Anna Duhon: Windows onto the farmscape: Becoming part of the story

FEP researchers Anna Duhon, Conrad Vispo, Claudia Knab-Vispo

How do we help facilitate people’s connection to the land? This is the central question that drives our work at the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program, a small, community-based research and outreach initiative on a working educational farm in the mid-Hudson Valley.

Our trio of researchers includes a botanist, a wildlife ecologist and a social scientist. Together we strive to open different windows of knowledge onto our county’s ‘farmscape’--the term we use to describe a landscape that even in its most out-of-the way corners has been shaped by a long history of agricultural land use and for which agriculture continues to be a defining factor.

The windows we open are often very different--a look into the native butterflies and the fields they thrive in, or the industrial history as it impacted land use, or the new farmers that are just marrying their visions to a piece of land. With the landscape as the connecting core of our research, we are always striving to mesh our different disciplines into a more holistic picture. This involves bridging areas of research that are often separate or even at odds, such as the cultural and the ecological, or agronomic and conservation sciences. By opening such different windows, we hope not only to deepen our own perspectives, but also to invite further exploration and engagement with the land from a broad base of interests; creating entry points that might draw in farmers alongside history buffs, or wildflower enthusiasts alongside local food lovers.

From "so what?" to "how?" Merging farm histories with farm and public history practice

In recent posts, I've been teasing out some of the useful aspects of the kind of detailed ethnohistorical knowledge about past and present farming practices that went into my Ethnographic Landscape Study of farmers and farming in Columbia County, New York, in an attempt to address the fundamental "So what?" question that lurks behind any historical inquiry.  However, "So what?" only gets us part of the way toward a more vital, shared historical consciousness about the agricultural past.  Equally important is how to put this kind of knowledge into active practice so that it can inform contemporary debates and choices relating to food and farming.

Wayside plaque at Martin Van Buren NHS

The final chapter of my report to Martin Van Buren National Historic Site proposed two guiding principles that the park might use in its management and interpretation of the agricultural land within its boundaries.  The first principle was that there's an ever-present danger of creating an aura of "pastness" through too much focus on "period" farming techniques and landscapes, which should be countered by emphasizing longer-term questions and issues (such as the ones I wrote about in a previous post) and creating a permeable boundary between past and present.  The second--important in any kind of partnership, but perhaps particularly with partners trying to survive in a risky and demanding business like farming--is that any farm-related projects should offer some identifiable, concrete benefit for the farms as well as for the park.

Building on those basic principles, I outlined a number of recommendations and sample project ideas, which can be found in Chapter Nine of the report itself.  Some of these raised as many questions as they answered (for example, how should a public agency like the National Park Service make decisions about which specific farms or modes of farming to partner with?).  But I've come to accept that farming is just like that--there are few, if any, definitive guidelines!  My suggestions tried to take into account both the politics and the practicalities of contemporary Columbia County agriculture, as well as the particular role played by Martin Van Buren himself and the park that preserves his working farm, while leaving room for the shared production of new knowledge informed by a careful consideration of evidence and debates from the past.

All of this has left me with a desire to extend these questions and ideas further, which I'll be doing this spring along with a number of fine public history colleagues.  And that gets me to the plan for the next several months of the blog.  In partnership with Michelle Moon of the Peabody Essex Museum, I'll be facilitating a Working Group session on "Public History and the Local Food Movement" at the National Council on Public History annual meeting in Ottawa, Ontario in April.  NPCH Working Groups are usually convened to focus on specific issues or projects, and ours is intended to further the professional conversation about the food/farm/history intersection and set out some of the theoretical and methodological issues in a way that's broadly useable by people in the field.

Working Groups also generally hold some kind of pre-conference intra-group discussion, and that's where the blog comes in.  We're planning to hold our discussions here, in the form of a weekly post from someone in the group and some commentary by others.  We welcome broader participation by readers and friends--any and all ideas will enrich the mix.  Michelle will lead off with the first post shortly, followed by what I think will be a really intriguing series of pieces focusing on that core issue of useability--getting history to the table as we're rethinking our food systems and all that connects to them.  This is not--I repeat, not--merely a ploy on my part to get out of writing a blog post each week!  I'm looking forward to expanding the dialogue and moving toward our face-to-face gathering in Ottawa in April.

Happy New Year to all, and happy eating!

"Bloody Mary" and back-to-the-land: Letting Polish farmers complicate the big story

We're closing in on the end of the year, the end of my discussion of my Ethnographic Landscape Report chapters, and the end of this phase of "History at the Table."  I have four chapters left to talk about, which I'm going to attempt to do in the next four days, and then the blog will enter a new mode for a while, which I'll say more about shortly.

