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).

A global network of regions: What Dutch colonial farms show us

Regions colonized by the Dutch over time*

Just as Native American farming practices give contemporary food activists a way to envision agriculture before the modern term got applied to it, the Dutch colonial farmers who moved onto Indian lands in the mid-Hudson Valley as part of the New Netherland colony provide a window into the surprisingly global network of regional production that existed in the early period of European colonization--a blend that seems in many ways to be quite close to what a lot of food and farm activists are envisioning today.  I'm certainly not suggesting that colonialism per se provides a useful model for reinventing our food systems, but the specific configurations that existed within colonial empires do shed some light on the possibilities for how we might knit together local, regional, and global resources in a way that doesn't depend on oil and industrial ways of growing food.

Map from Edward Collier's 1914 History of Old Kinderhook

 

In the Martin Van Buren Ethnographic Landscape Study that I'm commenting on in this series of posts, the colonial Dutch are the subject of Chapter Three, "Colonial Dutch Settlement, Farming, and Foodways (1609-1787)."  This was one of the most confusing chapters to write, in large part because of the incredibly complex details of land exchanges between the Dutch and Native Americans and among the Dutch settlers themselves.  Even Kinderhook historian extraordinaire Ruth Piwonka, who has spent many decades combing through old deeds, maps, and other sources, still can't be entirely sure about the original transactions around the piece of land that later became Martin Van Buren's Lindenwald estate (marked by a red dot on this 1774 copy of a 1767 map showing the division of land in the 1687 Kinderhook Patent).

Although historical and ethnohistorical research depend on exactly this kind of careful gathering of often tiny bits of data, there are also times when jumping to a broader level of context may be more useful in understanding what was going on, and that's what I found in the case of this chapter.  Once I gave up on the idea of definitively tracking the ownership of this piece of land, it became more interesting to follow the origins of the families in the immediate neighborhood. 

When I started doing that, I quickly realized that the single term "Dutch" is actually very misleading.  This wasn't a case of a consolidated nation-state administering a distant colony from a powerful metropolis, as later happened, but a surprisingly loose amalgamation of different regional centers, all drawing on highly diverse populations, farming and marketing techniques, and economic networks.  The "Dutch" settlers came from across northern Europe, including French- and German-speaking areas as well as Scandinavia.  The largest single group did hail from North Holland, which includes Amsterdam, but the Low Countries’ location had long made them a crossroads and an important shipping and trading region, fostering a certain cosmopolitanism within the Netherlands itself. And the colonists were occupationally diverse as well: although most or all took up farming out of necessity once they arrived in the New World, only about a third had started out as farmers, with the rest coming from backgrounds as soldiers, artisans, servants, and fishermen.

The specific origin of the Van Alstyne family who took up residence on what had undoubtedly been Mahican farm fields along Kinderhook Creek in the early 17th century was the Dutch province of Drenthe, a region where an inter-regional market economy had begun to flourish in the late medieval period of the 14th through 16th centuries and where many farm families also pursued artisanal skills to add to their subsistence. Jan Martense Van Alstyne, the patriarch of the family that built the first European farm on the Lindenwald lands, is described in some documents as "De Weever," suggesting that he may well have been one of those artisan/farmers. Regionally-specific patterns of land use--particularly settlement in tiny villages and relatively isolated farmsteads along rivers and creeks combined with unenclosed "commons" for grazing livestock--came to the New World with these settlers, along with long-running debates about how to find a workable balance between the needs of individual farmers and the carrying capacity of their shared environment. 

This is a view of a world not yet coalesced into the nation-states that we take for granted today, in which regional patterns of settlement and cultivation from one part of the world met up with and were influenced by those of another. This more nuanced view of past farming and eating also turns up in James McWilliams' study of colonial and revolutionary era America (A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, Columbia University Press, 2007), which argues that at least up to the late 18th century, colonial farmers were part of vigorous and far-flung inter-regional networks that always managed to circumvent the desired flow of raw materials simply from hinterland to metropolis.

None of this is breaking news in the historical profession, but it's a past that isn't widely recognized yet within the food movement, and it adds a very useful layer of awareness of just how much was historically done without fossil fuels and industrial machines.

Next: Road bumps along the way to a market society.

* In this asynchronous map of the Dutch colonial empire, the dark green areas show regions administered by the Dutch West India Company, light green the Dutch East India Company, and orange dots represent other places where the Dutch had a colonial presence. Detailed sources for other information in this post can be found in the Ethnographic Landscape Study report itself, available as a PDF from the Martin Van Buren NHS website.

