The Harvest Project

For the last several years, I (Richard) have been working on “The Harvest Project,” a multi-volume book series exploring agrarian themes in art and literature. Volume I: Hallowed Harvests, covers ancient to early modern times. Volume II: Harvest Hands covers early modern to recent eras. For those interested, both of those books are currently available on Amazon.

The third and final volume will be titled Harvest Horizons and covers the contemporary period. WSU Press is planning to publish this final volume soon. In the meantime, here is a excerpt to serve as a preview. This portion of the book highlights the imperatives of resilience in local food systems. Enjoy!

---

In the introduction to Agrarianism in American Literature (1969), M. Thomas Inge identifies key tropes of agrarianism to include religion (farmer reliance upon God and nature), romance (redemption through natural harmonies), and reciprocity (mutuality of healthy rural communities). These elements have long been expressed in art and literature and inform present considerations of rural challenge and environmental sustainability. To others, like novelist-historian Saul Bellow, the rural American experience “has had a long history of overvaluation,” with notions of self-reliance and fairness mixed with considerable unhappiness, alienation, and provincial pride. The ubiquity of people’s familiarity with agrarian scenes, labor, and traditions throughout the world since time immemorial is evident in a wide range of artifacts, art, and literature. This vast realm of evidence has rendered aesthetic interpretations of harvest in greatly varied ways. The longstanding popularity of the harvest theme from ancient to modern times, throughout both East and West, has contributed works that range from sublime to exceedingly hackneyed. Yet these attest in the main to a conviction that beauty, cooperative endeavor, and remedies to cultural and environmental threats are moral imperatives.

Cultural anthropologist J. Katarzyna Dadak-Kozicka observes that since time immemorial harvest “was essentially the purpose of existence,” and that field labors had a latent contemplative and spiritual dimension commemorated through art and ritual. A century ago journalist Alfred Henry Lewis offered a sobering practical corollary: “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” The unprecedented pace of social change since industrialization has shifted populations from the countryside to cities and distanced human connections to nature. For many generations farm work has required intimate knowledge of natural systems and long hours of hard physical work whether using human, animal, or mechanical power. These demands have fostered improved tillage methods to increase crop yields and ingenious labor-saving inventions. But such developments have inexorably if irregularly distanced populations from their fundamental reliance on the wellbeing of the land.

The term “harvest” has often been invoked as a quaint synonym for agrarian bounty or some distant ingathering of crops. Throughout the course of civilization, however, harvest has determined sufficiency or want, been the subject of endless anxious speculation throughout the seasons, and in many times has been a matter of life or death. “Give us this day our daily bread.” British scholars note significant social dislocation and political instability associated crop failures in England (e.g., 1481-1482, 1555-1556, 1596-1597), which were usually caused by late rains and resulted in yields of less than 50% of normal production. Periodic “harvest dearths” of such magnitude have been a significant factor in human migrations. In modern times nations have established storage facilities and enacted multilateral policies to ensure food supply resiliency. Yet annual harvests remain the heartbeat of national economies in the twenty-first century and are increasingly at risk from climate change, centralization of agribusinesses, and political instability.[1]

In continental and global contexts imperialism originated, and endures, in the quest for the most coveted natural resource—harvested foods. Various ideologies have been formed since ancient times to justify the conquest. Substantial Roman grain ships transported wheat from Egypt, North Africa, and Sicily; medieval European traders tapped the fertile Great Hungarian Plain, Rhine-Mosel Valley, Great Hungarian Plain, and Ukraine’s “Black Earth” district, while rural colonizers in the modern era transformed the American heartland, Argentine pampas, and western plains of Australia’s New South Wales. Populations of many contemporary societies are preoccupied with various commercial and secular endeavors and take a dependable and diverse food supply for granted. But this confidence belies serious risks, and public concern has been expressed in recent sustainability movements and examinations of exploitive geopolitics.

