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).

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.