Planning while doing: The Wendell Food-Farm TimeMap

1887 bird's-eye map showing northwest corner of Wendell

One of the things I've found blogs useful for is to push me to write about things I don't have time to work on in more depth.  That may sound sort of slipshod, but it's been a way for me to continue tying together various interests and bits of research in the midst of teaching and other work. Especially with the research that relates to energy use and climate change, this feels compelling enough to make some room for in the midst of a too-busy schedule, and important enough that doing it in even a small-scale and scattered way seems better than not doing it at all.

I'm pushing myself even a bit farther out on the limb this weekend by launching a little community history project in Wendell, Massachusetts, where I live (and which I wrote about in an earlier post).  I'm calling this the Wendell Food-Farm TimeMap, and it's designed to gather and consolidate more knowledge of the town's food and farming history, with an eye to informing some of the community discussions that have been going on here for many years about local resilience, self-sufficiency, and interdependence.

Tomorrow is Wendell Old Home Day, which is what I've been aiming toward as an official launch of this project.  (For those who don't know, Old Home Days are a New England tradition that emerged around the turn of the 20th century in depopulated, often rural places trying to mobilize sentimental connections--very often centering around farm life--among people who had left, with an eye to drawing needed resources back into the towns.  Now they're essentially just annual town fairs, where they still take place.)  My plan is a pretty loose one, and I thought I'd set it out here as a way to sort of document things as they go along.  One hope I have is that this might produce a useable template for people in other towns who might want to do similar projects, so I want to pay attention to what works and what doesn't.

Here's the plan:

• I'm thinking of this as a three-summer project:  one summer to begin gathering data, one to build out from the initial materials and add to them with some additional research and perhaps interviewing, and a final summer to consolidate things in some form (probably a webby one) so it can be disseminated and perhaps added to in future years, if someone feels inspired to do that.
• To a large extent, this project is about finding out what people already know about Wendell's food and farm history.  As much as anything else, I'm curious about that.  So particularly in the first phase, my main task is just to try to talk to as many people as possible, and to use whatever they tell me as a guide to the next stages of research.
• I'm planning to do that by setting up at Old Home Day and perhaps other events in the fall with a number of big laminated historical maps of the town plus a timeline that follows the general history of agriculture in the northeast.  I'll ask people to add things to the maps and/or timeline, and will try to get contact information for people who want to share more of what they know and recollect.  In future phases, as data gets added, the timeline can be more Wendell-specific and I can figure out a way to collate and display what people have told me so far (probably an indexed listing of names, farms, and properties, as I'm anticipating that that's how most people are going to find their way in to this).

1871 Beers Atlas map showing same part of Wendell

And that's pretty much it for now.   It's a loose plan and I don't have a great deal of time to pursue it, so I'm trying to keep this as simple and feasible as possible (which may actually be a plus in terms of showing people elsewhere how it might be useful in their own towns).  I've set up a Facebook page for the project and may also use my own website as a temporary online venue for materials relating to this once they start accumulating.

I hope that they do, and that I don't lose my voice tomorrow (I've had a nasty cold for a week), and that I haven't over-reached too far in adding yet another thing to my plate.  Stay tuned to find out!

What would keep us from going down the same path to "big ag" all over again?

As I've been pondering local food networks and activism over the past couple of years, one question keeps coming to mind.  It's all very well to be rediscovering smaller-scale modes of production and consumption, but our current large-scale systems developed for reasons that seemed wise at the time (trying to help farmers make a secure living, make food more affordable, reduce the back-breaking labor of cultivating land).  What would keep us from enacting the same cycle again, and ending up with just a nouveau version of today's "big ag"?  How do we hold the line at things that work at a local or regional level, rather than letting market logic push things toward the national and global?  As the networks of distribution and supply in the local food realm become more extensive, with "food hubs" and other intermediaries, aggregators, and specialized services of various kinds now appearing all over the landscape, this seems worth considering.

What happened the first time around is that competition and economies of scale came to favor larger producers, companies, and distributors, beginning as early as the mid-19th century but really becoming entrenched after World War II.   So if we're going to create and maintain small- and mid-sized systems, there needs to be something that can counter that trend toward bigness.

I spend a lot of time critiquing tourist-oriented development, so I feel a bit funny saying this, but I really think that tourism (and the whole repertoire of tourist-oriented techniques of publicity and experience-marketing) might help us here.  I wrote about this elsewhere in relation to fuels, cars, and railroads, and I wonder if the same thing might apply to local food.  At the moment, the case is being made for relocalizing/regionalizing in ways that are largely touristic, focusing on creating "hereness" and branded identities or products and locating local food within constellations of other heritage- and recreation-oriented attractions.  But that's not to say that the infrastructure that's being built in the process won't have its own staying power if and when times get tough(er).