[1] J. Dadak-Kozicka, “Long-sounding Notes and Ornamentation as Characteristic Qualities in Musical Expression in Slavic Harvest Songs,” in P. Dahling, 2009:97. Dadak-Kozicka’s insightful research which observes the distortion of festive and ritual harvest songs by Eastern European socialist regimes after the Second World War is based in part on research described in Eugenia Jagiełło-Łysiowa’s authoritative Elementy Styló Życia Ludności Wiejskiej (Elements of the Lifestyles of the Rural Population, 1978). On the grain trade of the ancient world see Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis, 1989. Concerns regarding modern-day food security due to global warming and geopolitics are explored in Thane Gustafson, Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change (2022), and Karl A. Scheuerman, “Weaponizing Wheat: How Strategic Competition with Russia Could Threaten American Food Security,” Joint Forces Quarterly 111 (October 2023).

‘Grain Forward’ with Palouse Heritage Grains & The History of Grain Exploration

Palouse Heritage was recently featured on the increasingly popular Foraging and Farming blog. Foraging and Farming author, Robin Bacon, shares stories about agriculturists and producers doing extraordinary things for our food system. We are honored and proud to have Robin write about us in order to spread awareness of the goodness of heritage grains.

Robin’s blog post explains how Palouse Heritage has revived the legacy of grain farming that originally came to the Pacific Northwest from the old world via the Hudson’s Bay Company. She also explains how we have partnered with other members of our local and regional food system to build a resilient model the delivers amazing flavors while prioritizing environmental and human health. Please take a moment to read Robin’s blog post about Palouse Heritage here.

Heritage Grains Play an Essential Role in National and Global Security

Title page of Karl’s paper in Joint Force Quarterly

Here at Palouse Heritage, we are serious about our commitment to revive and establish heritage/landrace grains in our local food systems. Among the many important reasons we are committed to this cause is the critical role heritage grains play in national and global security. One of our team and family members, Karl Scheuerman, recently wrote a paper related to this topic. The paper ended up winning first place in the annual Secretary of Defense National Security Essay Competition. As a result, it was just published in the latest issue of Joint Force Quarterly by National Defense University Press, a premier global security and military studies journal. The digital version will be out soon, but in the meantime, the PDF version is available here. (Karl’s essay begins on pg 34 of that PDF.)

To summarize, the paper dives into overlooked aspects of our food system vulnerabilities here in the U.S. within the context of global strategic competition. For your convenience, here is the introduction:

In the history of warfare, belligerents have often targeted food supplies to force opponents into submission. However, in America’s wars over the last century, threats to domestic food security were minimal. In many ways, the U.S. enjoyed insulation from combat conditions overseas that could have otherwise disrupted the country’s ability to feed itself. Complacency in relative isolation from disruptive food shocks is no longer a luxury the U.S. can afford. We are now in an era of increased globalization, where food supply chains span the oceans. In addition, America faces the renewed rise of strategic competition as China and Russia seek to replace U.S. power across the globe. Given these new realities, timely evaluation of potential vulnerabilities to American food production is necessary.

Among rising strategic competitors, Russia has explicitly demonstrated a clear willingness to target food systems. In their current war against Ukraine, the Russian military has relentlessly attacked wheat supplies and production. Yet despite the critical importance wheat plays as the foremost American dietary staple, its production is indeed vulnerable to disruption should Russia choose to do so. While a full-scale conventional war with Russia is unlikely due to nuclear deterrence, the Kremlin has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to disrupt foreign interests over the last several years, from election interference to trade wars. Targeting the U.S. wheat industry could become another preferred option for the Kremlin to wage adversarial competition at a level below the threshold of armed conflict. Given the emerging global security environment, the U.S. government should re-evaluate current policies to ensure the resilience of the wheat industry against this threat.

Included in the paper’s conclusions and recommendations is the following:

Landraces can and have been preserved in seed banks, which is worthwhile, but there are limitations in preserving them this way. Landraces are heterogeneous, meaning that individual specimens of the plant’s spikes stored in banks do not necessarily possess all the genetic diversity in the landrace variety. In addition, most biologists agree that active cultivation of landraces is essential to preserve cultivation knowledge. Given these circumstances, the USDA should find ways to collaborate with American farmers and researchers to incentivize and ensure sufficient production levels of landrace wheats.

