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

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

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

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

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

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!

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).

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

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

How historical research looks in the movies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not just a Sixties thing

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesse Buel's Albany-based farm journal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bread wars and problems of plenty: Lessons from the early market society

An 1805 map of the property that became Van Buren's farm

Chapter Four of the Martin Van Buren NHS Ethnographic Landscape Study report that I'm commenting on in this series of posts dealt with "Farming in an Emerging Market Society (1787-1839)." This chapter, which takes the story of Van Buren's farm up to the time when he purchased it just before losing his bid for Presidential re-election, left me with two big and really important takeaways.

First, thinking through the ways that farming in the northeastern states changed during this period left me firmly convinced that large-scale capitalism and small-scale agriculture are fundamentally at odds. By "large-scale" I mean not just global or corporatized, but pervasive in its adoption of a logic that foregrounds efficiency in search of maximum profitability. In agriculture, that logic has historically taken us down the road toward increasing mechanization, consolidation of small properties into larger and more expensive farms, pricing based on often-distant and often-volatile markets rather than local circumstances or costs of production, and other trends that eventually led to a fully industrial, commoditized food system not accountable to local markets or conditions. The seeds of what some have termed the "paradox of plenty" [1] or "problems of plenty" [2] were sown in this period, with efficiency and consolidation leading to lower prices and greater abundance for consumers, but driving small farmers out of business and leaving the rest chasing an ever-receding threshold of profitability.

It has taken a long time for the full implications of this to become clear, but the signs were there from the beginning.  One wonderful resource for my Ethnographic Landscape Study was Martin Bruegel's Farm, Shop, Landing:  The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860 (Duke University Press, 2002), which gives a detailed picture of how the growing and selling of food were changing in response to the increasing prevalence of market-based logic.  Bruegel reports (pp. 59-60) that a kind of informal "fair trade" system existed in the region until the early 19th century, with farmers and traders working out deals that spread their profits and risks fairly equitably.  As more fully capital-oriented markets took hold, however, those agreements were challenged.  For example, an 1810 ordinance in the town of Hudson required vendors in the public market to make their goods available to all comers rather than holding back some products for favored or regular customers (pp. 67-68).  This reflected a growing expectation of standardized pricing based on general supply and demand, rather than more flexible relationships between producers, consumers, and intermediaries.

And my second takeaway is the realization that despite some level of early 19th century prescience about the problems inherent in letting those more generalized "laws" of supply and demand determine how food would be grown and sold, no one had enough experience yet with capitalist markets to see where this all might lead.  As the riskiness of those markets became clearer--for example, after the Panic of 1819, one of the first systemic economic crises in the new republic--various efforts to strengthen and improve agriculture in the old northeastern states emerged.  But the irony of these projects is that they often involved pursuing exactly the same kinds of strategies--efficiency, higher yields, open markets--that were undermining the ability of small farmers and other food producers to survive in the longer term.

The New York of 1803, caught in bread wars

One striking example of this that I came across in researching my study is the early 19th century controversy over New York City bread prices.  Regulations known as the "assize of bread," rooted in medieval English law, limited bakers' profits and were resented by early American bakers, just as current limits on the price of milk are resented by dairy farmers unable to cover their own costs of production.  In November of 1801, New York's bakers staged a one-day work stoppage that badly frightened consumers and led the city government to intervene to make sure that bread--a staple food--remained available.

The bakers were trying to assert their right to a fair piece of the emerging market economy, just as small farmers were.  But both groups miscalculated, failing to understand their relative lack of power within a system increasingly dominated by concentrated capital and the unforgiving logic of efficiency.  New York's bakers finally managed to get the assize of bread abolished in 1821, but their organizing had irked a group of New York financiers who saw older artisanal guild networks as a barrier to free trade.  These well-heeled investors responded to the bread crisis by launching a new corporation, the Bread Company, that could provide cheaper bread to consumers.  By helping to create the legal underpinnings for a more wide-open market system, farmers, artisanal producers, and their allies among politicians and reformers actually made small farmers and producers much more vulnerable to large-scale competition and economic volatility.[3]

The really big takeaway here, and the reason why I think this particular period of history is well worth present-day food and farm reformers knowing more about, is that it shows how the attempts to compromise and chase after the new efficiencies demanded by capital-oriented markets in order to keep small-scale food production functional ultimately had exactly the opposite effect.  This history lends weight to contemporary efforts to re-scale our food systems so that they are once again more accountable to regional and local conditions and markets.  The "lessons" of the past aren't usually directly applicable to the present, but there can be a great deal of benefit from being able to say to those who argue for a fully market-oriented food system, "Look, we tried that, and here's why it didn't work."

Next:  Martin Van Buren buys a farm and Cathy struggles with presentism.

SOURCES

[1]  Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty:  A Social History of Eating in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 1993).
[2]  R. Douglas Hurt, Problems of Plenty:  The American Farmer in the 20th Century (Ivan R. Dee, 2002).
[3]  The assize of bread is discussed in Chapter 7 of Howard Rock's Artisans of the New Republic:  The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York University Press, 1984).