Agritourism and selling experience rather than just food may not seem like smart strategies for the long-term survival of small food producers, but it's worth remembering that domestic tourism actually flourished in the Great Depression, as people saved money by taking vacations closer to home.  More to the point, the emerging networks we're now seeing may be building systems and connections and knowledge that will be highly serviceable for robust local and regional food systems down the road. If present-day tourism helps us do that, then I'm all for it.

And my assumption is that by the time we find ourselves finally facing up to the realities of a carbon-saturated, fossil-fuel starved world (the imminence of which is becoming more apparent every day), many of the "externalities" inherent in the national and global food systems that now feed us will have shown themselves to be "unsustainable" in the long run.  The costs of obtaining oil, public subsidy of industrial food production and the transportation systems it relies on, reliance on below-market-value legal and illegal labor--our present way of producing food has multiple weak spots.  We may wake up one morning to discover that the smaller-scale, less energy-dense, more reciprocal networks we've been putting in place have simply become the new way of doing business.

So as corn and soy crops wither in this year's drought and Greenland's ice cap melts, the somewhat odd blend of people and motivations in the local food movement--boutiquey, nostalgic, and political in about equal parts--may offer some hope that in decentralized and sometimes contradictory ways, we're reinventing things right out from under the industrialized system.  I was heartened to read a recent Wall Street Journal interview with the chef at the upscale Stone Barns Center, running along these same lines.  "Five years ago," he says,  "I would have said that locavorism was at its height and that a new fad was coming to replace it. Now I'm actually convinced we're just beginning to see its potential." As we also see the potential of extreme weather and growing competition for fuel and other resources, that's a hopeful thought to hold onto.

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. 

Re-occupying the land-grant ideal

In addition to the national birthdays on both side of the U.S./Canada border this past week, another big birthday just happened:  the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the USDA and land-grant colleges in the U.S.

1862 was a banner year for federal support of agricultural initiatives in the U.S., despite the government's preoccupation with the Civil War--or, according to some, because of it, since the secession of the Southern states removed many sectional objections to greater government involvement in agriculture [1].  Several foundational pieces of legislation were passed that year that continue to shape the farm sector today, including the establishment of a federal Department of Agriculture (which has been celebrating its sesquicentennial this year in a variety of ways) and the Morrill Land-Grant College Act.

Maybe most Americans know how this worked, but it's something that has always been a bit mysterious to this Canadian girl.  The idea of federally-supported agricultural colleges had been promoted--particularly by New Englanders--for several decades, and it seems as though the Morrill Act was a way to make it happen without direct cost to the taxpayers.  The government granted 30,000 acres of federal land to each state, with instructions to turn it into a college by one means or another.  Some states built a school on the land they were given, while others sold the real estate or its resources and used the money to fund a new or existing school.  The land-grant colleges provided much of the infrastructure for public higher education in the U.S., and their legacy is part of what's being celebrated at this year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival, wrapping up today. 

"Mass Aggie" in 1867 (UMass Special Collections and University Archives)

All of this seems to have been intersecting in some interesting ways with contemporary food politics, a hot topic on many college campuses.  University of Massachusetts Sustainable Agriculture Professor John Gerber reported in a May blog post on UMass's recent invocation and reinvigoration of its own land-grant roots with the establishment of a new School of Agriculture.  Gerber believes "The time is right for the re-emergence of 'Mass Aggie,'" as the school was once known, and he comments on the appeal that farming increasingly has for college students, something I'm also seeing among many of my students at Tufts.  There's a long-standing tension in American higher education between vocational and intellectual training, reflected in the "second tier" status that many public universities have worked hard to leave behind.  The best and the brightest have chosen white-collar professions over farming for a long time now, but agriculture seems to be regaining some of the status it slowly lost over the 19th and 20th centuries, at least for a sub-set of young Americans. 

Meanwhile, on the left coast, another set of students has been invoking a university's agricultural history in a much more militant way.  On Earth Day in April, a group under the banner of Occupy the Farm moved onto a five-acre tract of farmland owned by the University of California/Berkeley--the last open arable land in the area, and a parcel that the students and their allies want to see turned into a community farm (UC has used it for agricultural research for many years, but has also proposed that it be developed as student and faculty housing).  For three weeks, before being driven out and arrested by riot police, the students farmed the land, planting vegetables and tending chickens they had brought with them.

Just this weekend, the occupiers returned, continuing a decades-long local effort to keep the land in cultivation.  As the USDA and the land-grant colleges observe their birthdays in officially-sanctioned ways, the more radical qualities of agrarian revolt also seem to be alive and well, something that seems worth celebrating too!

[1]  Douglas Hurt, 1994. American Agriculture: A Brief History. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press (pp. 187-92)

Among the machines

The Central Mass. Steam, Gas, and Machinery Association held its annual engine show at the Orange Airport last weekend, and Fred and I made our annual pilgrimage there.  Fred goes because he finds useful parts for things there and because he really likes the old machines.  I really like the machines, too, but mostly I enjoy watching and thinking about the people.  (Anthropologist.  Sue me.)