We hope that our efforts here at Palouse Heritage will help build and restore much needed resilience in our local food systems to mitigate the threats mentioned in the essay. Thanks so much for your support as we strive to do so!

Reflections on Summer 2023

Greetings blog readers. It was another active summer for us here at Palouse Heritage. We also noticed several other interesting updates that are relevant to our mission of re-establishing heritage grains into our food systems using regenerative practices, so we wanted to highlight a few.

First, Ali Schultheis and other friends of ours at Washington State University announced their Soil to Society pipeline project. The initiative researches strategies necessary to reinvigorate our food system with higher quality, more nutritious whole grain-based foods and making them affordable to all levels of society. We certainly applaud that cause. A very cool aspect to the work is what our friends at WSU’s Bread Lab are doing with the Approachable Loaf Project:

“an affordable, approachable, accessible whole wheat sandwich loaf.” For a loaf to be considered an Approachable Loaf, it must be tin-baked and sliced, contain no more than seven ingredients, and be at least 60-100% whole wheat. It must also be priced at under $8 a loaf, setting it apart from other whole grain, artisan loaves.

Read more about the entire Soil to Society project here.

Another important happening from this past summer was that the respected scientific journal Nature published a paper measuring harmful environmental impacts from agricultural pesticides leeching into ecosystems and freshwater resources:

Of the 0.94 Tg net annual pesticide input in 2015 used in this study, 82% is biologically degraded, 10% remains as residue in soil and 7.2% leaches below the root zone. Rivers receive 0.73 Gg of pesticides from their drainage at a rate of 10 to more than 100 kg yr−1 km−1.

The journal paper is located here. The findings reiterate the importance of our values, which include truly sustainable and regenerative farming practices for the sake of soil and environmental health.

Last but certainly not least, harvest 2023 at our Palouse Colony Farm was a success. Andrew and team had a great crop in spite of low moisture conditions throughout our region. The combination of our farm’s healthy soil along with our hearty landrace grains (and Andrew’s farming talents!) shielded us from the environmental circumstances that significantly reduced average yields around us. Enjoy some photos from harvest, including one of Andrew’s son kneading dough from our grains. Artisan baker in the making!!

Pendleton’s Umatilla County Museum and the Runquist Brothers

“Save the best for last,” the saying goes, and what a pleasant surprise to find on the last day of our cross-country expedition one of the finest agricultural exhibits we had seen anywhere in the country. Pendleton, Oregon, is best known for the annual “Stampede” rodeo held there for over a century. But grain has been grown in the area far longer—reaching back to nineteenth century Hudson Bay Company trader days. The remarkable story of the region’s agricultural heritage is the subject an impressive new exhibit at the city’s Umatialla County Historical Society’s Heritage Station Museum where we were hosted by tour coordinator Shannon Gruenhagen.

The museum’s substantial “Umatilla Gold” exhibit showcases numerous aspects of grain production with special emphasis on agricultural innovations. But among the featured treasures is the remarkable art of Portland artist brothers Arthur (1891-1971) and Albert (1894-1971) Runquist. They both attended the Art Students League in New York in the early Thirties and returned to the Northwest where they shared a studio and painted scenes laden with social commentary on the experiences of minorities and laborers. Arthur, who began working for the Federal Arts Program in 1935, was once severely beaten for his socialist leanings. He painted numerous landscapes including the richly colored Early Oregon (1941) mural as a state Federal Arts Program commission for Pendleton High School on which he was assisted by the brothers’ “self-described sister” and fellow activist Martina Gangle (1906-1994). The immense painting includes a substantial harvest scene that shows unsmiling field hands resting amidst the stubble in the foreground of a passing threshing machine while other workers stack grain sacks on a truck. A red elevator rises in the distance against a range of barren hills and the pensive pose of the central figure casts a mood of resilience amidst despair upon the idyllic landscape. The harvest scene, now framed in three panels with other sections of the mural, were salvaged during renovation at the school for exhibition at the Pendleton museum.

