Remember the Alamo! (and Mission Granaries)

Later in our cross-country road trip this summer, we found ourselves in San Antonio, TX. Beginning in 1718, Franciscan missionaries from New Spain established a cluster of five mission communities among the indigenous Coahuiltecan peoples who lived along the headwaters of the San Antonio River in present Texas. Their efforts were encouraged by colonial Spanish authorities who sought to secure the northern frontier from the influence of French Louisiana. The area’s first of five missions, San Antonio de Valero (more popularly known later as The Alamo), was built at its present location from 1724 to 1727 and consisted of a walled enclosure with church, residences, and granary surrounded by ranches and cropland watered by a carefully constructed acequia (irrigation canal).

Mission San Jose; San Antonio, Texas

Mission San Jose Granary and Original Granary Doors

Mission San Antonio’s granary was one of several substantial rooms located in the northern portion of the spacious convento (later known as the Long Barracks after Mexican forces occupied the location in the 1820s) and is the state’s oldest extant structure. The Franciscans also established Mission San José y San Miguel de Aquayo several miles downstream from Mission San Antonio and built an enormous granary (c. 1747-1752) with vaulted ceiling and flying buttresses to support the thick stone walls that safeguard the annual harvests of wheat, corn, and vegetables. The mission’s nearby acequia-powered grist mill (molino) with horizontal wheel, constructed c. 1794 (rebuilt in 1930) was the region’s first mill. Covering the largest area of the San Antonio River missions, San José became known as “Queen of the Missions” for the church’s resplendent Spanish Baroque architecture and substantial plaza.

Missions San Juan Capistrano and San Francisco de la Espada were founded in 1731 on opposite sides of the river several miles south of Mission San José. Mission San Juan’s granary was completed by 1756 and rebuilt in 1824 on its original foundation as the mission church which functions to the present day. The imposing structure was painted by German-American landscapist Hermann Lungwitz (1813-1891) who studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts before immigrating to the United States in 1850. Lungwitz became known for his many detailed, luminous renderings of Texas Hill Country farms and ranches. Mission Espada’s c. 1762 stone granary was also used as a church in the 1770s and a new storehouse erected on the southwest side of the compound in 1773 to secure the harvests of grain, vegetables, and fruit. The Espada Acequia still carries water to area farmlands and is the oldest feature of its kind in the country.

Cyrus McCormick and the Reaper Revolution

Visiting the McCormick Blacksmith Shop and Forge near Steele’s Tavern, Virginia

The earliest practical reaping machines were introduced in the 1830s by father-son Robert and Cyrus McCormick of Steele’s Tavern, Virginia, Obed Hussey of Cincinnati, and Montgomery County, New York farmer Enoch Ambler. We had the chance to visit the original farm on our summer road trip across the country. The McCormicks fashioned their landmark model with the help of the family’s Black slave, Jo Anderson, in their Walnut Grove Farm’s blacksmith shop and successfully demonstrated in stands of wheat and oats in July 1831. Ambler and the McCormicks secured patents for their models in 1834. These horse-pulled machines featured a reciprocating bar of small sickle sections with separating fingers and reel that could cut up to fourteen to fifteen acres a day and increased output more than tenfold over the cradle scythe method. In the late 1850s brothers William and Charles Marsh, natives of Ontario who had relocated to Illinois, introduced the revolutionary “Marsh Reaper-Binder” than could both cut grain and tie sheaves into bundles. Rights to the Marsh machine were acquired by entrepreneurs William Deering and Elijah Gammon in the early 1870s and established their base of operations in North Chicago.

Informed by a generation of farmer-innovators, men like Hussey and Case, and the McCormicks and Marshes would revolutionize world agriculture. “This magical machinery of the wheatfield solves the mystery of prosperity,” lauded McCormick biographer Herbert Casson in The Romance of the Reaper (1908), and “explains the New Farmer and the miracles of scientific agriculture.” Casson observed with capitalized emphasis, “…[I]t is true that until recently the main object of all nations was to get bread. Life was a Search for Food—a desperate postponement of famine. …Then came King Reaper.”

