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!

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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).

“Ancient Prayers” — Discing, Planting, Cutting

Contemporary agrarian art and literature offer insightful if variable perspectives on the transformation of rural landscapes and ways of country life. Stories and paintings can be elegiac and abstract as well as hopeful, with expressions of agrarian renewal evident in newfound appreciation for regional heritage and stewardship of the land. These considerations juxtapose values related to the natural world with those of private development and global capitalism. There is little to regret about archaic rural prejudices, grinding aspects of exhaustive dawn to dusk farm labor, and highly erosive tillage practices that once characterized areas like the Palouse. Small town redevelopment efforts are examining in new ways how local stories, specialty crops, and other resources might be shared to better contend with shifting labor patterns and demographic change. Harvest bees and church benefits still aid neighbors in times of special need. At the same time the annual harvest experience requires seasonal urgency, and the instinct for necessary provision unites humanity worldwide through rituals of planting and harvesting and thanksgiving.

Reflecting on contemporary agrarian experience, my longtime friend and novelist Bruce Holbert observes that in places like the Palouse, “God is in the details—turning a wrench, discing the summer fallow, spraying and rod-weeding, planting and cutting.” He considers these to be prayers “of the ancient sort, the ones you offer not for an answer as much as to be heard. Their reward is the opportunity to perform similar acts tomorrow and the next day. Their faith is not invested in an end; it is the opposite, a prayer to continue and in it is a kind of patience with the fates that few outside this place share.” The inhabitants of Holbert’s stories are not portrayed to explore the classic American theme of personal freedom amidst the conformist mainstream. Instead, they seem to take for granted a life of mystery and misery amidst economic hardship and the vagaries of nature, and speak perceptively from deep within as they move about in clouds of uncertainty. Holbert explores the abiding toil and periodic terrors of country life in Hour of Lead (2014), winner of the Washington State Book Award for Fiction, and in other novels and writings. His short story “Ordinary Days,” in which the Mason Hills are cast for the Palouse, features an exploration of rural change and meaning-making.

Nostalgia for some halcyon past contributes to the popularity of rural art but tempered with consideration of what has been lost and what has been gained. These contrasting themes are considerably explored in contemporary photographic art and are the special interest of Pacific Northwesterner John Clement and Don Kirby of Santa Fe. Ambivalent considerations about such trends are expressed in “Palouse” by Lewiston, Idaho, poet William Johnson:

There is always an empty house

by the road at the edge of town,

its windows whiskered with lilac

and letting in rain. Nearby,

a barn drags itself home,

and in May, daffodils trim the yard

against an ocean of wheat

that rolls in on a slow inexorable tide.

The stark, mysterious black-and-white photography of Kirby’s Wheatcountry (2001) shows unpeopled agrarian vistas from Texas to Washington. Essayist Richard Manning writes of the contrast between the imaginative West of the national consciousness—reshaped since settlement and largely uninhabited, and landscapes tended by farmers who contend with the vagaries of weather and maneuver through an array of government programs to provision the masses. Kirby’s monochromatic views bear the titles of nearby locations scarcely known or seen by outsiders, but that conjure memory and meaning to locals. His Palouse series includes Diamond and Lancaster (places where farmers came from miles around to procure seed wheat), Harrington and Pomeroy (home to area flour mills), and the Snake River port of Central Ferry, which remains one of the Northwest’s largest grain exporting terminals.

Having grown up in the vicinity, I immediately recognized Kirby’s “Wheatfield III, Repp Road, Endicott, Washington,” which shows a prodigious stand of ripening wheat cloaking an enormous swirl of sloping summer-fallow beneath a stack of cumulus clouds. The Repp family had the only pool for miles around before the town built one in the 1960s, so kindly taught a generation of us how to swim. The matriarch of the clan is still active at age 104 and her nephew Mike Lowry—our state’s twentieth governor who contributed to normalized US-Russia relations in the 1990s, surely helped harvest that very hill. Trends in the depopulation of the countryside are found throughout the nation, even as affordability of houses in small towns has helped keep some populated with newcomers to sustain local schools, churches, and clubs. Shrinking numbers of farmers remain as vital carriers of intimate knowledge about the land and growing conditions, and of practical skills that keep bringing forth the crops.