Although still in the throes of the Great Depression, most Northwest farmers had long since made the transition to mechanized farming. Only one large farm along the lower Columbia River route as late as the 1940s still used animal power to pull the combine behemoths. George Wagenblast of Dufur, Oregon, harvested rugged slopes near the mouth of the Deschutes and could not bear to part with his beloved team of twenty-seven mules. But times were changing and in 1941 they would make their last appearance before being sold for wartime service by the U. S. Army for about $45 a head. (He had paid $175 apiece in 1929). Comparing New Deal era and twenty-first-century themes in public art and critical discourse indicates a modern trend away from intellectual consideration of the land and its toiling masses who feed the world. Of over 45,000 entries in the most recent edition of the authoritative thirty-four-volume Grove Encyclopedia of Art (2011), for example, no subject headings are included for agrarian, agriculture, rural, or rustic.

Arthur Runquist, Early Oregon Harvest Panels (1941)

New Deal Art Project Mural, Pendleton, Oregon, High School

Relocated to the Umatilla County Historical Society Museum, Pendleton

“Umatilla Gold” Exhibit Panel

To be sure, countless numbers of regional artists and authors continue to create important interpretive works. Their enduring appeal is evident in the listings of agency websites like Saatchi Art and Mutual Art that feature hundreds of contemporary harvest-themed works and in exhibits like we found in Pendleton. Israeli historian Yuval Harari, author of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015), suggests that the pace of technological innovation is increasingly associated with the volume of personalized digital postings that threaten shared values that have long knit cultural identities and connected peoples to landscapes. Such preoccupation, Harari asserts, not only increasingly distances people from employable skills, but risks humanity’s wellbeing by neglecting regard for land care and sustaining social values. Hats off to the dedicated folks who affirm timeless agrarian values in places we visited this summer like Mt. Vernon and Steele’s Tavern, Virginia; the Spanish colonial missions from Texas to Arizona, Springville, Utah; Aberdeen, Idaho; and Pendleton, Oregon. Washington (D. C.) to Washington …nice to be back home!

Amazing Aberdeen (Idaho) and the National Cereal Grains Collection

Nearing the end of our cross-country road trip from the east coast to home in the Inland Northwest (see blog posts immediately prior to this one), we drove through Aberdeen, ID. Since 1988 the small southeastern Idaho community of Aberdeen has been home to the USDA’s National Small Grain Collection that contains one of the world’s largest seed banks for wheat, barley, oat, rice, rye, and other small grain germplasm as well their various wild relatives. The location was chosen because of the University of Idaho’s long history of agricultural extension research nearby, the region’s favorable growing conditions, and proximity to irrigation. Special thanks to Chad Jackson, director of UI’s Research and Extension Center in Aberdeen for providing information on the facilities.

The advent of widespread use of grains as a food staple can only be estimated, but archaeological evidence indicates humans in eastern Africa mixed crushed primitive wheats and barleys with water to form a nutritious gruel several hundred thousand years ago. The 23,000-year-old Ohalo II site on Israel’s Sea of Galilee’s southwest shore has yielded flint and bone sickles and primitive grinding tools with remnants of wild emmer wheat, barley, and oats that supplemented the omnivorous diets of area Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands. Wild cereals reluctantly surrendered their dense nutrition through millennia of human ingenuity requiring the sophisticated mastery of elemental forces—stone for cutting and grinding, water for mixing and kneading, and fire for cooking. Use of heated stones, with embers, and in other ways enabled the roasting of grains to enhance flavors and led to primitive breadmaking. But the revolutionary advent of fire-resistant earthenware pots in the Middle East by the eighth millennium BC fostered a significant advancement in food supply, culture, and population growth. Grains boiled in water made possible a savory array of pottages, soups, and stews, with the softened food especially benefiting the very young and elderly. No culinary advance since the invention of earthenware has had such salutary effects on cooking methods.

Cultivation of cereal grains has been integral to humanity’s advance since time immemorial and was undertaken independently at several times and places throughout the prehistoric Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Development of agriculture may be said to be humanity’s relentless quest to recreate environmental conditions that gave rise to our species. Cereals, named for the Roman goddess of fertility, Ceres, are not only nutritious but also adaptable to a wide range of climates and soil conditions. The ancestral range of cereals stretched along the Fertile Crescent from the Upper Mesopotamian-Anatolian slopes of southeastern Turkey, eastward across Transcaucasia to Kashmir and south to Egypt and Ethiopia. This vast region is notable for long, hot summers and mild, moist winters which were ideal for the emergence of large-seeded wheat, rye, and other grains along the alluvial shores of lakes, streams, and springs. These became the principal foods that fueled human settlement and expansion throughout the world.