McCormick, a devout Presbyterian, was also imbued with a keen business sense that would transform his humble Blue Ridge Mountain enterprise into the world’s leading manufacturer of farm equipment based in Chicago from 1847. His improved “Virginia Reaper” model made its European debut at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London which was the first large-scale industrial fair to include foreign exhibitors. A skeptical reporter for the Times jokingly dubbed McCormick’s reaper a “cross between an Astley chariot, a wheel-barrow, and a flying machine.” But in trials conducted that summer on farming estates at Tiptree Heath in Essex and Pusey, Berkshire, an enthused jury recognized that the new inventions would render the scythe as obsolete as the mechanical thresher would the flail. Although Prince Albert would later order two Hussey machines for royal farms, the judges awarded McCormick’s eagle-emblazoned machine its Grand Council gold medal and declared the device “worth the whole cost of the Exhibition.” By 1851 McCormick’s Chicago factory was turning out a thousand reapers a year and by 1859 approximately 50,000 were in use throughout the country. 

Cyrus McCormick 1834 Reaper Model

Cyrus McCormick’s passion for promotion matched his mechanical inventiveness and within a year colorful company advertisements cast his reaper in a scene as if a Roman conqueror appearing before an adoring crowd and bearing the prestigious award above a banner proclaiming it “Best in the World.” The 1853-1856 Crimean War between Great Britain and Russia interrupted export of grain from Ukraine to Europe which boosted commodity prices worldwide. American farmers responded with greater production and the favorable market brought a flood of new orders for improved equipment. McCormick deployed agents across the Midwest and eventually established a vast global network of outlets from London and Odessa to Melbourne and Wellington to sell in the grain districts of Europe and the British and Russian empires.

McCormick continued with Grand Gold Medal recognition at the glittering 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle where Emperor Louis Napoleon expressed special interest in the American’s invention. At the city’s next world’s fair eleven years later, McCormick was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by imperial decree and other Grand Golds came from world fairs in Hamburg and Vienna. Grandiose promotional iconography with these international recognitions would be colorfully featured in company advertising that merged prosperity with ingenuity and gave rise to one of the era’s earliest and most successful transnational corporations.

Agricultural Equipment Display, London Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851)

Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures (1853)

McCormick and Hussey reapers, Pitts and Case threshers, Marsh binders, and other mechanical harvesting equipment came into widespread use in the United States in the 1850s, and in the following decade steam-powered threshing machines were commonplace. Small farmers still flailed crops in many areas, however, due to the early threshers’ expense and tendency to clog in heavy grain and crack kernels with the metal cylinders. By the 1870s reaper-binders appeared that could drop a half-dozen grain bundles at a time on the ground tied with wire and later with twine. The sheaves were then arranged into larger shocks to further ripen or be hauled directly on open wagons to stationary threshing machines. Cyrus Hall McCormick, Jr. took over leadership of the family enterprise after the death of his father in 1884, and the sprawling Chicago-based McCormick and William Deering companies merged with the Plano Harvester Company to form International Harvester Company (IHC) in 1902. By that time the three firms had acquired or consolidated with several competitors, employed some 30,000 workers, and were producing over a thousand reapers per week in “harvester war” competition worldwide.

Founding Farmer Art and Architecture

George Washington understood the primacy of land stewardship for bountiful harvests and expressed concern about settlers’ “ruinous” tendency to exhaust frontier soils only to continue farther westward and inflict similar damage. He advocated use of “scientific farming” to renew soils and transition away from Southern tobacco and New England maize to grains, legumes, and grasses through a complex system of crop rotation and use of soil amendments. Washington’s progressive ideas were strongly influenced by foreign correspondence and reading of books by Great Britain’s most respected agricultural writers—Arthur Young’s first four volumes of Annals of Agriculture (1785) and Henry Home, Lord Kames’ The Gentleman Farmer (1776).

