Palouse Heritage Featured at Spokane’s Farm & Food Expo

Spokane’s second Farm & Food Expo was held November 3-4, 2017, at Spokane Community College where we had gathered last year for what we hope will become an annual affair. Exhibitor booths filled the main hall and sponsors shared a wealth of information on topics ranging from bee culture and wool production to irrigation systems. Having done my stint in the Air Force back in the 1970s and with son Karl a major in the Air National Guard, I couldn’t help but notice the “Vets on the Farm” booth and learned about the Spokane organization’s good work transitioning returning members of the armed forces back into civilian life through opportunities in farming and ranching. And since a discount was available to vets for their bright red flag-embossed hats, I just had to pick one up.

Brother Don Scheuerman and I had been invited to participate on Saturday by book-ending the day’s activities with a morning session devoted to “Growing Heritage and Landrace Grains,” and closing out the program with a final session titled “Soil Biome and Gut Biome: The Restorative Powers of Heritage Grains.” Because it was snowing to beat the band by 4:00 p.m. and getting dark, I wasn’t expecting much of a crowd so was pleased to find standing-room only. Our morning session covered basic information on terminology, agronomy, and marketing of specialty grains. We pointed out that “heritage” and “heirloom” have become a kind of catch-all word for “old,” but that the USDA uses the term to mean any variety that was raised before the 1950s. Since grain hybridization was introduced in the late 1800s, that means many hybridized varieties would be considered heritage by that definition. (In the book Harvest Heritage: Agricultural Origins and Heirloom Crops of the Pacific Northwest [WSU Press, 2013] I coauthored with Alex McGregor, we describe the contributions of legendary plant geneticist William Spillman who essentially founded the science of plant hybridization at WSC/WSU in the 1890s.) 

Landrace varieties, however, are what I sometimes call “Grain as God Intended,” since they are pre-hybridized plants that adapted to particular locales by the thousands throughout most of Eurasia before coming to the New World in the 16th century Age of Discovery. Our work these past several years with Palouse Heritage Mercantile & Grain Mill involves the cultivation, milling, and marketing exclusively of landrace grains like Sonoran Gold, Crimson Turkey, Purple Egyptian, and Yellow Breton.

Legendary Spokane Baker-Chef Shaun Thompson-Duffy and his Culture Bread Treasures

The Farm & Food Expo program included presentations by a host of other folks dedicated to local and sustainable food production including our good Spokane friends Joel Williamson, maltster at Palouse Pint (“Rebirth of the Local Malthouse”); Teddy Benson of Palouse Heritage / Grain Shed Brewing (“Brewing with Heritage Grains”); and Shaun Thompson-Duffy of Culture Breads (Old World Breads: From Millstone to Hearth”). Don and I attended all three of these sessions and were reminded why we have long been so impressed by these fellows. The very names of their topics indicate the stirring sea change that is underway in culinary circles across the country, and Joel, Teddy, and Shaun have joined with other prime movers in the region to establish viable connections with local growers of grains and other crops who are interested in stewardship of the land, rural economic renewal, and human health and heritage. 

In our closing session on restorative biomes to improve health and soil, we shared information gleaned from studies in the United States and Europe on heritage grain nutrition. Worth noting are summaries comparing primitive “pre-wheats” like emmer and spelt, landrace varieties like we grow at Palouse Heritage, and modern hybrids. This is a big topic, so stay tuned for the next post!

Palouse Heritage Harvest 2017

This past week we commenced our 2017 Palouse Country heritage grains harvest by working with our longtime friends Joe and Sara Delong at their incredibly beautiful and historic if somewhat remote ranch along the Palouse River about five miles upstream from our Palouse Colony Farm. The Delongs have partnered with us to raise landrace Sonoran Gold wheat, Purple Egyptian barley, and other heritage grains and this past week it was time to commence the annual harvest.