Wild Einkorn and Wild Barley growing on the Karaca Dağ Plain

USDA National Small Grains Germplasm Research Center Photographs

“Amber Eden” Heritage Hard White Wheat

Palouse Colony Farm near Endicott, Washington (July and August 2023)

Grain cultivation and replenishment of soils by annual flooding coincided with animal husbandry as villagers sought to prevent creatures of horn and hoof from damaging grain fields by domesticating them for food and labor. Dispersion of cereals by wind, animals, and other natural processes in prehistoric times was inexorable if slow—perhaps a thousand yards per year on average. Successive plant selections by early agro-pastoralists and discovery of tending operations (seeding, watering, manuring) led to earlier and more uniform maturing stands of protein-rich grains with characteristics unique to each region. These developments began the Neolithic “Revolution” along the Mesopotamian wetlands approximately 11,000 BC that developed over three millennia. Crop production and processing represented key cultural breakthroughs that led to settlements with fields, gardens, and livestock. This led over time to food surpluses and transition from unowned open commons to fixed residence sedentary “homelands,” cities, territorial states—and “civilization.”

Incredible Springville and Its Art

Next stop of agricultural interest on our summer road trip was Springville, Utah. Founded in 1937, Springville’s acclaimed Museum of Art Soviet and Russian Collection holdings are among the nation’s most extensive for rural subjects that include numerous harvest scenes painted in the 1890s by members of the Church of Latter-day Saints Paris Art Mission. I thank docent Judy Mansfield for helpful information on the remarkable story of the museum’s vast holdings. Springville’s Soviet and Russian Collection began unexpectedly in 1989 when museum director Vern G. Swanson first embarked on a series of trips to the USSR on behalf of the Grand Central Art Gallery Education Association. Swanson met Russian artist Vladimir I. Nekrasov (1924-1998) of Moscow’s Surikov Art Institute who introduced him to important works of Russian Expressionism and Social Realism that led to a major exhibition at Springville in October 1990 and eventual artwork purchases for the museum.

Springville Art Museum; Springville, Utah

Mahlon Young, The Farm Worker (1938)

Successive assaults upon the Soviet Union’s rural populace in the 1920s and ‘30s involved Stalin’s brutal campaigns to collectivize agricultural lands and against religion that led to widespread violence and famine. Millions of peasants perished or were displaced from their native villages through the imposition of these policies to abolish private property and modernize the economy. Russia remained a major producer of grain until this period which witnessed the expropriation of commodities from landed peasants (kulaks) who had withheld harvests in order to boost prices. Stalin’s push to industrialize the country at all costs required the provisioning Soviet cities, agricultural mechanization, the mass murder and exile of kulaks, and the exodus of vast numbers of younger rural residents to urban areas. The impact of these forces was devastating to traditional Russian village life and crop production. The nation was plunged further into cataclysm after war with Germany commenced in 1941.

As people and landscapes suffered, authors and artists sought memory for solace as well as lament. The glorification of communist principles through state-sanctioned Socialist Realism governed official Soviet art and literature from the 1930s to 1980s. Muscular representations of urban and rural life that lauded labor and socialist ideals generally characterized the approach, but later strains featured honest views of everyday life reminiscent of the French Impressionists and Taos Expressionists. Marx had viewed artists and writers as valued members of an intellectual vanguard promoting revolutionary change. Leon Trotsky later wrote in Literature and Revolution (1924) that their insights revealed the nature of society and if freely expressed would help guide the revolutionary struggle. Stalin, however, had no tolerance of art for art’s sake. His authoritarian policies sought conformity and denigrated individuality—the basis of creativity.

