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!

State of the field(s): What history adds to a snapshot of the present

The final narrative chapter of the Martin Van Buren NHS Ethnographic Landscape Study was a snapshot of northern Columbia County agriculture in 2010, when I completed the research for the report.  Drawing on a quote from one of my interviews, it was titled "A Lot of Ways to Keep a Farm Going (1974-2010)" and brought the histories of some of the older farms I'd looked at across time up to the present.  It also added a handful of new sites as a way to cover a wider range of farming practices in the county.

2009 promotional map of CC farm products

The mix included everything from well-to-do horse farms to old Dutch farmsteads now converted to purely residential properties. I looked at one large and one small Community Supported Agriculture farm and an orchard business that was almost entirely reliant on pick-your-own and agritourism income.  I included a large (by Columbia County standards) "conventional" dairy farm whose owners had moved to New York state after being priced out of suburbanizing Connecticut, and who currently work other farmers' fields all over this part of the county to grow feed crops for their cows.  In contrast to this was a family who had been farming the same property for 200 years and who had purposely decided to scale back their operation to keep from falling into some of the cycles of expansion, debt, and over-production that have plagued dairy farmers.  Every farmer included in the chapter had stories to tell about the hard choices to be made in remaining solvent, maintaining yields and land fertility, and staying in sync with what customers want and will pay for.

Before the July 2010 fire at Harrier Fields Farm

One of the uses of this kind of "round-up" chapter is simply to show the continuation of very long patterns of volatility and change in what often appears to non-farmers as a rather slow-paced way to live and work.  Two dairy farmers I'd been hoping to interview went out of business between the preliminary and primary research phases of my project;  the pick-your-own orchard changed hands before the report was printed;  and in a particularly heart-breaking happening, the early 19th century barn complex at Harrier Fields Farm (pictured above) burned to the ground in a hay fire just a few days after I'd interviewed farmer Mike Scannell there and admired the hay he'd just laboriously gotten in.  The fire made all the stories I'd heard from farmers about past losses and disasters much more poignant and pointed, and it's also made me much more aware of the costs of subsequent events like the floods after Hurricane Irene last year or the drought of this past summer.

The other utility of this survey chapter, for me, was to illuminate the range of ways that farmers continually draw on ideas and discourses from the past in constructing their own approaches to keeping a farm going.  Neo-agrarianism of various kinds came to the fore in many of my interviews, particularly with farmers in the "sustainable" or "eat local" fold.  In one of his newsletter columns [PDF] for Roxbury Farm's shareholders, Jean-Paul Courtens talked about re-embracing the label of "peasant farmer" as a way to challenge the logic of purely profit-oriented or fully-industrialized agriculture.  Mike Scannell, on the other hand, harkened back to the Jeffersonian idea of the yeoman farmer, emphasizing the importance of land ownership, freedom from the burden of debt, and Wendell-Berry-inspired reliance on muscle rather than mechanical power.

Some of the farmers drew on more personal histories and memories, including those of distant and recent forebears.  A few even invoked Martin Van Buren, often referencing his early adoption of orchard produce as a cash crop or--in Mike Scannell's case--his attempts to rein in the growing political power of consolidated capital in the U.S. ("He was the last President to really stand up to the banks," Mike said during our interview).  It was fascinating and useful to trace the overlapping and diverging currents of conversation among farmers in the area, and to recognize agrarian, reformist, industrialist, and occasionally utopian notions whose roots went back at least two centuries and sometimes far longer.  History often complicates things, as several of these recent posts have shown, but it can also provide a sense of depth and perspective in a way that nothing else can.

In what's going to be my final post for a while, I'll talk next about how I tried to roll all of this into some concrete suggestions for the national park.  Then I'm going to hand over the reins of the blog to a great group of colleagues who will be sharing their own thoughts about the farm/food/history nexus over the next several months.  More on that tomorrow!

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.

The bully palate: Presidential farms, Part 2

A little research is a dangerous thing.  The second part of this post was going to be about how Martin Van Buren represented a kind of high-water mark in the tradition of Presidents retiring to their country farm estates, and how that reflected the various big economic and social and occupational changes of the long 19th century.  I was working toward an argument about Presidents getting farther away from farming as time went on, eventually reaching a point--perhaps exemplified by Michelle Obama's 21st century kitchen garden--where a more feminized focus on gardens has replaced the initial masculine focus on farming as a foundation of American democratic society.

But a funny thing happened on my way through the Wikipedia list of American Presidents.  I found that Van Buren did represent some kind of transitional moment between an era of Presidents who were quasi-feudal lords and those more associated with the rising professional class of largely self-made men--lawyers, merchants, soldiers.  And my sense that this trend continued through the rest of the 19th century was essentially correct.  But when you get closer to the 20th century Presidents, farming starts coming back into the picture in some intriguing ways which have left their mark on the historic sites associated with these men.

Coolidge as a yeoman farmer - a carefully-crafted photo op?