How historical research looks in the movies

In movies and TV, people who are uncovering secrets from the past always stumble on some intriguing initial clue that leads them to a usually-linear series of discoveries culminating in a clear epiphany.  Historians know that this seldom happens, and that real archival and ethnohistorical research more often involves finding tiny snippets of information that get pieced together to make more provisional interpretations.  That's one thing we can learn from the process of doing rigorous historical investigations.  But another lesson is that occasionally things actually do follow that clue-discovery-epiphany model, and when it does, it's tremendous fun.  That was the case with Chapter 6, which covered years between Van Buren's death in 1862 and the First World War.

This was a time of sweeping transition in the American farm sector, with the continued ascendancy of commercialized markets, ever-more mechanized agriculture, and increasing attempts to bolster farmers' profitability through a range of policy measures, cooperative organizations, and technological innovations.  The big story arc of farm history in the old northeastern states in this period can be described as "dwindling," with far more people leaving the agricultural economy than entering it.  And yet...

In real life:  misspelled Polish names in old Census records!

I found an intriguing little clue in Martin Van Buren's Kinderhook neighborhood that suggested there were people getting into farming in Columbia County even as many of the older farm families were getting out.  I wouldn't have noticed it except that I'd just completed a previous National Park Service ethnography study that focused on Polish-Americans.  Because I was attuned to looking for Polish surnames, they jumped out at me from the U.S. Census records around the turn of the 20th century.  Once I started looking more closely, I found a sizeable number of Polish immigrants in the immediate area, clearly part of the large wave of migration from occupied Poland in this period.

The majority of Polish immigrants in the U.S. settled either in industrial cities or regions that serviced industry, like the coal-mining areas of Pennsylvania.  Few were able to follow up on the widely-shared dream of becoming small independent farmers, but I knew from my earlier research that a minority had done so, often taking over the older farms of New Englanders and other northeasterners and sometimes making them highly productive again.  (This was particularly the case in parts of the mid-Connecticut River Valley, where Polish family farms remain an important part of the local agricultural economy.)  It became clear that Columbia County's Poles had followed that anomalous path, with sons and daughters often working in the county's small factories but with many family members--particularly the  men--listed in the census as "farmer" or "farm laborer."[1]  Like many Dutch- and English-Americans of earlier generations, they combined waged labor for other farmers with subsistence and small-scale market farming on land that they bought or leased.

This neighboring farm (c. 1890) regularly hired Polish workers

Some Internet searching and asking around about family names from the old Censuses helped me to track down some descendants of the immigrant generation, and this new data helped me "read into" some of my earlier interviews and sources in a richer way.  For example, a charming memoir by the daughter of a neighboring farm family provided some tantalizing glimpses of the tensions between the Polish farmers and well-to-do Dutch-American farmers whom the immigrants probably saw as analogous to the landed gentry of Polish rural areas:  country squires and landlords who sometimes needed reminding of their responsibilities to the less well-off.[2]  The memoir recounts stories about a Polish woman that the family called "Bloody Mary" because she was the one who caught the pigs' blood in a pan during butchering.  After one day of harvesting potatoes, she was found to have stacked one bushel inside another to hide some potatoes she had taken for her own use, but like others who were caught pilfering feed grain, lumber, and other supplies, she seems to have been hired again the next year.  Perhaps "Bloody Mary" viewed her purloined potatoes as an informal benefit for her hard work and a way to remind her employer of his more-than-merely-financial responsibilities to those who labored in his fields.

The discussion of Kinderhook's Polish farmers in Chapters 6 and 7 let me trace both the opportunities seized by these hard-working immigrant families and the growing challenges faced by small farmers as the 20th century went on.  By the time of the Second World War, the sons and daughters of the newcomers had almost all moved on to other kinds of work;  the few who stayed in farming had embraced the new mechanization, chemicals, and mono-cropping that have come to characterize industrial agriculture.

Not just a Sixties thing

So the discovery of this nearly-invisible farm population doesn't change the big story arc.  But it complicates it in useful ways by showing that "decline" can sometimes be accompanied by renewal and reinvention, and that going "back to the land" was by no means confined to the 1960s and 70s.  Recognizing that helped me to see other examples of it from the 1930s and the 1950s (a fascinating history that Dona Brown has recently traced in her 2011 book Back to the Land:  The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America).  It also provided a kind of sideways connection with the farmers who, in 1924, invited philosopher Rudolph Steiner to give a series of lectures in German-occupied Poland to address their concerns about the decline in their soil and livestock fertility after the use of chemical fertilizers.  Steiner's lectures laid out the principles of what became biodynamic agriculture, which was transplanted to the U.S.--specifically, to the Hudson Valley region--a decade later and which is practiced by the farmers who currently cultivate Martin Van Buren's old farm.  All these "alternatives" and hidden histories give us a picture of how ideas about farming have historically circulated in surprisingly cosmopolitan and far-flung networks.