The 1805 map is by William Dickie, "A survey of the lands of John and William Van Ness...on the West Side of the Albany Road in Kinderhook" (from the collection of Martin Van Buren NHS).

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.

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.

Where slow food meets slow knowledge

I shed 40 pounds this week, and it feels great.

The weight was in the files and materials from the Ethnographic Landscape Study that I’ve been working on for the last three years for Martin Van Buren National Historic Site.  The project is now officially finished, and the final report is printed and also posted as a PDF on the park’s website.  And so I was able to move the files out of my office and take them to the park for eventual accessioning in their library collection.  

Even with an amazing amount of material stored on a tiny flash drive (how did we get along without those things?), there was a substantial pile of paper.  That, plus the fact that we were covering anthropology's "historical turn" in my "History of Anthropological Thought" class at Tufts this week, has got me reflecting on the slow, meticulous process of doing ethnographically-oriented research that covers a long span of time. 

The laborious pace of that kind of study was in sharp contrast to the let's-get-it-done-now approach of an event I attended right after my visit to the park:  a Farm Hack in Ithaca, New York.  Farm Hack is part of the expansive and communitarian DIY movement that's making itself felt in many communities of knowledge and practice these days--part Maker Faire, part barn-raising, part engineering design lab (but with really good food).  Farm Hack is a project of the National Young Farmers Coalition, itself an outgrowth of the Greenhorns, probably the central hub of information-sharing and activism for the burgeoning young-farmer movement.

I was there as part of a nascent conversation about what's happening at the intersection of new farm activism and existing (or emergent) networks of historical collections and study. Our discussions were fascinating, wide-ranging, and sometimes frustrating, and I left feeling confirmed in my hunch that the gap between the slow-food world and the slow-knowledge realm presents an incredibly interesting tension which could be enormously creative if it can be negotiated thoughtfully.  (Beginning to do so, over lunch, are, from left to right, Amy Francheschini of Future Farmers, Severine von Tscharner Fleming of the Greenhorns, Conrad Vispo of the Farmscape Ecology Program, Jeff Piestrak of Cornell University's Mann Library, and Dorn Cox of Tuckaway Farm.)

I'm planning to use my next few blog posts to reflect on all of this, starting with a more detailed piece about FarmHack in the next week or so.  Following that, I'll unpack the chapters of the Martin Van Buren ELS a bit, with an eye to the over-arching question that came out of the discussions in Ithaca for me:  How can public historians best make a case for the use value of careful, methodical historical knowledge-creation in dialogue with the exploding universe of the slow food and new farmers movements and the sense of urgency that's driving all of us involved in these realms?  Stay tuned.

Tourists, femivores, and panhandlers: The urban market blend

I've fallen off the one-post-a-week wagon again, mainly because I ended up unexpectedly teaching a summer class and my time has filled up with prepping and grading again.  It's actually been quite a lot of fun, and one of the things I've been enjoying is that the class is fairly small and the time block is long, so we've had a chance to go on some field trips around Boston.  Yesterday we went to the Copley Square farmers market as part of our discussion of economic systems and exchange relationships, and I found it a useful check-in for thinking about where the new food movement fits in the trajectory of economic redevelopment in this particularly successful postindustrial city.

I moved out of Boston in the late 1980s, just at the time when Copley Square was being redesigned from a sterile, high-modernist kind of open plaza to a greener and more inviting urban space.  The market was launched in 1990, just after the landscape re-set was finished.  I haven't really been in that part of the city much since then, so it was interesting to hang around for a couple of hours watching the mix of people and activities that overlap with and are enabled by the market.  Some highlights, of relevance to this blog's focus on history/heritage and the local food movement:

• The market fits seamlessly into the effort to create what Bella Dicks has called "visitability" and what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has termed "hereness" for Copley Square and for Boston as a whole.  Although the sellers--particularly the farmers, as opposed to the more locally-based bakers and other specialty vendors--were mostly from central and even western Massachusetts, the presence of the market itself conveys a sense of being rooted in a specific place, which goes along with the iconic architecture (especially Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library, which anchor the square on two sides) and links with various pieces of local lore (especially the Boston Marathon, which finishes here and which is referenced in Nancy Schön's 1995 "Tortoise and Hare" sculpture, much photographed by tourists).  
• The market itself is a tourist attraction of sorts, with an interesting relationship to visitors from both far away and within the city.  The market manager, Ben Sommer, told me that the customer base includes a lot of people who work in the surrounding downtown buildings, but also many international tourists who happen to be in the square and many people from elsewhere in Boston who come downtown to do some of their food shopping (and, presumably, to run other errands or see other sights--an important part of the argument that organizers of farmers markets often make for their power of attraction and their economic "multiplier" effect).  
• Overlapping with the nearby workers, tourists, and day-trippers were many people from the core demographic of farmers market shoppers: the well-educated, professional, mostly female, mostly white, mostly 30-to-50-year-old, leftist/progressive/environmentalist shoppers whom Peggy Orenstein has labeled "femivores" (see "The Femivore's Dilemma" in the New York Times Magazine, March 14, 2010) and who embrace the chance to shorten the food chain as a pragmatic expression of their political and social values.  My students were struck by the way that two groups of market "extras" were working the particular sensibilities of this crowd:  panhandlers and petition-pushers were equally active in approaching market shoppers, both clearly seeing opportunities to mobilize uneasy liberal consciences or righteous liberal indignation.