 It starts with Calvin Coolidge, born in 1872 into a New England farming family.  Coolidge was never a farmer himself and was not sanguine about it as an economic venture ("Farmers never have made much money, and I do not believe we can do much about it," he apparently said [1]).  But parts of his family's farm and a cheese-making operation founded by his father and re-started by his son are part of the Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch, Vermont (the cheese company was re-started yet again in 2009 by a young artisanal cheese-maker who clearly sees himself as building on the site's long history).

Plaque at Harry S. Truman NHS

Harry Truman's story is not dissimilar, although Silent Cal never sold a part of the family farm for a  residential and shopping development, as Truman did.  Truman had much more hands-on experience as a farmer--he worked the land from 1906 to 1917--but like Coolidge, he seems to have seen farming as something of a dead-end occupation, at least as far as money went:  when his sweetheart, Bess, turned down his first proposal of marriage, he said he wanted to be making more money than a farmer did before he asked her again. [2]  As with Coolidge, too, Truman's presence in the commemorative landscape is defined at least partly by his boyhood farm home.  The Harry S. Truman National Historic Site  in what is now suburban Kansas City includes 10 acres from the farm, with some original and reconstructed farm buildings.

Dwight Eisenhower wasn't raised on a farm--his grandfather was a farmer, but his father was an engineer and mechanic--but in fine early republican fashion, he retired to a working farm in Gettysburg, which he purchased in 1950.  My quick Internet search turned up a mention of a herd of Angus show cattle, but nothing on the Eisenhower National Historic Site website indicates whether the farm is still being worked today.

Lyndon Johnson was one of the more interesting examples of 20th century Presidential farming.  He was born in 1908 in a modest farmhouse which he was involved in reconstructing during his Presidency and which later formed the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park.  For Johnson's mother, an educated woman left to run the farm on her own while her husband was traveling for business and political purposes, the realities of hand-pumped water and wood-stove cookery seem to have been a trial, according to the NPS account.  LBJ, on the other hand, found that the rustic and rural setting gave him a "home field advantage" over more highly-educated advisors and guests who visited him at the "Texas White House."  The ambiguous position of the American farmer--salt of the earth but perhaps too close to the soil for comfort--seems to have suited this President's strategic style.  Johnson donated his ranch to the American people with the stipulation that it remain a working ranch and not "a sterile relic of the past"--a very clear challenge to the "pastness" that bedevils so many historic agricultural sites.[3]

Jimmy Carter, of course, was a successful peanut farmer when he ran for President (less so afterward--having put his farm in trust during his Presidency to avoid conflicts of interest in making policy decisions, he found himself a million dollars in debt thanks to the mismanagement of his trustees when he returned to Georgia in 1981).  Carter belonged to the Future Farmers of America as a boy, and like Harry Truman, came back home to run the family's farm in young adulthood.

More image than substance?  Reagan at Rancho del Cielo

Some of the farm/President links I found were somewhat more symbolic than actual.  For example, Franklin Roosevelt's sense of solidarity with American farmers was perhaps primarily forged through his experiences of rural life while undergoing treatment for polio in Warm Springs, Georgia, while Ronald Reagan's Western White House seems to have been a projection of Reagan's heroic movie hero persona as much as an actual working ranch.  And there were certainly some 20th century Presidents with no ties to agriculture at all, or who seem to have left it behind as soon as they could (Herbert Hoover's father ran a farm implement story in Iowa and Richard Nixon spent his earliest years on a California ranch, but neither of them showed any inclination to become gentleman farmers in retirement).

Overall, though, what strikes me is the strong thread of continuity in these Presidential lives.  Aside from that late 19th-century break, the association of elite political power with agricultural and ranching estates is one that links the earliest chief executives with many of their more recent successors, and that harks back not only to aristocratic histories but also to more mythic ideas about the American soil.  It's surely no accident that Presidents' boyhood rural homes and farms seem to loom so large in the commemorative landscape, and a closer study of whether any of these sites are actually moving back toward active agricultural production again might tell us something interesting about that mythic relationship between Americans and their land.

The National Park Service offers a travel itinerary of Presidential sites, and there's a Wikipedia page on Presidential gardens.

[1]  Ferrell, Robert H. The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. University Press of Kansas, 1998 (p. 86). 
[2]  McCullough, David.  Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992 (pp. 78-79). 
[3]  Harris, Marvin. "Taming the Wild Pecan at Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park." Park Science 19, no. 2, December 1999 (p. 2) 

NOTE:  I know I said I was going to mention Martin Van Buren's own "arugula gap" in this post, but it ended up not fitting with the direction that things went.  The story, though, is that in the "Log Cabin campaign" of 1840, when Van Buren was running for reelection and encountering mud-slinging that makes today's politics actually look pretty tame, an obscure congressman from Pennsylvania made a name for himself by depicting Van Buren as an elite fop whose expensive tastes in clothes and food revealed him to be out of touch with the common folk, especially in a time of economic hardship.  The charges, while exaggerated, probably contributed to Van Buren's losing the election, at which point he retired to his recently-acquired country estate and took up the life of a gentleman farmer (albeit one who continued to run for President when the opportunity arose).