So this wasn't a quest on the scale of the DaVinci Code, but it was an example of how pursuing a seemingly random snippet of information can throw a new light on some of what was happening around the edges of the big, taken-for-granted story of agriculture in a given period.

Next:  Sometimes history helps us see how short-term a trend actually may be.


[1]  For more on Polish farmers in America, see Dennis Kolinski, "Polish Rural Settlement in America" in Polish American Studies 52:2 (Autumn 1995), pp. 21-55.
[2]  Elisabeth Van Alstyne Wilson.  Children of Sunnyside.  Self-published, 1965.  Columbia County Historical Society.  The 1890 image of the Sunnyside barns above is from the book.

What we can (and can't) ask history to do for us: Lessons from Martin Van Buren

Lindenwald's kitchen reflects the park's expanded focus on food and farming

Shortly before he lost his bid for Presidential re-election in 1839, Martin Van Buren purchased an old Dutch farm in his home town of Kinderhook, New York.  After the election, he moved there permanently, continuing to play a part in national politics but also becoming a serious farmer.

170 years later, the small national park centered around Van Buren's country mansion expanded its boundaries to include the property's 19th century farm fields as well.  Those fields are now protected for agricultural use in perpetuity and most of them are currently being cultivated by Roxbury Farm, a vibrant biodynamic CSA.  Prompted in part by concern about keeping prime farmland in Columbia County in cultivation, the boundary expansion has been both supported by and the impetus for a number of park-commissioned studies documenting Van Buren's farming and--in the case of my own Ethnographic Landscape Study--the longer history of agriculture in the county.  In thinking through the practical utility of the chapters of my report, as I've been doing in this series of posts, I'm struck by how Chapter 5, on Van Buren's quarter-century at the farm, brings us up against some of the thornier issues of moving good historical scholarship into the public sphere.

While I was doing my primary research, the park and the farm were engaged in trying to negotiate the terms of their new relationship, a process that is still ongoing and that exposed tensions between differing philosophical approaches, management styles, and economic imperatives.  A question that the park and I were both wrestling with, in parallel, was, "What kind(s) of contemporary farming are compatible with the park's core mission of interpreting the life and political career of Martin Van Buren?" 

This question was most salient for the small amount of land owned outright by the National Park Service (most of the acreage is actually in private hands) but also for thinking about possible future partnerships with other farmers who might farm the property at some point.  For the second half of the 20th century, Lindenwald's farmer-owner had grown corn, potatoes, and other commercial crops using DDT and other toxic pesticides, and there was a strong consensus--supported by general NPS policies--that this was not a compatible use.  But the question opened a real can of worms:  toxic pesticides might be off the table, but what other methods were acceptable or unacceptable?  Did Martin Van Buren's own farming practices offer any kind of guide to defining those limits?  How useful was the historical record in helping to guide present- and future-oriented decision-making?

Jesse Buel's Albany-based farm journal

There are certainly many intriguing overlaps between Van Buren's farming and some elements of the contemporary food movement, including CSA and biodynamic farming.  Van Buren's farm provided much of the food for his own household;  this was still a time of "eating local."  Commercial markets were beginning to exert a much stronger influence on what farmers grew and how they sold it, making the mid-19th century not unlike our own time in its particular blend of local consumption and more distant marketing.  Van Buren was au courant with many of the farm reform ideas of his time, and seems to have shared the concern of many in the northeast about the future of farming and the livelihoods and values that went with it (including, importantly for Van Buren, the virtues of "free soil and free men").  Duke University historian Reeve Huston, who conducted a Special History Study [PDF] on Van Buren's farming for the park, tended toward an interpretation of the former President as an enthusiastic adopter--if not precisely a pioneer--of techniques such as restoring the fertility of over-worked fields through manuring, experimenting with new crops like hops, and reading progressive farm journals like Jesse Buel's Albany-based Cultivator.  Roxbury Farm's practices echo and mirror many of these historical precedents, including that its founder, Jean-Paul Courtens, is himself Dutch-American, like Van Buren and others who cultivated this land from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

Jean-Paul traced out some of these similarities in a September 2010 newsletter [PDF], locating Roxbury Farm within the longer trajectory of reform efforts in Columbia County, and we used this history as the basis for a "three-century farm tour" at the park's 2010 Harvest Day celebration (at left, after the tour, are Otter and Conrad Vispo from the Farmscape Ecology Program, Jean-Paul Courtens and Jody Bollyut of Roxbury Farm, Anna Duhon from FEP, yours truly as the early 20th century daughter of a neighboring farm, and Kinderhook historian Ruth Piwonka).