Themes of change upon the landscape mixed with agrarian wonder characterized many poems by Pulitzer Prize winning author Howard Nemerov (1920-1991). Although the New York native spent much of his life in academia, he traveled widely through the New England countryside and with publication of his 1955 collection The Salt Garden, Nemerov’s refined, contemplative verse took on more practical tones in defense of the land. Poems like “Midsummer’s Day” and “The Winter Lightning” reflect upon the timelessness of the seasons and consider a consilience with humanity’s ephemeral presence. In “A Harvest Home” an abandoned vehicle stands in a recently harvested field (“So hot and mute the human will / As though the angry wheel stood still / That hub and spoke and iron rim”), while marvelous creatures of the wing appear throughout the day—jays “proclaim” dawn, afternoon crows “arise and shake their heavy wings,” and an owl “complains in darkness.”

Perilous Bounty vs. Golden Wheatfields

As a boy raised between the rural grainland communities of Endicott and St. John, Washington, I was surrounded by first-generation immigrant elders who had been born in Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. I enjoyed listening to their tales of “Old Country” life which seemed in many ways like other-worldly experience with heavy doses of folklore and traditions on the cusp of vanishing. Investigating their stories later introduced me to the remarkable work of British folklorist George Ewart Evans who ever remained hopeful about contemporary smallholder and rural community prospects. He recognized the possibilities of new cooperative relationships by which growers could pool resources to buy machinery and share storage and marketing facilities. He characterized these arrangements as “a return on a higher level to the structure of the Middle Ages.” The situation was not unprecedented in Evans’s view, as he cited the introduction of the heavy Saxon carruca plow to Britain in early medieval times and the enclosure movement as changes that necessitated innovative cooperative practices. The “break” in apprecation of the old ways of labor, thrift, and economy, Evans wrote in the 1960s, “has chiefly been in the oral tradition: a farm-worker of the old school, a horseman for instance, had latterly no apprentice to take up his lore; and the young—the true bearers of the tradition—have in this respect been receiving a speedily diminishing heritage. It is not so much that they are not interested…; they have now so few points of reference against which to measure it.”

Mutual dependance among neighbors and community members was more than virtue. It was necessity when harvest-time was essential endeavor and ritual for all able-bodied persons including field laborers, cooks, and craftsmen. The rise of mechanization that has reduced exhausting manual labor and technologies to facilitate communication and transportion will not abide nostalgic appeals to preserve the old ways. Evans characterizes such doomed efforts as “misguided romanticism” that is impossible in practical application and ignorant of the abiding dynamics of rural life through the ages. Aspects of social cohesiveness evident in harvest operations of former days have also diminished an isolated parochialism that limits wider multicultural understandings as well as individual opportunity in life. Moreover, a host of politicial and environmental conditions that threaten the wellbeing of farmers and rural communities cannot be understood apart from participation in global solutions.

Needlepoint Grain and Grapes Altar Kneeler, National Cathedral, Washington, D. C. (2019), Columbia Heritage Collection Photograph

 Public awareness of land stewardship takes on special significance in a day of unprecedented industrial and technological change as world population and pressure for land use continue to grow. The number of farm residents declined during the twentieth century from 42% of the nation’s population in 1900 to just 1% in 2000. After peaking in 1935 at 6.8 million, the number of U. S. farms and ranches fell sharply until the early 1970s and today there are about two million. Moreover, just 5% of farms now produce approximately 75% of the nation’s food supply. Science writers now contribute to a new literary genre of environmental despair in the wake of global warming and food insecurity with such troubling titles as The End of Plenty, Red Sky at Morning, Perilous Bounty, and cultural critic Brian Watson’s big picture Headed into the Abyss. (The phenomenon started with publication of The End of Nature in 1989 by mild mannered Methodist Bill McKibben, who now warns in Falter [2019] of significant disruption to world crop production and decrease in grain protein levels due to climate change.) Contemporary science fiction has likewise shifted in tone from the fantasy upheaval of alien invasions or asteroid impacts to speculative dystopian thrillers.

Books like American-Canadian writer William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020) depict a menacing state of corporate control and online existence substantially disconnected from the natural world. Instead of a single make-believe threat, Gibson’s characters face a convergence of intractable problems exacerbated by climate change, pandemics, and authoritarianism enabled by high tech mass communication. More disturbing if absurdly entertaining are novels by Joy Williams like The Quick and the Dead (2000) and Harrow (2020) in which characters vainly navigate through primal social upheaval in the aftermath of environmental spoliation. Williams’s latest title alludes to the ancient farm implement as cipher for humanity’s relationship to nature, and recalls a passage from Job (39:9-10) about the foolishness of tethering a wild ox to a harrow. This varied literature disdains the arrogance of publically invoked cultural pieties about responsible living. Such stories often invoke ancient myths bearing the common assumption that the wellbeing of humanity is inextricably linked to respect for the natural world’s titanic potential.