Re-county-izing? Thinking about the county agricultural fair

The Franklin County Fair took place in Greenfield this weekend, and that's got me thinking about the surprisingly dynamic history of county-scale life in Massachusetts, and what role the county might play as we try to adjust to smaller-scale food systems.

The Franklin County Fair has been held since 1848, making it one of the oldest continuously-operating agricultural fairs in the country. [1]  As James Gildea's insightful 2008 history of the event shows, the fair was founded at a time of political, social, and economic uncertainty and upheaval, with fierce debates over famine-driven immigrants, abolition and the future of escaped slaves in the north, and the perceived decline of agricultural productivity in an increasingly industrialized and urbanizing New England.  Although railroads were snaking across the region by that point, the realities of transportation and communications systems meant that most people's lives still took place on a more circumscribed level.  County fairs and county governments made sense because the county was roughly the scale on which most people lived. [2]

Over time, however, the expansiveness that fossil-fuel powered transport and instant long-distance communication made possible also prompted the dissolution of many forms of organization that once took place at the county level.  More than half of Massachusetts' original 14 counties were dissolved as governmental entities in the late 1990s, with their administrative functions absorbed into state agencies.  A handful--including Franklin County--opted for a looser "council of governments" model in which municipalities collaborate on some planning processes and provision of services but there is no longer any centralized county government. [3] For a good capsule history of these changes, see the League of Women Voters website.)

Counties--if not necessarily county government--may be beginning to make more sense again as we try to re-envision life on a more geographically-limited scale.  You can wrap your mind around a county.  It's usually not so vast that you couldn't cross it in a day, even using muscle-power.  But it's varied enough that it expands our horizons beyond the purely local and offers enough things to see, buy, and do that it can function as a kind of little world, if you approach it that way.

The fact that county agricultural fairs endure in many places in New England and elsewhere also makes sense to me.  Despite the industrialization and globalization of agriculture, people who farm still do so in ways that are inescapably located in specific places and in relationship with others in the networks of production and cultivation that exist in those places.  The continued existence of 4H Club exhibits, pie and pickle contests, and horse and tractor pulls speaks to the realness of the farm economy in this part of the world, despite long-standing rumors of its demise.

And fairs are lively places that often combine old and new in highly compatible ways.  You can see that in the program for this year's Windsor County Agricultural Fair in central Vermont, the theme of which was "New Agriculture" (something that, as its website notes, "of course is really just returning to the 'old' ways of local food and small family farms") and which included the usual mix of midway entertainment, music, and racing, along with solar energy demonstrations and a farmers market.  For its first eight decades (1850s to 1930s), this fair was held at the Billings Farm in Woodstock, giving it an interesting historical connection with a site that now exists somewhere between the museum world and the working farm economy.

The Columbia County Fair, founded, like Greenfield's fair, in the tumultuous 1840s, is another fair that I know a bit about through my research on Martin Van Buren's farm in Kinderhook, New York.  Are there others out there that seem to reflect the scale and potential dynamism of county-level living? I'd be interested to hear!


NOTES
[1]  Agricultural fairs had come into popularity earlier in the century, with the 1811 Berkshire Agricultural Society fair, not far west of Greenfield, among the earliest documented (Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1994, p. 104).  Franklin County is actually represented at two fairs, the second being the Three County Fair in Northampton, founded in 1818.
[2] The scope of the county is implied in the origins of the word:  it refers to the holdings of a count or viscount--that is, a large landed feudal estate.
[3] For a good capsule history of these changes, see the League of Women Voters website.

Cross-posted from The Veg Table: Saving Seed, Saving Face

NOTE: This week's post is a cross-posting from The Veg Table, a blog by Signe Porteshawver. Signe is a recent Tufts graduate who wrote a great senior honors thesis on Community-Supported Agriculture and who's now working at Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, Mass. This post seemed to follow really nicely on my own thoughts last week about questions relating to scale in local and regional agriculture, and Signe graciously agreed to let me cross-post it here.
______________________________________________

"Saving Seed, Saving Face" 

I recently re-discovered a memoir on my bookshelf. I was drawn to Gathering: A Memoir of a Seed Saver mostly because of the author’s roots. Diane Ott Whealy grew up in rural Iowa, and relates fond memories of its countryside and culture. The agrarian history of thriftiness and neighborliness is nostalgic and enchanting. In Whealy’s childhood, as in many areas of the United States during that time, large gardens and livestock were maintained as a matter of necessity. Saving seed was commonplace and economical. The practice of saving seed exemplifies the more humble sense of economy felt during that time.