The Delong ranch is well known in our region as the oldest farm in the county and also has the special distinction of being the one continuously owned longer than any other family around. Joe’s frontiersman ancestor, Indiana native Joseph Delong, drove a team of oxen over the Oregon Trail in 1862 and eventually settled in 1869 on the Palouse River where the family farm is now located at the end of long gravel road. I think Great Great Uncle Joe would be proud of his 21st century namesake since he and Sara have worked long hours for many years to be good stewards of the land where they continue to raise grain and livestock in one of the most beautiful parts of the country. Joe is a master mechanic who can keep equipment of any vintage running forever, and in the shadow of immense and rugged basaltic bluffs they share the landscape with deer, golden eagles, and occasionally errant moose and elk.

Palouse Heritage Red Russian Wheat; Delong Palouse River Ranch

I’ve known the Delong family most of my life since they farmed just a few miles from where I was raised. Back in 1980 I interviewed Joe’s father, Ray, who was not only proud of his pioneering past but had also preserved many priceless documents handed down since the farm had been established decades earlier. The journals and account books kept by Joseph, Sr. provide a rare glimpse of life on the Palouse frontier during its earliest years of settlement. The records reveal the kind of self-sufficiency rarely known in our day as he tended a considerable orchard and established a packing house as well as raised grain and livestock. He also established the first store in the vicinity to supply farm families who came later and travelers who passed by on the historic Kentuck Trail.

Joe, Sr.’s journal entries from the late 1800s record information essential to pioneer life under such scribbled headlines as "Smallpox Cure," a concoction of sugar, foxtail, and zinc sulfate, "Recipe for Preserving Green Fruit," and "Grasshopper Poison." Related knowledge of value clipped from early issues of the Walla Walla Statesman and Palouse Gazette was safeguarded between the small, lined pages of his hardboard bound books providing the mathematical formula "To Measure Hay in Ricks," stories about Lincoln and Grant, and favored verse: "Let live forever grow, and banish wrath and strife; So shall we witness here below, the joys of social life." Perhaps to advance social relations with the travelers and neighbors who frequented his place, DeLong also found time to jot down riddles. One favorite of this thinly bearded soul with kindly mien was in rhyme: "I went to walk through a field of wheat, and there found something good to eat. It was neither fat, lean or bone, I kept it till it ran home. (An egg!)”

Pioneer Joe Delong and Colt (c. 1900); Courtesy of Joe and Sara Delong

Apples from the Delong Orchard

Most folks with whom DeLong most often shared such wit and practical knowledge were families of those who later settled near him on the pine covered slopes of the Palouse River Valley. Names frequently appearing in his account books include Ben Davis, Frank Smith, Steve Cutler, Link Ballaine, and E. E. Huntley. These families came to DeLong's store to visit, collect mail, and procure staples, often on credit. DeLong's inventory included eggs, onions, coffee, sugar, and baking powder; soap, sarsaparilla, and tobacco. He also stocked hardware supplies like nails and wire, and such curatives as oil of anise, oil of bergamot, and sulfuric of ether. DeLong and his neighbors spent considerable time building and repairing split rail fences to hold in their livestock, and also experimented with a variety of grains and fruits to determine those best suited to the region’s soils and climate. Joseph also planted hundreds of apple trees that he obtained from Walla Walla nurseries as well as pear, cherry, plum, prune stock, grape vines, and currant bushes. Summer visitors to his store could always expect a good supply of Tall Pippins, Yellow Bells, and Northern Spy as well as soft fruit and vegetables which he sometimes traded for salmon with Indians who seasonally passed along the old trails along the river.

Harvesting Palouse Heritage Scots Bere Barley at Delong’s

Thanks to Joe and Sara’s regard for heritage and health, we were able to complete harvest this past week of our Sonoran Gold soft white and Red Russian soft red wheats which we will soon be transforming into flavorful all-purpose flours. We had a few breakdowns but we’ve come to believe there’s nothing made of metal that Joe can’t repair in short order. Brother Don, nephew Andrew, and I took turns driving truck while Joe did the hard work on top of the combine—a 1959 McCormick combine that hasn’t missed a harvest since 1959! Perhaps the company should send him a new one, though at $650,000 that’s probably not likely. As we were finishing up in a corner of the field I noticed a row of old plum trees along a fence line loaded with dark red fruit. So on my next trip to town I returned with a bucket to retrieve some for Grandma and returned with enough to keep us all in jam and sauce until next year.

