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).

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.

The Italian Connection: Part I

Go ahead. Google “Italy agritourism.” I dare you. Scrolling through the thousands of hits will take you more time than you probably have today, or any day. I don’t know whether the Italians actually invented agriturismo—I’m still trying to piece together a more reliable sense of the genesis of farm and food tourism, which I don’t think anyone has really tackled yet in a solid historical way—but I do seem to keep finding Italian connections as I look at the topic. Farm-stay and food tourism in Italy—and all around the European coast of the Mediterranean—clearly evokes a particularly appealing version of la dolce vita for many people, and I thought I’d spend this post and the next one talking about one nineteenth century and one contemporary example of Italian images and ideas in the American landscape of farm tourism and preservation.

Martin Van Buren's Lindenwald, Kinderhook, NY

The nineteenth century example is sort of subtle, and it didn’t really strike me until well after I’d finished my research on Martin Van Buren’s farm.  When Van Buren lost his Presidential reelection bid in 1839, he returned to his home in Kinderhook, New York, and bought a substantial farm.  The property boasted a fine Federal-style house at that point, and Van Buren seems to have been quite satisfied with that.  But he also wanted to see subsequent generations of his family settle on and cultivate the farmland.  To that end, he gave his youngest son, Smith Thompson Van Buren, free rein to renovate the old Federal farmhouse, as a way of giving him a greater stake and sense of ownership of the estate.

The strategy didn’t work;  Van Buren’s sons sold the property within a couple of years of his death in 1862.  But the 1849 renovation, by fashionable architect Richard Upjohn, is revealing about some of the visions of country living and farming that were circulating at the time.  Upjohn was particularly known for his work in the Italianate style, which had emerged among elite landowners in England a few decades earlier and which reflected the widespread Anglo-American association of Italy with gracious, patrician, cultivated (yet passionate and earthy) living. 

Johns Hopkins' Clifton Park, now within a city golf course

So when Upjohn reconfigured the old Kinderhook farmhouse as an Italianate mansion with a bell tower, he was presumably invoking that association, which continues to make itself felt in agritourism on the Mediterranean model today (farm-stay vacation in Tuscany, anyone?).  And the Van Burens were by no means the only gentleman farmers to assert this idea in the architecture of their country estate.  What sparked this connection for me was reading about how Johns Hopkins, a contemporary of Van Buren, had his home at Clifton Park in Baltimore renovated in the Italianate style at almost exactly the same time.  Blandwood, in Greensboro, North Carolina is an early example of the style;  built as farmhouse in 1790s, it was later rebuilt in Federal style, then reinvented as a Tuscan villa in 1844.  Within the Nashville Zoo, the historic home at the heart of the Historic Farm area, Grassmere, underwent a similar transformation from its 1810 beginnings to an Italianate makeover in the 1870s.  (Its current incarnation as a nature and environmental education center makes an interesting link with the "getting back to the land" theme of Italian-inflected country living, and a recent collection of historical recipes from middle Tennessee seems to further the connection.)

The barn at Shelburne Farms, Shelburne, Vermont

Other styles—Tudor, Gothic, Elizabethan—superceded Italianate architecture in the U.S. not long after the Civil War.  Many of the farm estates of the later 19^th century (for example, Vermont's Shelburne Farms, at left) reflect the neo-medievalism that also prompted the Arts and Crafts movement and other efforts to invoke smaller-scale living and hand-crafted production.  Each of them, of course, invokes an imagined and often romanticized past, but a more northern than southern European one.  Those anomalous Italian towers dotting the American historic farm landscape hint at the role that Italy played in the imaginations of those—like Martin Van Buren and his family—who used their antebellum farms to express a vision of what cultivated country living could and should be.

Next week:  A more recent Italian-American patron of agriculture remakes a Vermont dairy farm for the postindustrial economy.