One of the benefits of teaching is that it pushes you to stay at least somewhat current with the academic literature, and my thinking about the Copley market was enriched by a couple of good recent articles that I assigned as readings for this class trip:

• Kathleen Bubinas, "Farmers Markets in the Post-Industrial City," City & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 154–172 (2011)
• Nana Okura Gagné, "Eating local in a U.S. city: Reconstructing 'community'—a third place—in a global neoliberal economy," American Ethnologist, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 281–293 (2011)

Both Bubinas and Gagné point to the ways that farmers markets and postindustrial urban redevelopment can complement one another, for better and worse--creating a potentially politicized alternative to purely commoditized food exchange, on the one hand, or playing into purely consumption-oriented revisioning of urban spaces, on the other.  I've spent a fair bit of my own time critiquing the latter, but like others who are now focusing ethnographically on new food activism, I'm heartened by the sense that the potential for real change exists even within touristic or consumerist market projects.

Maybe it was just the exemplary gluten-free brownie that I scored at one of the booths, or the beautiful weather yesterday, but I left the place mentally agreeing with Rachel Slocum, whose 2006 article "Whiteness, space and alternative food practice" (Geoforum 38[3]:520-533) I also assigned as a reading for this class, that these markets may be spaces where the exclusionary can coexist with the transformative, and where we as scholars might lodge critiques that are sharp without being unproductively harsh. 

April is the Busiest Month

I stole a little time away from work yesterday to put a few plants in the ground and continue getting my new garden infrastructure in place. The deer, the porcupine, and the neighor's marauding dog have all put in an appearance this week, and I'm feeling the need to get those fence-posts in very soon! But the time outside, while useful and therapeutic, put me even farther behind, because I'm in the throes of an over-busy spring of teaching, planning, and conference-going--which is to say, a pretty normal spring for anyone in the academic business.

This puts me in mind of something I came to realize while I was doing my research a couple of summers ago in New York state: farmers’ and academics’ schedules are diametrically opposed, in ways that are either perfectly complementary or impossibly out of sync. This isn’t accidental, of course--our school year is still based on the old let-the-kids-out-to-work-on-the-farm-in-time-for-haying pattern. The majority of people in this part of the world were no longer farmers (or even rural) by 1920 or so, but the rhythm of the agricultural year still shapes our academic lives, even after all this time.

Mike Scannell, Harrier Fields Farm

What this means for academics who want to study agriculture is that the people you need to observe and talk to are at their very busiest during the months of the year when you actually have time to do your research. Many of my fieldwork interviews in Columbia County were done literally in a field—that is, in a farmer’s field. One dairy farmer excused herself in the middle of our interview to help her daughter-in-law chase the cows back into the barn, and one of my most useful and memorable encounters, with latter-day yeoman farmer Mike Scannell of Harrier Fields Farm, took place among his Red Devon cows, who live outside year-round and who were busy fertilizing the field for him the whole time we were talking.

One of the reasons my interview with Mike was so useful was that he's a farmer who has read widely and thought very deeply about the history of American agriculture and the various dilemmas that small farms find themselves in today. When does he do all this reading? In the winter, of course--when life on the farm slows down and he has more time to reflect. It's another one of those natural-rhythm things that make sense in the context of an agricultural life. There's a time when you're crazy-busy, and then a time when you can actually catch your breath before it all starts up again.

Lately I never seem to get out of the crazy-busy phase, and I hear the same thing from more and more of my fellow scholars (Sharon Leon at the Roy Rozenzweig Center for History and New Media wrote a good blog post about it earlier this week). Digital technology and the increasingly rushed and productivity-oriented pace of many areas of higher education, plus the fact that "contingent" knowledge workers like me usually have to juggle multiple overlapping jobs and schedules, means that there's no longer any naturally-occurring down-time for many of us.

A lot of people are working on eating more seasonally these days, and it strikes me that it would be a good idea to figure out how to work more seasonally, too. That might mean gearing up during the growing season and then slowing down in the winter, or maybe it would be an academic schedule that actually did give us a chance to think and reflect and write during the summer. Or maybe (and this is my own perfect world) it would involve a nice syncopation of the two different but potentially complementary rhythms. 

Whatever the mix might be, I guess this particular season is always going to be busy.  One of my farmer-interviewees in New York state told me, during a hectic 30-minute conversation in his barn, "On the first nice day of spring, a dairy farmer gets a week behind schedule;  by the fifth nice day, he's two weeks behind." That's about where I am right now, madly prepping conference presentations and classes while trying to carve out a little time to put manure on the new garden beds and get the holes dug for the fence posts.  It's all good, and I tell myself that there are far worse things than having too much work that you love.  I hope that someday soon I'll have a chance to work on book-scale rather than blog-scale ideas again, and in the meantime, I'm just trying to do what the farmers do:  to keep growing.