning to do so, over lunch, are, from left to right, Amy Francheschini of Future Farmers, Severine von Tscharner Fleming of the Greenhorns, Conrad Vispo of the Farmscape Ecology Program, Jeff Piestrak of Cornell University's Mann Library, and Dorn Cox of Tuckaway Farm.)

I'm planning to use my next few blog posts to reflect on all of this, starting with a more detailed piece about FarmHack in the next week or so.  Following that, I'll unpack the chapters of the Martin Van Buren ELS a bit, with an eye to the over-arching question that came out of the discussions in Ithaca for me:  How can public historians best make a case for the use value of careful, methodical historical knowledge-creation in dialogue with the exploding universe of the slow food and new farmers movements and the sense of urgency that's driving all of us involved in these realms?  Stay tuned.

My inner Anglo-Saxon and the right tool for the job

I was pretty much a card-carrying white Anglo-Saxon Protestant to begin with, but I got a birthday present last month that made me feel even moreso.  My husband gave me a beautiful new scythe from Scythe Supply in Perry, Maine, and I've been learning to use it to mow the grasses and weeds in the clearing around our house.

Learning, in this case, has involved some trial and error, and also some diligent reading of David Tresemer's classic The Scythe Book, which came with the scythe.  Tresemer has a deep sense of the history and lineage of this particular hand-tool, and the book reminded me of how the pre-modern continues to lurk in many aspects of our supposedly postmodern world.  You can definitely hear it in the old English words that turn up in scything:  peen, tang, snath, windrow.  And Tresemer also notes that in the days before standardized measurements, there were many variations on how large an acre was, perhaps based on what could typically be mowed by a person in a day--a metric that was influenced by differences in local and regional methods, tools, and levels of skill.  Mowing a field with a scythe evokes some sense of connection to peasants haying in preindustrial Europe and yeoman farmers carving out farms in colonial New England.

The scythe's renewed popularity seems to be part of a recent trend toward "reskilling" and the somewhat longer-standing "appropriate technology" movement.  These and other related movements (for example, DIY and urban homesteading) emphasize hand tools, small-scale production, muscle-power, and low energy inputs, all of which also tend to support personal and local agency rather than top-down or large-scale control of resources and production of all kinds.  Among the hybrid farm/history sites that I've been keeping an eye on as I've been thinking about the intersection of historical knowledge about farming and contemporary farm economies, there are two that have clearly embraced this approach:

• Tillers International, in Michigan, connects the dots among historical and small-scale modes of farming, energy conservation and efficiency, and rural self-determination.  Its classes and projects are a fascinating blend of the nostalgic and the forward-looking, and it treats the historic farm tools in its museum collection as "models of innovation" that can be used to inspire re-designed and re-invented technologies for contemporary farming.

•  The Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York state has recently launched a "Slow Tools" project that aims to create efficient, ergonomic tools and machines suited to the small scale of most new young farmers' operations.  Beginning with a small electric tractor that can serve multiple purposes (above), the engineers and inventors working on the project plan to offer open-source designs for a variety of energy-efficient equipment.

 Scythe Supply's "Why Use a Scythe?" page includes a list of many different kinds of people and groups who find scythes preferable to petroleum-powered mowers, and the list reflects the heartening diversity of the hand-tool and back-to-the-land movements.  Farmers, gardeners, ranchers, and growers of various kinds are represented;  so are those who want to limit the environmental impact of their mowing by avoiding heavy equipment (an argument sometimes put forward for the use of draft horses in small-scale logging operations).  The page mentions "A pair of 81 year olds who remember mowing in their youth and have returned to scything for exercise" as well as "Living history centers needing period equipment"--all in all, an interesting blend of the nostalgic, the practical, and the representational.

A dissenting voice on this comes from a commenter on a post I wrote earlier this year extolling the virtues of small-scale farm equipment.  When the piece was re-posted recently on the National Young Farmers Coalition "Farm Hack" blog, a fifth-generation Wisconsin farmer took me to task for ignoring the many downsides of old equipment, including safety concerns and costs in time and effort.  It was a useful reminder that we always need to ask the question, "Why did we move away from doing this in the first place?", a historical approach that can be an important corrective to assuming that anything old or small-scale is inherently better.

"What's the best tool for this particular job?" is perhaps an even better question to ask, with an awareness that "better" might encompass everything from fuel costs and environmental impact to the aesthetic/physical/personal satisfactions of feeling a sharp blade slicing through damp grass in the early morning.