George Washington Presidential Library Reading Room, Mt. Vernon

Fred Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington

Washington made dozens of pages of notes from these and similar works and twice recorded Kames’ observation that, “No branch of husbandry requires more skill and sagacity that a proper rotation of crops,” which in England had come to involve cycles as long as seven years. Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s of the public need to promote a “natural fertility” (his own italicized expression), and that if “…taught how to improve the old, instead of going in pursuit of new and productive soils, they would make these acres which now scarcely yield them anything, turn out beneficial….” (The opening essay of the Annals series which Young personally sent to Washington carried a broadside against Britain’s wasteful wartime spending.)

Harvesting wheat, oats, and rye remained labor intensive and undertaken by Washington’s enslaved workers. But he sought to make the process more efficient by careful field observation and in 1786 recommended that every pair of adult cradle scythers be followed by four reapers and one binder followed by younger carriers of bundles. Harvest at Mt. Vernon and Washington’s other farms generally took place in July and August followed by the seeding of fall grains. Threshing was conducted in winter or even in spring. Washington also advocated improved agricultural mechanization and in 1792 constructed an innovative sixteen-sided, two-story threshing barn at Mt. Vernon’s Dogue Farm so horses could more efficiently tread out grain stalks on a slatted floor so the kernels could rain down and be gathered below. Prior to the advent of mechanized threshing, four pairs of horses trotting in a circle some sixty to one hundred feet in diameter could tread out some 300 bushels of wheat per day. Similar results with flailing might take five threshers working exhaustively for ten days. After a tour of Washington’s estates in 1788 guided by Washington himself, French minister to the United States Comte de Mousteir termed the newly elected president’s treading barn “a true monument to Patriotism.”

Mt. Vernon Threshing Barn

Mt. Vernon “New Room” Plaster Ceiling and Doorway Frieze Harvest Motifs

Mt. Vernon National Historic Landmark; Mt. Vernon, Virginia

Columbia Heritage Collection Photographs

Washington’s meticulous records of purchases at Mt. Vernon indicate his aesthetic as well as commercial interests. He was a serious collector of art prints and purchased no fewer than one hundred during his time in Philadelphia and at Mt. Vernon. Washington also bought six landscape paintings from English immigrant artists William Winstanley and George Beck that depicted the Potomac and Hudson River Valleys. These first hung in the original presidential residence in Philadelphia, but upon completion of his second term in 1797, Washington bought the entire group along with prints and furniture for his Mt. Vernon home’s grand two-story “New Room.” Designed in the style of an English manor house salon, the large room with airy Palladian windows was crowned with Richard Tharpe’s intricate plaster ceiling bas reliefs depicting harvest sheaves, scythes, rakes, and other farm tools. Art appreciation through collecting and display was understood to foster the moral virtue of both owner and viewers, and ornamental details honored sources of wealth and aspirations.

Washington also acquired exquisite copper mezzotints by London master printer John Boydell (1719-1804) and others showing scenes from biblical history and Greek mythology as well as Dutch pastoral landscapes (e. g., Adam Pynacker’s Morning and Evening). Boydell learned the complexities of printmaking and became one of the era’s most influential publishers who procured the services of such leading British artists as Benjamin West (1738-1920) and Richard Westall (1765-1836). Boydell engraver Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815) perfected colored stippling techniques that drew widespread acclaim from European and American patrons who had only known reproductions in black and white or brown tones. Washington’s Boydell prints were from the London publisher’s magisterial edition of Liber Veritatis (1774-1777), a precursor to the modern coffee table book, which contained two hundred drawings of works by influential French landscapist Claude Lorrain that came to be owned by William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire. The scenes were reproduced by engraver Richard Earlom (1743-1822) as distinctive mixed-method colored mezzotint for washes and etching for pen lines, and the series soon became a standard for aspiring artists to study.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Inner Court

Artists and authors contributed to an iconography of Washington as a modern Cincinnatus and agrarian statesman that was well established within several decades. His uncommon leadership and benevolence stand in contrast to the presence of amiable slaves who appear in several early nineteenth-century Mt. Vernon scenes. But Washington himself underwent a paramount life transition as young patrician who inherited vast estates with slaves when only eleven to Father of the Nation who freed them upon his death.