Societal expectations for tomorrow are strikingly varied. As a boy I experienced our family’s 1962 cross-state trip from the Palouse Hills to Seattle’s optimistically titled “Century 21” World’s Fair. Visitors were dazzled by exhibits on space travel and consumer abundance. A half-century later Milan, Italy, hosted the 2015 “Feeding the World” Fair with themes related to the problems of food security, sufficiency, and safety. A UN-sponsored session discussed the disturbing flatline of world grain yields since 2000, and how one billion developing world inhabitants were at risk of chronic malnourishment after decades of decline. Medieval era population peaked at approximately 300 million inhabitants but rose to a billion by about 1800, doubled to two billion in 1927, and reached three billion in 1960. Demographers at Milan predicted this exponential growth rate would result in ten billion by 2050 and bring attendant challenges for food resources, species diversity, and stewardship of soil.

Good Scythes, Thresholds, and Eating

Whenever a younger member of the clan mentions being bored I ask if they’ve been to the library lately. While the flood of resources available online is endless, I often find time in our local public library relaxing and more manageable. A vast collection of current periodicals is readily available and since I tend to spend more time reading non-fiction books, I also use trips to the library to scan what fiction works might expand my horizons. Recently I happened upon Jim Crace’s 2013 dystopian novel, Harvest, that transports readers to a sixteenth-century English village to experience a week of celebration, intrigue, and disturbance that marks the end of harvest. Area residents gossip and gather in the barley field but are more concerned with the recent arrival of several vagrants than the momentous events about to engulf them. The story is told from the standpoint of Walter Thirsk, who after residing there for a dozen years is himself a relative newcomer to a place. “We should face the rest day with easy hearts,” he muses, “and then enjoy the gleaning that would follow it, with our own Gleaning Queen the first to bend and pick a grain. We should expect our seasons to unfold in all their usual sequences, and so on through the harvests and the years.”

The strangers who camp nearby are refugees from enclosure of open lands, and their coming coincides with that of a man of uneasy silence the villagers call Mr. Quill for the peculiar instrument he carries for his work: “We mowed with scythes: he worked with brushes and quills. He was recording us, he said, or more exactly marking down our land.” Quill is making a map and compiling numbers, measuring locations of streets, houses, and fields. He informs his rustic hearers that such work is about “improvements” being done on behalf of the manor estate’s absentee heir who is zealous for improvements to enlarge the estate by enclosure and replace fieldworkers with sheep which will also render gleaning obsolete. “We know enough to understand that in the greater world,” Quill explains, “flour, meat, and cheese are not divided into shares and portions for the larder, as they are here, but only weighed and sized for selling.” The old order of Enough is being displaced by More. To be sure, pre-enclosure landscapes were not idyllic spaces since commoners depended on hard labor and the vagaries of the seasons for their welfare. But conditioned by faith and custom, daily anxieties poignantly expressed by Crace were moderated by community fellowship and shared resources from the commons.

One of Kentucky farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry’s first public addresses on trends in consolidation of family farms and land care took place in July 1974, at the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium held in conjunction with Spokane’s “Expo ’74.” The world’s fair was promoted as the first international ecological exposition and Berry’s passionate talk, delivered from scribbled notes on a large yellow pad, included a call for “a constituency for a better kind of agriculture.” The presentation inspired organization of the Northwest Tilth movement for sustainable farming, and became the nucleus of Berry’s best-selling book The Unsettling of American: Culture & Agriculture (1979). 

In his essay “The Good Scythe” (1979), Berry grapples with the meaning of progress in modern times. He recalls buying a “power scythe” for cutting grass on a steep hillside near his home, but soon found that the anticipated advantages of reduced labor were offset by the machine’s temperamental motor and considerable racket. The turning point came when a neighbor showed him an old-fashioned scythe that was comfortable to handle and efficient. “There was an intelligence and refinement in its design that make it a pleasure to handle and look at and think about,” Berry observed, and he promptly replaced the powered machine and gas can with a wooden-handled Marugg scythe and whetstone. Berry does not dismiss mechanical innovation; the scythe, after all, is an improvement on the sickle. But he found the episode to have “the force of a parable” about life, labor, and definitions of progress. He advocates a time-honored approach for judging claims of saved labor and short cuts, and warns against the embrace of technological solutions that tend to bring longer working hours with greater equipment expense, and further move the balance between nature and needs.