I had a brief interesting chat with the guys at the International Harvester Collector Club table--the same group I wrote about in an earlier post this spring.  They had a row of beautiful Farmall tractors set up, and I asked them if anybody in the club actually used these for "real" farming.  Not really, they said--aside from an occasional Plow Day event when they help out a farmer in exchange for a place to run the machines around, the point is more the collection and restoration of the tractors, not their everyday use.

They did mention that a handful of club members found the older tractors useful for working small patches of land or doing specialized jobs.  But by and large, these collectors aren't farmers.  When I asked about that--i.e. how many members of the club had ever worked as active farmers--the answer was one that I could have predicted:  "Well, a lot of us had grandparents who farmed, but we do other things."

It's a very familiar answer when you talk to people in preservation, public history, reenactment, and related circles, and it confirms my sense that for a lot of those involved in preserving and commemorating elements of the past, it's more about reconnecting with a lost piece of family background rather than discovering something that might be put to use in the present.  And anyone actually using these machines to cultivate fields isn't going to spend a weekend sitting at the engine show--they're out growing things at this time of year.

So the aura of "pastness" is always pretty intense at the engine show.  But it's still fun to walk around and look at the often bizarre and beautiful machines, and to realize what an extensive community exists around them.  Like public historians, these people are engaged in saving and showing how to use aspects of small-scale farming that can't be relearned overnight, and even if they're not using that knowledge directly themselves, that's not to say that what they're doing isn't important and potentially useful to others.

The bully palate: Presidential farms, Part 2

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

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

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

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

Plaque at Harry S. Truman NHS

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

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

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

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

More image than substance?  Reagan at Rancho del Cielo

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

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

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

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

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

The bully palate: Presidential gardens, Part I

Michelle Obama has a new book out about the White House vegetable garden (American Grown:  The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden, released in May from Crown Books) and that's got me thinking about the long history of what happens when people at the pinnacle of power use food and farming as an expression of their values or ideals.

I actually started thinking about this earlier in the spring, when a student in my tourism seminar at Tufts said she'd been wondering about Marie Antoinette playing farmer at Hameau de la reine at Versailles (shown at left).  Was that in some sense a working farm (maybe in the mode of other elite model farms of the kind that I've written about in an earlier post)?  And if it was, even in an elitist demonstration-farm kind of way, is the image of the queen as nothing more than a dilettante aristocrat dressing up as a shepherdess for kicks perhaps a distortion of a more complicated reality in which real and represented farming somehow overlapped?

It does seem that the tastes and agricultural aspirations of those in power are particularly vulnerable spots that political and ideological enemies have historically rushed to exploit.  Michelle Obama's garden has been the subject of eager press coverage about the level of lead in the soil--evidently a legacy of Clinton-era application of sewage sludge as lawn fertilizer--as well as a disinformation campaign by agribusiness organizations who warned that the food from the garden would be dangerous because it hadn't been grown with safety-enhancing chemical pesticides.  Critics also invoked fears of elitism and exclusive access to over-priced organic foods, perhaps keying off the famed arugula gaffe of the 2008 Obama campaign.  (The Daily Show gleefully satirized the whole debate in May 2009.)

The fears surrounding the present garden are an interesting echo of an earlier day:   Eleanor Roosevelt's World War II era Victory Garden at the White House apparently provoked initial opposition from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which feared that the First Lady's support for home-grown vegetables would hurt the American food industry, which had just struggled through a long Depression.  During an earlier war, Woodrow Wilson had a flock of sheep brought in to save labor on White House groundskeeping (the wool was also auctioned off to raise money for the Red Cross).  I don't know what the contemporary public and media response to this was, but a present-day Google search reveals suggests that it's now seen as an odd Presidential quirk, at best.  Something about modern First Families going "back to the land," even a little bit, seems to provoke some kind of civic anxiety.  Maybe it's felt to be phony or to upset the settled hierarchy in which manual labor is always lower on the power scale.

The relative secrecy surrounding the the small organic garden that flourished during the Bush Sr. and Clinton presidencies seems to bear this out.  (It's not clear whether it was White House staff or Clinton himself, following Jimmy Carter's lead, whose objections resulted in the garden being located on the roof rather than on the ground where it might disturb the formality of the White House grounds.)  Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton certainly didn't write books about it--they stuck to the safer First Lady topics of child-raising, education, and more domesticated kinds of animals.

Michelle Obama's stated rationale for the new White House garden--it produces healthier food and outdoor activity for her own and other children--actually fits quite neatly within that range of topics.  The White House is clearly attempting to downplay the connections with the local and sustainable food movement, but the controversy surrounding the garden shows that its more political meanings are still being received and debated, and that seems like a good thing to me.

Next week I'm planning to write about earlier Presidential farms and gardens, including Martin Van Buren's own "arugula gap."  Stay tuned.

(Image above is by Acclaim Images)