Looking under the lawn

The Tufts campus is at its loveliest at Commencement time.

This past weekend was Commencement at Tufts University, always an inspiring rite of passage and a chance to reflect a bit after the intensity of the academic year.  It's particularly reflective for me this year, after a spring spent gathering information and ideas about the campus as a former, current, and perhaps future site of food production.  My "New Food Activism: Roots and Visions" class was devoted, in part, to reenvisioning the landscape around Tufts' Medford campus through the lens of its agricultural history, and my sense of the place has been shifting as a result.  In particular, I've been rethinking the lawns.

It's the petroleum, stupid: The surprising persistence of small-scale farms in the northeast

In my experience, every writing project presents some unexpected question that you have to wrestle with before you can get things to make sense.  In my Ethnographic Landscape Study for Martin Van Buren NHS, that question was, "When did working farms and historic or touristic farms in the American northeast actually part ways?"  I was working from the basic assumption that agriculture in the region was already in decline as a primary economic driver by the late 19th century, a basic tenet of the "farmers moved west in search of more fertile land" narrative.  I also knew that the historic preservation movement was getting into full swing by that time, with the national centennial of the 1870s, the colonial revival of the 1890s and later, the founding of groups like the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (1910), and then the first wave of American "living history" villages like Colonial Williamsburg and Greenfield Village in the 1920s.  I confidently expected to find that those two trajectories would overlap somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, or perhaps closer to 1920, when, for the first time, more Americans lived in urban than rural places.[1]

Undated handbill, Capital District Cooperative

But as I was casting around for evidence of this definitive split, I kept finding information that went in two different directions.  First, farms and farmers were catering to the tourist market in a variety of ways far earlier than I had realized, dating back at least to the mid-19th century Shaker settlements (which welcomed visitors for a variety of reasons) and creating a sizeable sector of what we now call farm-stay vacations or agritourism.  And these flexible strategies, along with a still-robust regional food network comprised of truck farms, urban markets, and cooperative ventures like the Capital District Cooperative in Menands, New York, helped small farms to remain active and competitive right through the first half of the 20th century.  The split I was looking for just wasn't there--until after World War II.

And that was the big takeaway from Chapter 7 of the report, which covers the years between 1917 and 1973, when Martin Van Buren's estate became a national park.  Small farming was by no means as ubiquitous in the northeast as it had once been, but it was surviving fairly healthily until the postwar oil economy clobbered it in the 1940s and 50s.  Long-distance trucking, supermarket chains,  expensive new "inputs" like petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, and machines, and rising land prices as suburbs expanded into former farming areas all combined to make it exponentially more difficult for small farmers to survive.  In his book about Land's Sake, the community farm he helped to start in Weston, Mass., Brian Donahue points to this "sensible regional food system" and suggests that we might do well to aim for something very similar if we're serious about re-regionalizing now.[2] 

What's the utility of knowing this?  I would suggest that it's a crucial reminder of how extremely recent our current system actually is.  My parents grew up with much shorter food supply chains;  it's only been within their lifetimes, and mine, that the famed 1,500-mile Caesar salad has been conceivable.  And the fact that people are increasingly questioning the wisdom of eating this way begins to make it look as though we could soon see the second half of the 20th century as a stark anomaly, a moment when we let relatively cheap oil seduce us into thinking we could have a level of choice and convenience  far beyond what anyone actually needs.  Marianna Torgovnik has argued that World War II casts such a long shadow over subsequent U.S. war memories that it's difficult for us to see around it, and I'm wondering whether the same is true of the postwar shift into fully petroleum-powered agriculture.[3]  If it is, then the surprisingly interwoven histories of agritourism, preserved farms, and real-life farming before the war can be a useful counter-balance for the tendency to think of the robust small family farm as a thing of the much more distant past.

Next:  "A lot of ways to keep a farming going."