Protecting the Common Good

Mentalities of limits and moderation foster individual identity as well as social cohesion to sustain both culture and soil. French sociologist Émile Durkheim criticized modern society’s “malady of infinite aspiration” that trades cultural renewal for a fixation on replacement and perpetual commercial agitation to acquire things. In his foreword to Of the Land and the Spirit (2008), an anthology of Walter, Lord Northbourne’s writings on ecology and religion, Berry (like Lord Northbourne) points to perennialist matters of ultimate purpose as expressed by Jesus to, “[S]eek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness...,” in order to be provided food, drink, and clothing. Berry suggests that mastery of agriculture, husbandry, weaving, and other skills are assumed in this context, and that Jesus demonstrated faith by prayerful service to others in feeding and healing them. In these ways, literary, artistic, social, and vocational endeavors in any age represent harvests in which anyone can participate. A wide range of sustainable farming initiatives have been advocated and implemented in recent decades with varying success. Those with prospect for enduring progressive change incorporate core elements of crop rotations for soil health; improved conservation through reduced tillage and terracing of slopes; and policies that reward farmers for these practices.

Amidst the mistral winds of June 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his Harvest (Wheat Fields) series of ten paintings which provided him opportunity to experiment with color and technique. He worked quickly, “just like the harvester, …intent only on the reaping,” and blended striking hues of gold, copper, and bronze with yellow, red, and brown. The lush expressionistic masterpiece Wheat Field with a Reaper he painted in July 1889, gleams with a swirling sea of grain in impastoed layers of yellow-orange with white highlights seen in many of his Saint-Rémy paintings. A benevolent sun stands against a sky of aquamarine and seems to shine from the canvas uninterrupted by shadow or shade. The view is from the upper story of the building where van Gogh had sought recovery and shows the field’s gray-white boundary wall without any sense of confinement. Van Gogh wrote of its “vague figure toiling away… in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold,” as a modernist expression of “sacred realism” with calm, religious hope in the face of death and his own demise.

Association of grain with life suggested humanity’s vulnerability and resiliency in passionate reds and golds composed in balanced synthesis with the greenery and browns of verdant earth. These colors he complemented by mysterious orange and blue tones of the cosmos—a palette strikingly similar to his The Resurrection of Lazarus (1890). In spite of grain’s susceptibility to ruin from fire and wind, or harvest with scythe and sickle, the fields serenely endured as tangible evidence of incomparable beauty, fecundity, and energy of the divine order. The death reaper fulfilled the sower’s purpose in the grand mysterious cycle of life.

Johann Raphael Wehle, And They Followed Him (1900), Lithograph on cardboard, 4 x 6 inches, Columbia Heritage Collection

 Tolstoy’s exposition on aesthetics in What is Art? (1897) embraces a wide range of creative expression from painting and sculpture to literature, folklore, and liturgy. He characterizes their highest forms as conveyance of the makers’ regard for human dignity and the natural world in ways that astonish, mystify, and benefit the common good. That Tolstoy points to Millet, Lhermitte, Gogol, and Pushkin as aesthetic exemplars is significant for their use of agrarian themes to present such universal values. Great painting and writing express struggle and beauty through memorable associations with ideas, people, and places. Such understanding is at risk in contemporary society at once smart and ignorant. Information technologies can be exploited to distraction for endless browsing and displace contemplation of relationships to the earth and to others. Unprecedented threats to wellbeing loom if humanity’s commons of seed for harvest becomes unalterably modified and proprietary. Enduring individual and societal flourishing in any age, as Ruskin observed when considering a sheaf of grain, requires the discpline of work and rectitude. The beneficial middle way tempers entreprenership and technology through hard decisions protecting the common good. 