Patrons of husbandry: Are non-profits the new gentleman farmers?

One of the things that I learned very quickly in my research for the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site Ethnographic Landscape Study that I've been working on for the past couple of years is that it's seldom, if ever, been easy to make a living farming, particularly since the emergence of a market-oriented society in the early nineteenth century.  And one of the big revelations for me during the study was just how long ago people in the American northeast started bemoaning the decline of agriculture and trying to revitalize, reform, and preserve rural agricultural places and communities.

Wayside plaque at Martin Van Buren NHS

When Martin Van Buren moved back to his native town of Kinderhook after losing his bid for Presidential reelection in 1840, there was an element of this revitalization urge in the way he approached the old Dutch farm property that he settled down on.  He wanted to help solidify and maintain the farming patterns he had grown up with (although he was the son of a village tavern-owner rather than a farm boy himself).  The key point is that he had the wealth to invest in trying to make the farm profitable, in a time when acquiring enough good farmland to make a prosperous living was already beginning to be beyond the reach of less well-capitalized Americans in the northeast.  It's not exactly clear how profitable Van Buren's farm actually ever was, but that's another key point:  he could farm in ways that he believed to be ecologically and morally sound, without having to worry over-much about how this affected his bottom line in an increasingly commercialized farming economy.

Gentleman farmers were often among the experimenters and innovators as agriculture became more and more industrialized and commoditized.  Sometimes they were pushing for modernization, but just as often they were trying to conserve older ways of life or--often paradoxically--trying to combine the two.  Much of the wealth that created model farm estates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually originated with industry.  Edwin Severin Clark, who turned James Fenimore Cooper's old farmstead into a state-of-the-art dairy operation in 1918, was a Singer Sewing Machine heir. In Vermont, the Vanderbilt fortune was largely behind the creation of Shelburne Farms out of a patchwork of 30 small properties into a 3,800-acre model agricultural estate by the turn of the twentieth century, while a succession of wealthy conservationists--George Perkins Marsh in the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Billings in the later century, and Laurance and Mary Rockefeller in the mid-twentieth--left their mark on the farm and forest property that is now Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Woodstock.  In Ohio, best-selling writer Louis Bromfield started a grass-based operation at Malabar Farm in 1938 and produced fiction and non-fiction that popularized his ideas widely.

Edward Severin Clark's model dairy barn in Cooperstown, NY

One of the most interesting legacies of this history of gentleman-farming is that these model farms have very often been preserved as historic sites, moving from the sort-of-for-profit to the not-for-profit realm.  The farm estates of many of Martin Van Buren's political predecessors and contemporaries--George Washington's Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Andrew Jackson's Hermitage--are among the best-known American historic sites, with Mount Vernon arguably the progenitor of the preservation movement in the U.S.   Clark's Cooperstown dairy farm became the Farmers' Museum in 1944, while Malabar Farm became an Ohio state park and Shelburne Farms was reconfigured as an educational center in 1972.

The non-profit incarnations of these farms often preserve prime farmland, promote the virtues of local and regional agriculture and products, and are involved in educational endeavors, all things that also distinguished the original model estates.  But as some of these sites begin to connect with the local and sustainable food movements, another similarity is arising:  like the older gentleman farmers, the non-profit historic sites are engaging more directly with the contemporary agricultural economy, but without having to stand or fall on their ability to survive in the for-profit marketplace. 

I argued in last week's post that surviving "for real" is an important test of a farm operation's viability, and that farms at historic sites that remain entirely within the educational, representational, or social service realms aren't really challenging or changing the conditions of the farm sector overall.  But the question is far from a simple one.  It's also possible to envision these non-profits as a new version of the old gentleman-farmers, holding desirable farmland in trust, willing and able to support experimental or philanthropic ventures that respond to the problems caused by purely commercial approaches to agriculture.  Might Martin Van Buren NHS be a new version of Martin Van Buren himself?

A big question there, of course, is whether historic sites' own sources of support--mostly public funding of various kinds--will be robust enough for them to play this role of patronage within local and regional food networks.  If public funding continues to dry up--if the gentleman-farmers lose their fortunes--agriculture may become more necessity than philanthropy at these preserved places.  Or it may be that public funding will follow innovative, risk-taking projects that involve food production, rather than the kinds of more traditional exhibitry and programming that have been the bread and butter of public history.

In either case, looking at the history of these historic farm sites, as I hope to be doing in future posts, may point us in some useful directions.  Few of them are simply "ordinary" farms;  there's a lineage of elite patronage and reform there that we should pay attention to in this new era of reform and reinvention of the food system.  I'd be interested to hear of other gentleman-farmer examples, especially those whose properties have entered the preservation realm and perhaps the current agricultural economy as well.