[1]  R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History (Ames, IA: Iowa State
University Press, 1994) p. 26. 
[2] Brian Donahue, Reclaiming the Commons:  Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 66, 74.
[3] Marianna Torgovnik, The War Complex:  World War II in Our Time (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Church, Grange, contradance: The role of old buildings in building new food infrastructure

The Montague Grange (Photo:  Friends of the Montague Grange)

I was going to start unpacking the chapters of my Martin Van Buren National Historic Site Ethnographic Landscape Study in this week's post, but there was an article in my local paper that feels worth commenting on, so I'll delay the report discussion for another week.

When I say "local paper," I mean really local.  I went on a media fast more than 20 years ago to cleanse my mental system, and it felt so great that I've never really gone back.  I get much of my breaking news either through various social grapevines or from the Greenfield Recorder (whose "Obama wins" headline this Wednesday was well below the news of both Elizabeth Warren's Senate victory and a too-close-to-call race for state rep).  Since we moved to Wendell a year and a half ago, we've also subscribed to the Montague Reporter, a decade-old weekly that calls itself "The Voice of the Villages" and covers a number of the small towns in eastern Franklin County, including ours.

This week's Reporter includes a lengthy story by Lee Wicks about the Montague Grange turning its charter back in to the state Grange, signalling the end of its 125-year history as an active part of what was once a broad national network focused on farm and rural concerns.  As with many Grange chapters, its membership has dwindled down to almost nothing, and in recent years it has been just one part of a three-headed organizational structure along with the Corporation of the Grange Hall, an entity that actually owns the Grange Hall, and the Friends of the Montague Grange, which exists for fundraising and maintenance of the 1834 building. 

One of the things that was interesting to me about the article was how much history it included.  There was a long quote from a history of the local and national Grange (written by Mik Muller in 2008 and available on the Montague town website), focusing on the many progressive social and political projects the Grange movement has supported in the U.S., from rural road improvement and school lunch programs to the land-grant university system, ballot reform, and anti-monopoly legislation.  The Montague Grange was formed in 1887, 20 years after the launch of the national Grange, and Wicks makes it clear that at least in the early years, farmer activism tended to be as wide-ranging and politicized as it is today with the local-food movement.

The one vote against giving up the Montague Grange's charter came from a member who is quoted as arguing that "The Grange played an important role in our collective history;  at some future time we might need it back."  That strong sense of historical consciousness, too, struck me as interesting, but perhaps a bit narrow to fit the way that civic organizations and structures--things that have come to be termed "civil society"--tend to morph into each other over time, particularly in small towns and cities.  The Montague Grange Hall, pictured above, spent its first century as a Unitarian Church;  the Grange used to meet in the Town Hall space now occupied by the public library;  other civic spaces and groups have come and gone over the years, but always, I'm guessing, with considerable overlap in membership and perhaps also in purpose.

Muller's history shows that like other local Granges, the one in Montague had become basically a village improvement society quite early in its history, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't performed an important function in keeping social connections and meeting spaces alive so that people can work on issues of shared concern.[1]  We do of course need organizations that can do the kinds of things the Grange did in its early years, but civil society theory suggests that a lot of the infrastructure for doing that is created and maintained not just through direct political and financial organizations but also through contradances, sports leagues, book groups, local newspapers, and historic preservation campaigns.  So even without its charter, the Montague Grange may be holding that physical and social space open, in the same way that I've argued agritourism may be helping to hold open spaces for persistent, low-level infrastructure-rebuilding in the food and farming sector.  A sense of the fluid history of organizations like the Grange may help us to see the value in these less-direct forms of activism.

(Source:  Collier, A History of Old Kinderhook)[2]

Martin Van Buren link:  The Lindenwald Grange in Van Buren's home town of Kinderhook, New York (named for the post-Presidential estate of the town's most famous son) similarly acquired an unused public building--in this case, the 1836 Academy that once served as the town's high school, shown at left--and occupied it until 1975, when its membership had also declined to the point that keeping up the building was more than it could manage.  Columbia County, New York, like Franklin County in Massachusetts, has been a hotbed of new farming and farm organizing in the past decade, and in my next few posts I'm planning (if not distracted by fun things in the newspaper) to say more about how I think historical research can play a role in supporting that.