The characters who inhabit Tolstoy’s stories have heroic capacity, even when cast as loners and losers. They walk familiar paths to work together in the fields and better understand the people and world around them. Among the most stirring moments in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is when landlord Konstantin Levin, who sought the full life of mind, love, and labor, joins a scythe-wielding brigade in an afternoon of great satisfaction: “He… wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible.” In a day of tension over progressive approaches to a more sustainable future, ancestral regard and considerations of Ruth and Boaz, muzhik harvesters, and Port William farmers offer restorative interpretations of land use and the human prospect.

     Praise God for the harvest of farm and field,

     Praise God for the people who gather their yield,

     The long hours of labor, the skills of the team,

     The patience of science, the power of machine.

     Praise God for the harvest of conflict and love,

     For leaders and people to struggle to serve,

     To conquer oppression, earth’s plenty increase,

     And gather God’s harvest of justice and peace.

     —Brian Wren, “Praise God for the Harvest” (1968)

Determining and Affirming Values of Care

Cultural tensions rise with proliferating perils of climate change, global food security needs, and concern about impacts on soil biomes and wildlife. Establishing balance involves mediation of the ancient urges for veneration and exploitation, and consideration of technocratic limits and trade-offs in agricultural improvement. Soil scientists estimate that no-till chemical intensive farming has reduced erosion on American farms by 40% while also creating conditions for the emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds. Yet less tillage in such systems reduces American diesel consumption by two-thirds for some 280 million gallons of annual savings. For Promethian bioentrepreneurs CRISPR gene modification and related technologies offer prospect of crop improvement although prominent biologists acknowledge that cellular arrangements can be altered in ways that are poorly understood. Reengineering life forms raises uneasy questions about the complicated relationships between the natural and unnatural, and theological distinctions between obeying God and playing God, or between earthly tenancy and proprietorship. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman likened the complexities of modern science to a cosmic chess game at which we are only observers with limited capacity to predict outcomes regardless of worthy intentions.

Wendell Berry explores these tensions and offers a fertile field of practical recommendations for how anyone can apply the useful habits of memory, attention, and reverence. He recognizes the primacy of earth care to support all other human endeavors, and likens this to holy service: “The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it…. It keeps the past, not as history or memory, but as richness, new possibility.” In this sense the urgent partisanship in political and economic affairs becomes secondary to stewardship of land and life, and the function of healthy community for enduring fulfillment.

Whether on a Midwest farm or in a Chicago high-rise, one may live with fidelity to place by learning and practicing domestic arts and community building. Family care and homemaking need not require moving “back to the land,” though new paradigms for remote working are faciliating rural residency. In any setting folks can summon moral courage to eat together, shop locally to support practicioners of local crafts, connect young people to worthwhile endeavors, and affirm the values of environmental care. Policies and practice of self-reliance and promotion of the common good that characterized republicanism in the ancient world are relevant more than ever in an era of threatened landscapes, endangered species, and marginalized labor. Ethicist Julie Crouse characterizes Berry’s ongoing literary conversation about these matters as a “sacred harvest” for renewing the common good by promotion of connections among people, landscapes, and spirituality. In the context of farm work for participation in the market economy, or mental work for healthy imagination and discernment, Berry calls the external standard of such endeavors the “Great Economy,” or the “Kingdom of God.” The goal is to promote abiding, abundant harvests and the longterm wellbeing of individuals in community. In spite of dreams of space colonization, exploration of extraterrestial neighbors near and far has shown that, in the words of science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, “There is no Planet B.”