In The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry argues that modern economic thought is reflected in today’s homes. Whereas in Ott-Whealy and Berry’s youth the home was a place of production as well as consumption, the standard American home is only a site of consumption. Consumption engages the economy of money, but disregards the economies of land and energy. Homesteading communities engage in these more tactile economies every day, as they live with the results of their practices, gathering those seeds, promoting connectedness of process and product, use with replenishing.

 A home-based agricultural economy trusts in and heeds the economy of the land. Place matters to this economy. Weather and soil type and community all make a difference. This is especially true in seed saving, as varieties are shaped through selection to thrive in specific regions and climates. The modern American home instead has no response or ties to place. It is only a symbol of status and leisure.

 If Berry’s discussion of appropriate economy didn’t get me thinking about E.F. Schumacher, certainly this quote would have, “….as a society, we have abandoned any interest in the survival of anything small”. When asked by a friend the best political action to fuel revolutionary economics, Schumacher said, “…my suggestion would be to plant a tree”. Certainly, investing in your home as a site of production, saving seeds in your backyard, and rethinking economies is incredibly important, especially to personal well being. But is seed saving sufficient politics? I had a nagging question the whole time I was reading Ott Whealy’s memoir: What about commercial agriculture?

A bit about Gathering. Ms. Ott Whealy founded the Seed Savers Exchange, the biggest heirloom seed collector in the country, with her husband in 1975. (In their basement! At one point they housed 4,000 bottles of over, 1,200 varieties of beans!). The organization has since grown into a diverse network of over 13,000 members who grow, save, and exchange thousands of endangered seed varieties every year. Seed saving preserves biodiversity, reinvigorates memories and cuisines, carries on family traditions and rural culture, promotes food sovereignty, and works towards “closing the loop”. The values, sentimentality, and community around the practice are also very powerful, but I’ll leave that to Ott Whealy’s passion and humor. SSE produces an annual yearbook with information about all the growers and their varieties, which are available for trade. They also sell seed online, maintain a hugely diverse demonstration farm, and host community-building campouts.

As passionate as SSE is about saving seed, Ott Whealy admits the lack of political drive within the organization. It is certainly political in Berry’s sense of home economics that I discussed above, and to Schumacher as well, but Gathering did not bring up how seed saving can help change the way food is grown in this country in a big way. SSE does compile a directory of commercial seed companies that offer non-hybrid varieties. The catalogue is called the Garden Seed Inventory and is no doubt a great resource for gardeners and perhaps commercial growers as well. However, saving seed and choosing heirloom varieties becomes harder at a larger scale.

Saving seed on a commercial vegetable farm is next-to-impossible, if not hugely impractical. Twice the staff and twice the land area would be required. Many plants are easily cross-pollinated and varieties have to be covered when flowering or planted acres apart from one another. If covered, the plants must be hand-pollinated. The fruits have to be harvested at a specific time and allowed to cure or dry, the seeds extracted and properly stored. Labeling is, of course, crucial.

Farming and selling vegetables is hard enough in and of itself. I can’t imagine also worrying about growing our own seed. There would be a lot of risk involved. What if the seeds don’t store well or the beets mold in the root cellar over the winter? (Beets are biennials, meaning they flower every other year. To harvest seed you must pull them, keep them happy through the cold months and replant them out in the spring.) Saving (and finding new seed varieties) is a huge job, as Ott Whealy will tell you.

The varieties we grow are constantly changing depending on pest pressures, customer preferences, and convenience. We want hybrids as well as open-pollinated crops because folks like big beef tomatoes and we like tomatoes that are late blight resistant. We use pelleted lettuce seed so our eyeballs don’t explode. Sometimes we buy non-organic seeds because the trusted and tasty varieties are not always available organically. We also keep an eye on the price tag. Heirloom and organic seeds can add up fast on a large scale.

Despite the impracticalities of seed saving, I’m sure many commercial, locally-focused, sustainable vegetable farms buy into the idealism of saving seed. We live by the humbling economy of the land. We are intimately connected to place. We are the queens of thrift. How can we hold on to and promote seed saving without participating? This type of question comes up a lot in the food movement: How to promote, re-invigorate, and protect the more appropriate practices of the past, while also reshaping them to accommodate today’s economy, the farm economy, and customer preferences. How can commercial operations be true to ideals of the past and thrive in today’s world?

~ Signe Porteshawver

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)