An Open Letter to New Farmers, Part II: Crop Mob Mentality

In last week's post, I wrote about why younger and beginning farmers might want to forge relationships with historic sites that have land and often a long history of cultivation of that land.  And while I've got you on the line, new farmers, I’d like to make a case for how you might help to strengthen the museums and history-minded organizations who are your potential partners in preserving farmland and researching and rebuilding local and regional food systems.  

I'll cut right to the chase:   I think that public history needs not only your critical savvy about how we might prepare ourselves for the changes and stresses of a changing climate and a more localized way of living, but also the improvisatory, do-it-yourself, open-source approach that you tend to take to life and work.  That approach reflects the fact that you've come of age with the World Wide Web, which enables new kinds of sharing, collaborating, learning, and creating across distances and time.  And while there's no shortage of digital enterprise going on in the public history world, I have to say that I don't think the collective inventiveness and open-endedness of this mindset has really permeated the field yet.  That's where you might play a role.

I see this new mindset sprouting up all around the local food movement.  It's exemplified by the Crop Mob, a kind of new-fashioned work bee that responds to the demographic and economic changes in farming over the past century.  How do you harvest your potatoes or move your giant compost pile when you don't have 11 kids or a handy local workforce of seasonal farm laborers?  Put out a call to your network of like-minded young agrarians, who will come help you out in exchange for a good meal at the end of the work session and the promise of reciprocal unpaid labor when they need it.  Digital communication is key to making a Crop Mob work, in addition to spreading the idea beyond its origins in the Triangle area of North Carolina.

Groups like Food + Tech Connect are beginning to marry this approach to research and public education about the food system, as they do most notably in their Farm Bill Hackathon. A hackathon is a gathering of geeks to work on some specific task:  building a tool, writing a piece of code, or, in this case, turning the wonky data of the Farm Bill into accessible narratives and graphics.  Like crop mobbing, the Farm Bill Hackathon emphasizes doing--gathering a variety of people to engage directly with complex information, make something useful out of it, and then use those products as a step toward making social and economic change.  It also emphasizes open rather than proprietary knowledge creation--a democratization of data that public historians should embrace.

The new generational mindset--what one farm visionary is thinking of as Agriculture 3.0--even shows up in heartening ways in more traditionally commercial ventures, like a two+ minute ad for the (healthy) fast-food chain Chipotle.  Chipotle emphasizes its non-factory-farmed ingredients, and the ad is a mini-history of the industrialization and nascent reinvention of agriculture.  A pig farmer expands and mechanizes his business, only to end up seeing his pigs being compressed into big pink food cubes on a factory conveyor belt;  after a dark night of the soul (above), he goes back to older methods, selling to Chipotle rather than to a faceless food processor.

Like the Farm Bill Hackathon, the Chipotle ad distills a lot of information into a narrative that is over-simple in some ways but not without nuance.  For example, it hints that factory farming was the product as much of farmers' desire to improve their operations as of evil corporate profit-seeking.  As one of the ad team puts it in the "making of" video, the farmer "ends up with this factory farm out of having good intentions or wanting to...build a successful business"--an important point to remember as we try to figure out how to dismantle or resist the industrialized food system. The ad itself also has a DIY feel to it, and although it was accomplished with highly sophisticated equipment, its stop-motion animation using handmade figures is the kind of thing that could easily be done with less high-end tools and disseminated in less high-budget ways.

There's a long history of Americans seeing the next great technology as the solution to the problems of the previous ones, so I don't want to oversell the potential of the Internet, which is already turning out to have downsides of its own.  But one of the exciting things about it is how well it combines with older, retro, and muscle-powered technologies.  Young farmers' use of digital technology gives me hope that this may be a much more selective adoption of the latest new thing than some of the earlier attempts to revitalize small-scale farming by maximizing its efficiency through mechanization.  This strikes me as more akin to how Amish and Mennonite farmers have approached technology: with a careful eye on how it might maintain and enhance community rather than unraveling it. 

And the whole combination strikes me as just what a lot of historic sites have been looking for:  a way to expand their publics, share and aggregate the knowledge they've collected, and strike a healthy balance between tech-savviness and an insistence on the importance of tangible places and experiences.  I'm not proposing anything specific here, which is sort of the whole point--I'm just thinking that if young farmers brought their inventive crop mob mentality to farming and learning at historic sites, and if public historians embraced that do-it-yourself ethos with a trifle more abandon than we tend to see in the field, some very exciting things might start to happen.