The Purple Egyptian Barley Project

Beer and bread. Two staples of history's menu. It is said that agriculture was founded just for the making of these two nutritious vittles. Every corner of the planet had their own ways of doing things, their own flavor profiles. From technique to weather to soil composition, everything that distinguished a given region or artisan from another imparted specific flavor profiles. That is the art and science and terroir. Think of it as "territorial flavors."

Here at Palouse Heritage, we specialize in raising landrace grains (landrace grains being original natural varieties that have been planted and cultivated in such a way that they have naturally and fully adapted to local geography). Enter Purple Egyptian Barley. This is an ancient grain used extensively in the greater Egyptian area thousands of years ago. It was brought to the Inland Northwest and it has since fully adapted to life here, expressing Northwest terroir as a true landrace grain. Palouse Pint, Spokane's only malting facility, has malted a portion of this incredible grain.

From left to right:  the baker (Shaun of Culture Breads), the malter (Joel of Palouse Pint), and the farmer (our own Don Scheuerman)

As a joint effort between Palouse Heritage, maltster Joel of Palouse Pint, Shaun of Culture Breads, and Tom of Bellwether Brewery, together we bring you Spokane's introduction to this NW landrace Purple Egyptian Barley.

The brewer (Tom of Bellwether Brewery)

Every Thursday beginning February 23 through the first week of April, we will bring you a new small batch of a Purple Egyptian variety Bellwether beer and Culture Breads bread. If you come every week there are prizes in store, including a commemorative pint glass and the chance to vote for your favorite beer of the series. The winning beer will be brewed at full capacity and released during Craft Beer Week in May.

Break bread and raise a glass with us each Thursday for the next 7 weeks. Location is Bellwether Brewery at 2019 N Monroe St, Spokane, WA.

Meet the farmer (our own Don Scheuerman), the maltster, the brewer, and the baker. Learn why landrace grains are so important to local economy and how it brings the best terroir to your plate and pint. Hope you can make it. 

Cheers!

Sharing What Palouse Heritage Does

Recently, Palouse Heritage was generously invited to present about our work at the local Rotary chapter in Colfax, WA. We were extremely grateful for the opportunity to share. Our farm manager, Andrew Wolfe, delivered an excellent talk on who Palouse Heritage is, what we do, and why we do it. Here is the an excerpt from his presentation.

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Who We Are

We are Palouse Heritage, a venture aiming toward the reintroduction of landrace grain flours and malts, grown here in the Palouse Country, for health, hearth and heritage. Some here may know the story of the Volga Germans, as some of you are surely kin, and it is difficult for me to say who we are without recalling from where we first came.

In the 18th century Catherine the Great, Tsarina of the Russian Empire, extended an invitation to foreigners to possess, inhabit and cultivate the fertile lands of Southern Russia that would later claim the title of the breadbasket of Europe. Our story follows a number of pioneering families who, considering the opportunity, ventured from their homes near and around Frankfurt Germany to make their new lives in Russia. Here they would fashion their lives much as they did in Germany, doing what they knew best, tending the earth and raising crops. As political instability and religious persecution loomed heavy by the 19th century, these humble farmers looked yet again toward new horizons that, by the 1880's, would lead them to the great northwest.

Led by a vanguard traveling by wagon and rail to Northwest destinations in the 1880s, members of the Ochs, Scheuerman, Kleweno, Litzenberger, Pfaffenroth, Schmick, Helm, Weitz, and other families would find their solace at "The Colony." The Colony, as they fondly referred to it, soon developed into a thriving settlement that provisioned families coming from the Old Country to their new home on the Palouse. Scores of new arrivals stayed while adjusting to life in the new land, and today many thousands of residents in the Northwest and beyond can trace their origins in the country to this time of sanctuary along the placid Palouse. Parents described it as a “Land of Milk and Honey” for children who tended the colony’s dairy herd and raided bee hives along the river. The newcomers used farming methods of medieval origin—long, narrow Langstreifen fields (akin to English furlongs) in three-crop rotations (Dreifelderwirtschaft), a shared “commons” (Almenden) for grazing and gardens, and harvests with sickle and scythe. In 2015, descendants of the Ochs and Scheuerman families reestablished The Colony as Palouse Colony Farm and tend now to the land our ancestors once did.