Lewiston, Idaho artist W. Craig Whitcomb has painted rural scenes for a half-century in watercolor and acrylic with subject matter ranging from isolated Northwest grain elevators to English thatched cottages and Japanese landscapes. His Amber Waves (2008), finalist for the first annual “H’Art of the Palouse” Banner Competition, shows an immense abandoned grain elevator in vivid rusty reds and blues rising from a field of ripe grain. Vibrant watercolors of Northwest grain and legume fields scenes by Andy Sewell of Viola, Idaho, have appeared on posters for the Pullman-based National Lentil Festival. His dramatic Doubletime Before the Storm (2021) shows the skillful choreography of two John Deere combines moving in tandem with tractor-pulled grain carts in the face of threatening clouds and lightning. Sewell, a graduate in fine arts from the University of Idaho in Moscow, spied the late afternoon scene near his eastern Palouse home. The golden browns and dark shadows of land and sky express Sewell’s appreciation for the primal forces of nature that make harvests possible. Other richly colored agrarian landscapes by Sewell include Palouse Summer Glory and Palouse Country Summer.

Roger Feldman, Threshold (2013), Laity Lodge near Leakey, Texas

Courtesy of the Artist

Works by my friend Roger Feldman of Seattle, winner of the 2005 Prescott Award in Sculpture, reflects his study of theology and art education. Raised in the Palouse Country community of Rosalia, Feldman has created large site-specific sculptures in the United States, Canada, and Europe. He meticulously plans each installation by visiting the location to “dream about the possibilities” before rendering a small 3-D scale maquette from mat board before fashioning a larger, more refined model from wood. For Threshold (2013) at Laity Lodge, an ecumenical retreat along the Frio River in Texas’s Hill Country, Feldman conceived of three interconnected chiseled limestone monoliths including a 15-foot-tall tower to represent the three-in-one concept of the Trinity. The work’s title is derived from Hebrew words used in the Old Testament (saph, miptān), a raised beam at the edge of a threshing floor, to signify the boundary between the outside world and sacred space for contemplation and worship.

Tradition and innnovation have presented cultural tensions since the dawn of civilization, and responsible influence from each has contributed to humanity’s wellbeing. Like van Gogh paintings of gleaners and reapers with factory smokestacks on the horizon, agrarian fine art and literature foster better understandings of tensions that involve emotion and reason, and local and universal values. Among other recent developments in grain production, the advent of minimal tillage operations using specialized power equipment has greatly reduced soil erosion on Amercan farms while increasing yields. The emerging New Agrarianism of the twenty-first century moves beyond nostalgic romanticism to moderate use of industrial energy within the context of natural systems for soil fertility. Wise approaches to innovation respect stewardship of land and the longterm wellbeing of others. Duke Divinity School environmental theologian Norman Wirzba writes of a New Agrarian ethic that honors modern science as well as ancient religious appreciation for the transformative mystery of soil, water, and grain for human sustenance. Implicit acknowledgement is also made of fair compensation for farmers and other workers. “How we make bread, how we share and distribute it, are of profound moral and spiritual significance,” he writes in Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (2011). “[E]very loaf presuppposes decisions that have been made about how to configure the social and ecological relationships that make bread possible.”

Tim Dearborn of Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Taste & See: Awakening our Spiritual Senses (1996) tells of Jesus’ reference to bread in the context of material well-being and spiritual strength. During his temptation in the Wilderness (Luke 4:4), Jesus quotes the familiar Old Testament passage, “[M]an does not live by bread alone” (Deuteronomy 8:3), which recognizes legitimate needs for “daily bread” physical sustenance (Matthew 6:11) provided through divine provision and sacrifice. Sharing food and faith goes hand in hand with prayer (“grace”) and communion with family and friends for the vital, senuous experience of daily feasting. In this way, meals can transform mundane consumption into enriching spiritual experience that honors grains, greens, and other foods, but recognizes their material essence, cultivation, harvest, and preparation as rooted in meaningful service. The tragedy of religious piety is not materialism Dearborn writes, “but that in a particular way we are not materialistic enough.” By dividing aspects of human existence into sacred and secular realms, one can also render possessions, physical needs, and the land into domains separate from their divine source and protection.