Berry has explored ideas of earth care most fully in his novels and short stories about the Coulter, Catlett, Branch, and other families. They dwell together in imaginary Port William, for which the author’s native Port Royal, Kentucky, serves as a touchstone. The place is not a utopian metaphor as its residents navigate with failure and success through cross-currents of old ways and modernity’s encroachments and benefits. In “That Distant Land” (1965), a rural neighborhood crew gathers for tobacco harvest in the sweltering August heat, and Berry casts a scene that resembles field laborers of ancient times: “They dove into the work, maintaining the same pressing rhythm from one end of the row to the other, and yet they worked well, as smoothly and precisely as dancers. To see them moving side by side against the standing crop, leaving it fallen, the field changed, behind them, was maybe like watching Homeric soldiers going into battle. It was momentous and beautiful and touchingly mortal.” The classical allusion is not incidental. In “The Agrarian Standard” (2002), Berry invokes lines from Virgil’s Fourth Georgic about “an old Cilician” who cares for a small plot of land that produces abundantly because of an ethic “rooted in mystery and sanctity” that values giving back to the health of the soil—an affectionate agarian stewardship for the sake of present and unborn generations.

Meaning-making in classical thought came through an honorable paideia of civic engagement and reflection. Intellect detached from action risks loss, and empathy apart from action is purposeless. Apparent in literature and art from Virgil and Horace to British Georgics, French Rustics, and Russian Itinerants, a holistic life of labor—such as Port Royal harvesting, craft,  and community, promotes personal as well as cooperative wellbeing. A related education grounded in distinctly local connectedness through stories and art, mealtime fellowship and field study offers prospect of cultural renewal.

Harvests Then and Now

Stories and paintings that relate a range of interpretations regarding contemporary and future existence add voice and visibility to diverse perspectives on land use. Consolidation of family farms in recent decades into larger corporate enterprises and the commodification of grain—William Cronon’s “transmutation of one of humanity’s oldest foods,” warrant high regard for stewardship of the land. Reinvigoration of Americans’ deep-seeded social memory and cultural capacity can guide landowners and public officials who contend with environmental challenges and finite production acreage. When Conrad Blumenschein told me in the 1970s about leaving Russia for America just before the outbreak of World War I, ten families lived on a dozen farms of about 320 acres each scattered along the road between my hometown of Endicott and the Palouse River some seven miles to the north. (The other two landowners lived in town.) Numbering some fifty people, most attended one of two Lutheran churches in the area—the Missouri Synod in the country, and the Ohio in town, and two country schools enrolled the area’s children through the eighth grade. Many of these families were related to each other, and regularly gathered for summer harvest labors, fall butchering bees, and various ceremonies and celebrations.

A half-century later when I began interviewing first generation immigrant elders like Conrad Blumenschein and Mary Morasch, the number of farms had fallen to nine with some consolidation of property holdings among the seven families of thirty-two individuals who remained. The size of area farms had increased to an average of 550 acres, and both country schools had consolidated with the larger town district that offered instruction through grade twelve. My father was able to complete our month-long harvest on about that much acreage by keeping in good repair the old tractor and pull-combine that had teamed up for at least a quarter-century to make the annual run. Based on a photograph from the time, family member Rob Smith captured the scene in the watercolor A 3L-160 Harvest, c. 1970 (2012, named for the equipment model numbers). The price of a bushel of wheat rarely rose to $2 from 1960 to 1973, when a controversial U. S. trade deal to supply the Soviet Union with grain boosted prices to as much as $6.25. The long-sought optimism felt by growers ushered in a year of equipment upgrades and land purchases encouraged by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz’s 1973 “get big or get out” slogan. Favorable Russian harvests the following year coupled with reduced federal subsidies contributed to America’s 1970s “farm crisis” followed by years of rural economic stagnation.