What We Do

We aspire to capture the sentiment of the "commons" once again in a modern and complex era. Though, before anything can be done, we must first grow grains. At Palouse Colony farm we grow landrace grains or, as I am fond of saying, "we grow the grains God made." These landrace grains are ancient pre-hybridized varieties ("races") of wheat, barley, oats, rye, and other grains which nature has caused to flourish in areas ("lands") throughout the world where they adapted to local environmental conditions. Genetic diversity and natural selection have conditioned these landrace varieties to be remarkably resilient and quick to adapt to new locations. Through often painstaking efforts we have found, reintroduced and caused to flourish many of the landraces which the very progenitors of our blood had grown in the soil of which we are now stewards. Varieties like Palouse Heritage White Lammas, known to history as "Hudson's Bay Wheat," originated as a landrace in the Celitc Aisles and is the original cereal grain of the Pacific Northwest. Palouse Heritage Red Walla Walla is a soft red landrace wheat hailing from Great Britain that was sown and thrived from Walla Walla to the Palouse after 1890. Palouse Heritage Bere Barley is a landrace from the Orkney Islands and the "grain that gave beer it's name." Palouse Heritage Purple Egyptian barley is a hulless, glassy purple barley with its heritage in Egypt and raised by our Russian ancestors in southern Russia. The list goes on. At Palouse Colony Farm we aim to reintroduce the flavorful spectrum of these lovely forgotten varieties along with their tremendous health benefits back onto the northwest dinner table. Through cooperation and partnerships with area malters, millers, bakers, brewers and distillers, we aim to offer our kaleidoscope of grains in the form of healthy flours and delightful beverages, bringing something truly unique to the market place, while tending the land responsibly and sustainably. 

Why We Do It

The pioneers and explorers of our area embraced a sentiment of community, their lives and livelihoods were often predicated by it. The experience of the entrepreneur strays very little from this idea; leaning on friends, neighbors and partners to the end of reciprocal benefit. Borrowing from contemporary agrarian visionary Wendell Berry, having a neighbor is preferable to having his land. In this sense we like to place ourselves in the boots of our pioneer forebears; inviting others of like mind to co-opt in the prospect of mutual success, in the pursuit of “the commons” while sharing common cause in health, community, relationships and sustainability. We revere the memory of things worth remembering and the preservation of things worth preserving. We do it to create sustainable grain economies that seek to respectfully feed body, mind, and spirit.

We do what we do for success, not just for ourselves, but for those around us. We do what we do to make real for others what we have known and what is continually revealed to us; that we live in a remarkable earth with spectacular diversity and creativity—the hallmark of our Creator—and what’s more is that it was meant for us. For health. For hearth. And for heritage. 

Sickles and Sheaves — Farming, Faith, and the Frye (Part 1)

This blog post is part of a series I (Richard) am writing about my past life experiences that helped develop a love and appreciation for agricultural heritage in general and landrace grains in particular. The series is called "Sickles and Sheaves - Farming, Faith, and the Frye" and you can view the other parts of this blog series here.

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My Personal Connection with Landrace Grains

Somewhere in one of the outbuildings on our small Palouse Country farm in southeastern Washington, our parents kept a scythe (pronounced sigh, or sithe) in semi-retirement. The old implement appeared only when barnyard grass and weeds needed to be cleared, or when Dad thought his two sons had unnecessary time on their hands. We didn’t have a tractor-powered sickle mower like some of our neighbors, though a thoroughly rusted reaper-binder from our grandfather’s day rested securely in the branches of a cherry tree on the hillside just above our house. The dilapidated contraption with wooden reel, drive chains, and sprockets was an object of endless boyhood fascination. Although the machine had been abandoned long before Dad took over the farm in the 1940s, he had somehow mastered the elegant art of binding sheaves for decorative use or for us to enter into the Palouse Empire Fair, which to this day still has grain sheaf competition.