[1]  See R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History (Ames, IA: Iowa State
University Press, 1994), pp. 203-5 for an overview of the Grange's shift away from radical cooperative activities into a more general educational and civic focus after the 1870s.

[2]  Edward A. Collier, A History of Old Kinderhook (New York and London: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1914)

Planning while doing: The Wendell Food-Farm TimeMap

1887 bird's-eye map showing northwest corner of Wendell

One of the things I've found blogs useful for is to push me to write about things I don't have time to work on in more depth.  That may sound sort of slipshod, but it's been a way for me to continue tying together various interests and bits of research in the midst of teaching and other work. Especially with the research that relates to energy use and climate change, this feels compelling enough to make some room for in the midst of a too-busy schedule, and important enough that doing it in even a small-scale and scattered way seems better than not doing it at all.

I'm pushing myself even a bit farther out on the limb this weekend by launching a little community history project in Wendell, Massachusetts, where I live (and which I wrote about in an earlier post).  I'm calling this the Wendell Food-Farm TimeMap, and it's designed to gather and consolidate more knowledge of the town's food and farming history, with an eye to informing some of the community discussions that have been going on here for many years about local resilience, self-sufficiency, and interdependence.

Tomorrow is Wendell Old Home Day, which is what I've been aiming toward as an official launch of this project.  (For those who don't know, Old Home Days are a New England tradition that emerged around the turn of the 20th century in depopulated, often rural places trying to mobilize sentimental connections--very often centering around farm life--among people who had left, with an eye to drawing needed resources back into the towns.  Now they're essentially just annual town fairs, where they still take place.)  My plan is a pretty loose one, and I thought I'd set it out here as a way to sort of document things as they go along.  One hope I have is that this might produce a useable template for people in other towns who might want to do similar projects, so I want to pay attention to what works and what doesn't.

Here's the plan:

• I'm thinking of this as a three-summer project:  one summer to begin gathering data, one to build out from the initial materials and add to them with some additional research and perhaps interviewing, and a final summer to consolidate things in some form (probably a webby one) so it can be disseminated and perhaps added to in future years, if someone feels inspired to do that.
• To a large extent, this project is about finding out what people already know about Wendell's food and farm history.  As much as anything else, I'm curious about that.  So particularly in the first phase, my main task is just to try to talk to as many people as possible, and to use whatever they tell me as a guide to the next stages of research.
• I'm planning to do that by setting up at Old Home Day and perhaps other events in the fall with a number of big laminated historical maps of the town plus a timeline that follows the general history of agriculture in the northeast.  I'll ask people to add things to the maps and/or timeline, and will try to get contact information for people who want to share more of what they know and recollect.  In future phases, as data gets added, the timeline can be more Wendell-specific and I can figure out a way to collate and display what people have told me so far (probably an indexed listing of names, farms, and properties, as I'm anticipating that that's how most people are going to find their way in to this).

1871 Beers Atlas map showing same part of Wendell

And that's pretty much it for now.   It's a loose plan and I don't have a great deal of time to pursue it, so I'm trying to keep this as simple and feasible as possible (which may actually be a plus in terms of showing people elsewhere how it might be useful in their own towns).  I've set up a Facebook page for the project and may also use my own website as a temporary online venue for materials relating to this once they start accumulating.

I hope that they do, and that I don't lose my voice tomorrow (I've had a nasty cold for a week), and that I haven't over-reached too far in adding yet another thing to my plate.  Stay tuned to find out!

Getting ready to "food-map" Wendell

This blog isn't going to turn into one of those this-is-what-I-planted-today-and-this-is-how-it-made-me-feel things.  Promise.  Its purpose is to help me think about the intersection of critical historical study and the local food movement, and I'm going to stick to that.  But since I'm trying to be more local in where and how I use my critical/historical skills, as well as where and how I get my food, my own place comes into the picture to some extent as well.