Konstantin Topuridze, People’s Friendship “Golden Sheaf” Fountain (1954)

Exhibition of Economic Achievements, Moscow; Wikimedia Commons

Unless about earlier periods or other places, Soviet depictions of internal discontent and tragedy were forbidden in favor of sentimentalized worker characterizations of the proletarian dream. The character of Soviet monumental art was famously exemplified in Vera Mukhina’s 80-foot steel sculpture Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer (1936) that was built to crown the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Plated in radiant chrome-nickel, the massive female figure designed by Mukhina (1889-1953) grasps a sickle alongside her hammer-wielding companion in striding poses that symbolized the nation’s aspirations. After the Paris fair, the sculpture was relocated to the entrance of Moscow’s sprawling All-Union Agricultural Exposition on the city’s north side where substantial halls showcased numerous aspects of crop, livestock, and food production. Architect Konstantin Topuridze (1905-1977) designed the enormous Golden Sheaf (People’s Friendship) Fountain (1954) as one of the park’s centerpieces that features a towering grain sheaf encircled by three colored glass cornucopias and sixteen bronze statues of young women who symbolized the Soviet republics. (In 1959 the complex’s name was changed to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements and has come to include a grandiose amusement park, year-round trade shows, concert hall, and pavilions featuring space exploration and technological advancements.)

Idealized paintings of country life like Arkady Plastov’s Harvest Festival (1937) and Field after Harvest—Sheaves (1954) by Yuri Kugach show bountiful fields and smiling brigades of kolkhoz (collective farm) laborers clad in red neckerchiefs and head scarves enthusiastically driving farm equipment or tending threshing operations. Plastov, born to a family of icon painters near Simbirsk on the middle Volga, also painted works like Harvest (1945) and Spring (1954) that risked official condemnation given his Impressionistic renderings of commonplace scenes devoid of political sentiment. Harvest is a discomforting view of an aged reaper sharing a meal in the field with three children scarcely old enough to shoulder such responsibilities. Completed in the last year of a war that had inflicted enormous suffering throughout Europe, the scene also inspires appreciation for the home front brigades of women, children, and the elderly who labored for years to sustain soldiers and civilians. Plastov’s dynamic, colorful Haymaking (1945) shows a shirtless teen flanked by two elderly men and a woman who cut grass near a copse of birch trees.

Kugach, who settled in the Tver countryside after the war, went on to establish the Moscow River School in 1974 to revive the dramatic style of Repin, Levitan, and other Russian Realists. Ambidextrous painter Nikita Fedosov (1939-1992), Yuri Kugach’s nephew, became a prominent member of the group and painted numerous country scenes including Last Rays and Overcast Field (1966). Muscovite Victor Ivanov studied with Kugach at Moscow’s Surikov Institute of Art in the late 1940s and in the 1960s became a leading member of the Avant Garde Severe Style that depicted the grim austerity of post-war Soviet life in opposition the naïve depictions of Socialist Realism. Artists like Ivanov risked establishment censure but painted throughout the Khrushchev reform era in ways that recalled the 1910s Futurism of Kazmir Malevich and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Ivanov painted numerous harvest scenes like Harvesting near Ryazan, Men Resting at Harvest, and Women Harvesting (1965). These spare, balanced compositions in irregular blocks of olive, mustard yellow, and chestnut contrast rural toil with the rustic beauty of the Russian countryside.

Dmitry I. Slobodin, Untitled Donbas Harvest Scene (1982)

Gouache on paper, 17 ¼ x 22 inches

Columbia Heritage Collection

A native of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, Dmitry I. Slobodin (1929-2005) graduated from the Art College of Lugansk and became a master of Impressionistic palette-knife paintings in tempura and oil earth tones that depict the quiet beauty of his native land while resisting the artificiality of the regime’s officially sanctioned Socialist Realism. Slobodin’s untitled Donbass Harvest (1982) shows mottled field rows of tawny cream with shadowed forest greens beneath a gleaming orange ribbon of setting sun. At left far in the distance beyond a darkened tree-lined swale one can almost hear the hum of a late model Rostelmash self-propelled combine throwing a roiling cloud of yellow-white chaff. The red machine appears to be opening up a field of ripened grain at day’s end near at base of a broad gentle slope in a scene of bounty and peace.