Our old scythe’s serpentine handle seemed taller than I stood so was awkward to handle. But Dad could adjust the weathered grips, which he called nibs, and would offer refresher lessons in swath, rhythm, and sharpening before sending my brother or me out to battle formations of wheatgrass and Jim Hill mustard. “There’s a right way, and a wrong way,” was his familiar refrain while demonstrating many tasks like this one for our rural edification, and as if watching some peculiar country dance he showed how to keep the heel down with each measured step to avoid sticking the point of the blade into the ground.

Located between the small rural communities of Endicott and St. John, Washington, our place was deep in the Pacific Northwest’s Palouse Country—a legendary grain district known for steeply rolling hills and a favored destination for landscape photographers from around the world. I suspect farms like ours held in common with many others a peculiar geographic nomenclature necessary for communication about what had happened long before, or what needed to be done with scythe, hoe, or other tool. Far behind the house we had the Huvaluck (Hessian dialect for “Oat Hole,” from Hafer, German “oat”), Windmill Hill, and Spud Draw where our clan had planted potatoes in an endless furrow during the week of Good Friday for at least three generations. The head of the draw led over a narrow hill aptly named The Saddle. With only a half-section, our farm was small even by 1960s standards but there could be no doubt where we might be directed to tend a thistle patch or harrow or rendezvous with the combine to unload grain since so many named features existed on that tussled 320-acre half-section.

Volga German Scything Scene (1768)

Concordia Center for Volga German Studies, Portland, Oregon

Over time I came to understand my father’s and grandfather’s familiarity with the land’s every twist and turn, and eventually my own, in terms that defy analytics. Nature writer Barry Lopez characterizes such natural relationships in Home Ground as “the unembodied call of a place, that numinous voice” when a hill, draw, or untilled sodpatch wildlife sanctuary seems to become “something that knows we are there.” This mystical relationship fosters a deep connection with landscape that predisposes some to feel a kinship of comfort and familiarity with certain other places—in my case the undulating Hessian Vogelsberg district in central Germany, and the steeply rolling Bergseite of southern Russia’s black earth Volga region; places inhabited by my ancestors long ago. People have perceived these forces since time immemorial, and they continue to inspire. The Lake District sustained Wordsworth like Suffolk enlivened Constable, and the Great Plains fed the souls of Willa Cather, Ole Edvart Rølvaag, and Hamlin Garland.

The broad hill rising westward from our house toward the entangled cherry tree reaper was steep enough to accommodate a spacious root cellar attached to our ramshackle porch. The cellar had been built not long after our paternal Russian-born German great-grandparents arrived in the Palouse in the early 1890s, so we were warned to stay out due to threat of collapse from the weight of the ground above. Our elders called these places zemlyanka, Russian for “earth-home,” which likely were successors to the medieval German grubenhaus (“dug-house”) their ancestors had fashioned in Hesse. Our people had lived in such places when first immigrating to Russia from Germany during Tsarina Catherine the Great’s reign 250 years ago. Some even inhabited such dens after arriving in the Pacific Northwest until a proper family home could be built.

The young are disposed to explore, so in our youth we ventured inside the cellar periodically to see dimly lit evidence of life from yesteryear. An exceedingly dusty pituvfka kitchen worktable stood against one wall with two rounded flour bins suspended beneath, and some old glass canning jars remained on wooden shelves. Most had long been empty, but a few held grain safeguarded by our grandparents. Perhaps these were remnants of the Hirsche Brei (“millet porridge” in Hessian) that Dad remembered eating with honey as a boiled wheat breakfast mush in Depression days. I learned later that usu Leut (“our people”) had brought ancient landrace grain seed from Russia’s Volga region and the Ukraine, varieties named for colors of kernels and glumes like Russian “Turkey” Red and Odessa White wheats, Purple Egyptian Hulless barley, and Green Russian oats. Perhaps the cellar had also served as Grandpa’s seed vault.