That place is in Wendell, Mass. (pop. 850), in a new house that we moved into just over a year ago.  We're newcomers in town, although we've lived in the area for 25 years.  Now that we've gotten through the house-building process, I'm now obsessing about building a garden--literally building it, because the soil in our part of Wendell is inhospitable at best.  I've been learning from experienced growers around here who have created thriving small farms and large gardens on equally inhospitable land--people like Sharon Gensler in Wendell, Ricky Baruc and Deb Habib of Seeds of Solidarity in Orange, and Dan Botkin of Laughing Dog Farm in Gill, among many others--and have been working on no-till "lasagne" beds and season-extending techniques (currently just a small cold frame, but I'm also trying to make a moveable hoop-house system).  We recently finished setting the last of the black locust fenceposts--"Nature's pressure-treated," according to the website of the forester we got them from. After years of container-gardening, it's a huge treat to have a big sunny space where I can really grow food.

Wendell in 1871

It's also a treat to be here because there are so many smart people in the area who are engaged in re-thinking and reinventing our food systems.  Wendell's well-deserved reputation as a hub for "alternative" ways of living is one of the things that made me decide to use this as a base for developing a "historical food-mapping" project, which I'll be launching later this spring. My plan is to start with a series of large town maps from different time periods and to invite people in town to add about what they and others have grown on particular pieces of land over time, with the goal of building up a more detailed picture of the networks of food production and exchange that Wendell has historically been part of.  The town cultural council has given me a small grant for supplies, and I'm hoping to gather enough data this spring and summer to give a sense of what kinds of additional research might help to fill in some of the blanks in the picture.

I was originally envisioning this as having a purely local focus, in keeping with the widespread notion in "transition" and "relocalization" circles that places need to become more food-self-sufficient as a strategy for resilience in an era of peak oil and climate change.  My ideas are already morphing on this, though, in large part through listening to historians and food activists like Brian Donahue who are arguing that regional self-sufficiency is actually a smarter strategy to aim for, as well as more closely reflecting historical patterns of the pre- and early-industrial eras.  And that makes me think that these food-maps should keep an eye open to larger scales, probably by asking not only what people have grown here in various time periods but also what food they've bought and from where. 

One crucial piece of history for this project is the story of why places like Wendell stopped being mainly agricultural over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.  I can see this history just by looking out the window:  as with many places around New England, Wendell's woods are criss-crossed with old stone walls that speak of farms past and abandoned.  The rocky soil is a big part of this story;  my no-till raised beds are a solution on a fairly small scale, but once agriculture became more commercialized in the early 19th century, those people who were still trying to make a living farming began to struggle with the very real limitations of this landscape.  You can actually produce food in an intensive way here, but it's labor-intensive to do it, and it doesn't work on a large commercial scale.  And of course that connects to a whole raft of issues relating to how we work and travel and eat--our whole modern, consumption-driven, energy-intensive way of living.

So as I start to develop this local food-mapping project, I'm thinking that it's going to be as much about scale as about localness per se.  What evidence is likely to be out there for Wendell's involvement in regional-scale agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries?  And what can be discovered locally about the pivotal moments (like the official designation of some environments as agriculturally "submarginal" in the 1920s and 30s, leading to reforestation and the creation of places like Wendell State Forest) when the scales changed radically?  Stay tuned--I hope to be able to report on some of this over the summer!

For an article on how the "submarginal lands" designation played out in neighboring Vermont, and how some farmers resisted it, see Sara M. Gregg, “Can We ‘Trust Uncle Sam’? Vermont and the Submarginal Lands Project, 1934-1936,” Vermont History 69 (Winter/Spring 2001):201-221, available as a PDF here.

Three Tough Questions, Part 2: Is It Viable?

A hoop-house at Laughing Dog Farm, Gill, MA, in late March

When you talk about food relocalization with farmers and others who embrace the industrial capitalist logic of maximizing efficiency in farming, you tend to hear one phrase over and over again:  "You can't feed the world that way."  The immediate snappy answer, of course, is, "We're not trying to feed the world--we're trying to figure out how to feed individual regions, as used to happen before the food supply became so industrialized, commoditized, and globalized."  But even if you accept (as I do) that this is a crucial task, the question is still one that should be pondered.  Can we go back to feeding the world on a region-by-region basis?  More specifically, can we do it here in New England?