Frustrations with equipment repair and long hours of solitary fieldwork may appear scarcely related to religious faith. But farmers and other members of St. Macrina’s Episcopal Church near San Francisco regularly meet to share the challenges of twenty-first-century farming with area millers, bakers, brewers, and consumers.  All contribute perspectives on grain as a “community crop” and how each group can participate in consequential efforts to strengthen cultural ties and serve as stewards of the land. In 2015, St. Macrina co-founder and Agricultural Chaplain Elizabeth DeRuff established The Bishop’s Ranch Field on Russian River Valley church property near Healdsburg, California. Young and old gather there throughout the year to plant, till, and harvest heritage grain that is milled for communion bread and distributed throughout the diocese. “We want to see local farmers succeed and be part of local communities,” explains Rev. DeRuff, “and to learn with them about ‘belonging’ as well as ‘having.’”

Although based in Baltimore, landscape artist Katherine Nelson has regularly traveled cross-country since 2001 to the Palouse’s undulating grainlands. Her fluid charcoals and dye sublimates capture the summertime chiaroscuro of swirling slopes, saddles, and swales laden with wheat, barley, and legumes. Nelson has also contributed to Oregon State University’s Art About Agriculture program and to Glen Echo, Maryland’s Yellow Barn Gallery exhibitions. She traces threads of her fascination with the region to her diplomat father’s interest in Turkish rugs: “I remember their luxuriant textures and shapes which influenced my affection for rolling landscapes. The Palouse is a tapestry of woven connections among seasons, fields, and people. The effect is thoroughly spiritual and provides a place of reflection, solace, and beauty that overcomes the noise of the outside world.” To emphasize the rhythmic effects of light for line and shadow, Nelson works entirely in black-and-white which evokes heightened awareness of layering, texture, and movement. “My ‘Portraits of the Palouse,’” she explains, “are metaphors for the human prospect. ‘Harvests’ to me are exhibitions that depict the land as hallowed space through views of heritage farm architecture and landscape vistas. Implicit rural values relate to the natural environment, hard work, and community, and are relevant anywhere.”

Crace, Berry, and Progress in Modern Times

Jim Crace’s 2013 dystopian novel, Harvest, transports readers to a sixteenth century English village to experience a week of celebration, intrigue, and disturbance that marks the end of harvest. Area residents gossip and gather in the barley field but are more concerned with the recent arrival of several vagrants than the momentous events about to engulf them. The story is told from the standpoint of Walter Thirsk, who after residing there for a dozen years is himself a relative newcomer to a place. “We should face the rest day with easy hearts,” he muses, “and then enjoy the gleaning that would follow it, with our own Gleaning Queen the first to bend and pick a grain. We should expect our seasons to unfold in all their usual sequences, and so on through the harvests and the years.”

National Colonial Farm, Piscataway Park, Accokeek, Maryland

The strangers who camp nearby are refugees from enclosure of open lands, and their coming coincides with that of a man of uneasy silence the villagers call Mr. Quill for the peculiar instrument he carries for his work: “We mowed with scythes: he worked with brushes and quills. He was recording us, he said, or more exactly marking down our land.” Quill is making a map and compiling numbers, measuring locations of streets, houses, and fields. He informs his rustic hearers that such work is about “improvements” being done on behalf of the manor estate’s absentee heir who is zealous for improvements to enlarge the estate by enclosure and replace fieldworkers with sheep which will also render gleaning obsolete. “We know enough to understand that in the greater world,” Quill explains, “flour, meat, and cheese are not divided into shares and portions for the larder, as they are here, but only weighed and sized for selling.” The old order of Enough is being displaced by More. To be sure, pre-enclosure landscapes were not idyllic spaces since commoners depended on hard labor and the vagaries of the seasons for their welfare. But conditioned by faith and custom, daily anxieties were moderated by community fellowship and shared resources from the commons.

Kentucky farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry’s book A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (1998) is rooted in lifelong experience on the land and considerations of beauty, hard work, crops, and the natural world:

                  Harvest will fill the barn; for that

                  The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

                  And yet no leaf or grain is filled

                  By work of ours; the land is tilled

                  And left to grace. That we may reap…. (No. X [1979])

One of Berry’s first public addresses on trends in consolidation of family farms and land care took place in July, 1974, at the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium held in conjunction with Spokane’s “Expo ’74.” The world’s fair was promoted as the first international ecological exposition and Berry’s passionate talk, delivered from scribbled notes on a large yellow pad, included a call for “a constituency for a better kind of agriculture.” The presentation inspired organization of the Northwest Tilth movement for sustainable farming, and also became the nucleus of Berry’s best-selling book The Unsettling of American: Culture & Agriculture (1979). 