But despite all that, when I came to write Chapter 5 of my report, the conclusion I rather reluctantly came to is that the history of Van Buren's own farming in no way provided a straightforward guide to what might be done on the farm in the present or future.  There were overlaps but also sharp differences, including of course the fact that no era is ever an exact repetition of a previous one.  And Van Buren himself, like virtually all farmers, created his own idiosyncratic set of choices and practices, pursuing some of the latest technologies but also planting his potatoes according to the phases of the moon, as his forebears had done. If there was a simple answer to guide the park's planning, it was that farming is an immensely complicated and dynamic activity that is inherently in dialogue with the changes and conditions of its own moment and practitioners.

So there were two takeaways for me from Chapter 5, in terms of history's utility in thinking about present-day farming and historic sites.  First, the chapter was an important corrective to the hope that the historical record can somehow provide a model or a map for "getting it right" in the present.  If anything, the historical record will almost invariably complicate things, which is frustrating but also important in keeping us from leaping to too-hasty or too-simple conclusions.  History, if you look closely at it, has a habit of forcing you to reflect more deeply and weigh alternatives more carefully.

And the second takeaway, since we do sometimes need to act rather than getting stuck in the pondering phase, is that it's important to be clear about what historical research can help us with and what just needs to be decided based on more present-oriented considerations.  In other words, we need to beware of asking history to do too much as well as too little.

Next:  Finding new histories--and unseen alternatives--between the lines.

Farming outside the lines: Why the history of Native American agriculture matters

I started this blog a year ago intending to post roughly once a week for at least twelve months, and while I haven't quite hit that target (some weeks are like that), it's been pretty close.  I'm planning to wrap up this first phase of the project's existence with my chapter-by-chapter discussion of the Ethnographic Landscape Study for Martin Van Buren National Historic Site, and then segue into something new in January--stay tuned for more about that shortly.

In my previous two posts, I surveyed the broad questions I was addressing in the study and the types of synergy I saw operating between food/farm history and historic sites.  Both of those posts, and the introductory chapter they were based on, centered around the issue of how we can find vital connections between knowledge about farming in the past and efforts to strengthen local and regional food and farm economies in the present.  As I go through the ethnohistorical and ethnographic chapters of the report, I'm going to focus directly on that question, and to ask, "What case can be made for bringing this particular piece of history into the crowded present-day dialogue about food and farms?"  Here goes with Chapter 2.

Columbia County's prime soils shown in green

Chapter 2 looks at Native American farming practices in the Hudson Valley up to about the early 17th century, when Dutch colonizers arrived.  As with most Native history, the written record is spotty and colored by misperceptions of many kinds.  It's clear, though, that the fertile river floodplains served the Mahicans as agricultural fields for perhaps centuries before the Europeans came on the scene, and that they contributed cultivated vegetables--particularly the "three sisters," corn, squash, and beans--to a varied diet that also drew on foraging, fishing, and hunting.  As has been very well documented by now, Native conceptions of land use and territorial boundaries were based on collective rather than individual ownership, long-term stewardship rather than short-term resource extraction, and a layered system of rights in which permission to work or use a piece of land could be granted to an outsider without removing it from an overall ancestral homeland.  The European "all-or-nothing" system of ownership very quickly came into conflict with this paradigm, diminishing the Natives' access to farm fields and hunting territories that had supported their  ecologically and agriculturally sophisticated occupation of the mid-Hudson Valley.

So what does this kind of (now generally known and accepted) knowledge contribute to contemporary food and farm debates?  To my mind, its principal utility may be in the way it helps us think about the cultivation of plants for food outside of the surprisingly limiting concepts of "farming" and "agriculture" per se.  However inaccurate it may be, when we think of "a farm" and "agricultural society," we tend not to think of Indians--farms and agriculture are things that came along with the Europeans.  And I think that's actually a good thing.

Urban projects like the Brooklyn Grange complicate farm definitions

I've been teaching a social theory class at Tufts this fall, and that has reminded me that one of the recurring themes in the history of anthropological thinking is how our own cognitive categories--what's okay and not okay to eat, what gender roles are supposed to look like, and so on--both structure and constrain our sense of reality and possibility.  Structuralist thinkers taught us that, and post-structuralists showed us how these categories of thought have often been battlegrounds for struggles over ideology and power.  Deeply value-laden definitional squabbles over farming--what counts as a farm, which states are "farm states" and which ones aren't and what kind of political power accrues to that, how we classify what's conventional or industrial or organic agriculture--have been going on for a long time in the U.S., and they can blind us to the much wider range of cultivation practices that have always existed alongside and in the interstices of what has become mainstream in American agriculture. 

As with so many other domains--for example, race, citizenship, and sexuality--challenging and shifting these farm-related concepts is an essential aspect of making real change.  So while there are a lot of reasons why the study of Native cultivation is important (knowledge about permaculture and intercropping, among many other things), I would point particularly to the way that it lets us escape a limiting set of concepts when we're thinking about growing food, so we can approach the whole subject with fresher eyes and minds.

Next up:  Dutch farmers in early America.