That's the question posed in the two videos embedded at the end of this post. The speakers are friends and colleagues:  farmer and Brandeis University environmental historian Brian Donahue and John Piotti, executive director of the Maine Farmland Trust. Drawing on ideas and calculations that Donahue, in particular, has been developing over many years, the two presentations walk through what it would take for the region to become largely self-sufficient once again in food production.  They conclude that it's probably viable, but it requires (among other things) that those who are intently focused on the local broaden their vision to the larger regional scale.  Thinking on that scale, they point out various conditions that would need to be met:

• Six or seven million acres of farmland would need to be devoted to food production.  This is comparable to what existed in the region just before the watershed moment of World War II, when fossil fuels really became the bedrock of an increasingly industrialized agriculture.
• Population (currently just over 14 million people) would need to continue to grow fairly slowly, to around 17 million people 50 years from now.  Out of this 15 million, there would need to be 50-100,000 people farming, not really that much of an increase from the 30,000 who are doing it now.
• We would need to eat in healthier ways--more fruits and vegetables, less red meat, more fish, lower calories overall (you know--the way we already know we should be eating!).
• More concerted efforts would need to be made to protect farmland and to make it affordable and possible for farmers to cultivate it.
• New England farmers would have to develop modes of pasturing animals without just stripping forest cover and depleting upland soils, as was done during the sheep and dairy booms of the 19th and 20th centuries.  
• They would also have to continue developing smart ways of extending the growing season (for example, via hoop-houses, which are proliferating virally around the New England landscape at present).
• The region would have to import at least some of its grain.  Donahue points out that western farms can produce and ship feed grain, in particular, much more efficiently than our smaller farms, so why not let them do it? 

Under these conditions, Donahue and Piotti believe that New England could make itself 80% food self-sufficient in the next half-century (during which they also expect that energy prices will continue to rise, making all of these changes more economically feasible and urgent).

This scenario raises many questions, which both speakers acknowledge.  What would create the political will to get us there, particularly in terms of protecting and giving farmers access to those additional millions of acres of farmland?  How do we get more people to internalize all the "externalities" that go into producing food (land costs, subsidies of various kinds, and so on)?  How can we guarantee equitable access to this good healthy food when it's going to continue to be more expensive to produce than the commodified versions we find in supermarkets and big box stores? 

What I like about these two talks is not just that they're up front about these questions and generally hopeful that we're already on the way toward addressing and answering them.  More interesting to me is the really ecumenical and non-ideological vision that both Donahue and Piotti hold for the future of New England farming, and the flexible, thoughtful way they're drawing on history.  Donahue's emphasis on thinking regionally rather than just locally echoes the ideas of his fellow historian James McWilliams, who has argued in A Revolution in Eating:  How the Quest for Food Shaped America (Columbia University Press, 2007) that even in the colonial era, Americans were always linked in to regional, inter-regional, and global networks of trade. 

On a similar note, Piotti tells his listeners, "You shouldn't think of the commodity track as what's old and what's past, and the local agriculture track as what's hot and hip and new and the future."  Rather, he sees both tracks as "mutually reinforcing," with commodity farms making grain prices affordable for small mixed farms and many possible hybridized models that combine old and new, mechanized and muscle-powered, local, regional, and even global networks.  This is a way to use historical knowledge and models without fetishizing them or seeing them as sharply distinct from industrial methods or larger-scale markets, as both hard-core locavores and the living-history/farm museum approach tend to do. It took more than a century to create that sharp distinction in most Americans' minds, and erasing it again may also take some time--but smart thinkers like these two can help us to get there faster!  (If you have 20 minutes to spare, I urge you to spend it on one of these two talks.)


Brian Donahue, "Can we grow more food in New England?" from John Gerber on Vimeo (March 2011)


John Piotti, "Can New England Feed Itself?" from TEDxHarvardLaw (December 2011)