Barn and Fence Rails, National Colonial Farm

In his 1979 essay, “The Good Scythe,” Berry grapples with the meaning of progress in modern times. He recalls buying a “power scythe” for cutting grass on a steep hillside near his home, but soon found that the anticipated advantages of reduced labor were offset by the machine’s temperamental motor and considerable racket. The turning point came when a neighbor showed him an old-fashioned scythe that was comfortable to handle and efficient. “There was an intelligence and refinement in its design that make it a pleasure to handle and look at and think about,” Berry observed, and he promptly replaced the powered machine and gas can with a wooden-handled Marugg scythe and whetstone. Berry does not dismiss mechanical innovation; the scythe, after all, is an improvement on the sickle. But he found the episode to have “the force of a parable” about life, labor, and definitions of progress. He advocates a time-honored approach for judging claims of saved labor and short cuts, and warns against the embrace of technological solutions that tend to bring longer working hours with greater equipment expense.

A Mystic Sheaf and the Origins of Farming

Harvest season back home in the Palouse Hills often brings to mind bygone high school days. Trips from our Palouse Colony Farm to nearby Endicott lead past the school where I attended all twelve years, and where I served as principal in the 1990s. One of the great privileges of my education career was to return as a colleague with Mrs. Louise Braun, who had been my high school English teachers. She was a woman of capacious mind with expectations that students read and appreciate Shakespeare and Robert Frost with the same enthusiasm shown for sporting events. A native of tiny Viola in the Idaho-Washington Palouse borderlands, Mrs. Braun guided our uncharted literary journeys across time and place with the peculiar incentive—highly controversial among faculty and parents, that once a week we could spend class time reading Farm Journal, Field & Stream, or any other periodical of our own choosing. “Reading is the main thing,” she would say in the context of expanding young minds. 

To my mind, our most formidable high school read was the epic poem Beowulf through which we battled for many days to make sense of alliterative Old English expressions that related ancient Scandinavian lore. This was a time before Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings had ushered in a resurgence of interest in classical fantasy literature. Mrs. Braun’s reminder that many of us had descended from these tribal peoples provided modest encouragement to continue our study of this oldest English long poem. The poem’s opening lines in Lesslie Hall’s modern translation, however, invoked intriguing agrarian reference:

Lo! the Spear-Danes’ glory through splendid achievements
The folk-kings’ former fame we have heard of,
How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle.
Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in numbers
From many a people their mead-benches tore.

Queries about Old English “Scyld the Scefing,” which may be translated “Shield Sheafson” or “Scyld of the Sheaf,” provided an remarkable glimpse into mystical realms also described by Tolkien in his legendarium of Middle-earth. The namesakes of the eponymous Scyldings’ (Sköldings) Danish royal house founder in Beowulf are associated with the crucial roles as historical protector of the people (Shield) and as agri-cultural hero (Sheaf). In the mythic past he arrived as a foundling from the west who washed up in a boat on the shore of Jutland’s Old Anglia. The golden child’s head rested on a pillow of grain stalks, and he would grow into a strong and wise ruler who was the ancestor of Beowulf. Like a medieval Triptolemus, Scyld also taught his adopted people the first principles of farming and husbandry. Tolkien further explored aspects this legendary figure who is also mentioned in lesser known works of Old English literature like William Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum (“Deeds of the English Kings,” 1125) and the eighth century Historia Langobardorum (“History of the Lombards”). Tolkien’s imaginative rendition drawn from these several accounts is beautifully expressed in the poem “King Sheave,” published posthumously with “The Notion Club Papers” in Sauron Defeated (1992): 

In golden vessel gleaming water
Stood beside him; strung with silver
A harp of gold neath his hand rested;
His sleeping head was soft pillowed
On a sheaf of corn shimmering palely
As the fallow gold doth from far countries
West of Angol. Wonder filled them. 

Tolkien’s telling, the boy ascended a hill and sang a song of “sweet, unearthly, words in music woven strangely.” His hearers marveled at sounds miraculously dispelling the darkness and terror that had long gripped the region. From “King Sheave” descended many sons and their nations—Danes and Goths, Swedes and Northmen, Franks and Frisians, Swordmen and Saxons, Swabians and English. In the magnificent Scandinavian epic of Beowulf, Tolkien found a magisterial Anglo-Saxon antecedent of mythic grain king and culture hero skillfully interwoven with dynastic history to form an English national identity.