The year of Butz’s remarks was coincident with publication of British-German environmental economist E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (1973). The contrast in perspectives regarding the wellbeing of farmers could not have been starker. Schumacher (1911-1977) considered federal promotion of larger production acreages and related needs for more expensive equipment to be a reckless hubris of domination. Inspired by thinkers like Tolstoy and Gandhi, Schumacher understood the forces of modernity to be complex but fueled by a blinkered preoccupation with short-term solutions that ignore ancient ways of sustainable living. He invoked a sovereignty of reason to advocate for enterprising farmers who valued the longstanding natural and social commons that provided economic benefits well worth protecting. Without such public policies vast numbers of younger farmer families would be driven from the countryside. And so they have been. (Ohio farmer-essayist Gene Logsdon, author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse [2007], responded to Butz’s admonition with advice on how to, “Get small and stay in.”)

Palouse Harvesttime Smoky Sunset and Pine City Grain Elevator Firestorm Aftermath (2020)

Columbia Heritage Photographs

In the fifty years that has now passed since my 1960s high school FFA speech on world hunger, global population has increased by four billion and the world has consumed some 1.3 trillion barrels of oil. (Approximately one and a half trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide have been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.) The result has been a warming of the earth’s surface by 0.6 degrees C. and the disappearance of a million square miles of spring snowpack in the northern hemisphere. The pace of change has led to devastating impacts on biodiversity and prospect of neo-Malthusian food security crises. Regional trends can only be discerned over time but already some disturbing patterns are evident. Since 2020 annual precipitation has declined across the Columbia Plateau and in the summer of that year the only firestorm in living memory made national headlines when it devastated the Palouse hamlets of Malden of Pine City and destroyed vast areas of standing grain. Notable modern writers like James Rebanks, author of Pastoral Song: A Writer’s Journey (2021), reflect upon the impact of climate change upon agriculture and natural systems in passionate and informed prose as compelling as Rachel Carson. The urgent planetary imperative is to live within the biosphere’s means through new economies and methods of sustainable production. 

My boyhood rural neighborhood of several thousand acres that had been home to about fifty souls in 1900 is comprised today of just eight farms. All but one are parts of larger family-owned operations whose members also own or lease other cropland in the area. (The average Palouse Country farm size in 2020 was approximately 1200 acres.) Only four households are located on the same seven-mile stretch that supported those ten families a century ago, and today are populated by just five adults whose grown children live elsewhere. In between these habitations one can now see lonely clusters of dying locust trees, broken fences, and the rusted equipment of abandoned farmsteads. The trend has brought debilitating effects on rural communities that contend with closures of local stores, banks, and public service by reaffirming pioneer values of hard work, integrity, and teamwork.

The broader demographic impacts on rural life and labor are consistent with trends over the past two centuries that have changed the nature and necessity of worker communities. In 1840s pre-industrial America, for example, a farmer could produce an acre of hand-broadcasted wheat yielding about twenty bushels from approximately fifty hours of annual work using simple implements like a single-shear plow and scythe. (Soil exhaustion and other factors in early nineteenth-century France and Germany contributed to average yields of less than half that amount, or about ten bushels per acre; yields on unmanured fields in England were in the range of fifteen. Continental Europeans commonly faced substantial crop failure and famine at least once every ten years.) A single day’s harvest by an able-bodied reaper could cover up to one acre. By 1900 an American farmer equipped with horse-pulled gang plow, harrow, and mechanical drill still produced about twenty bushels from an acre but in some ten hours. An experienced crew operating a reaper-binder and steam-powered thresher at that time could cut about forty-five acres a day for some 1,200 bushels (31 tons) of grain. A farmer in 1940 using a gas-powered tractor, three-bottom plow, and combine with 12-foot header further reduced annual per acre labor to 3.5 hours.

Harvests Yesterday and Today—Different Times, Identical Location

Lautenschlager & Poffenroth (1911) and Klaveano Brothers Threshing Outfits (2019)

Four miles north of Endicott, Washington

 Dryland grain yields increased three-fold nationally during the twentieth century and Palouse Country yields of eighty bushels per acre are common today along with diesel-powered, satellite-guided equipment that make crop rows of linear perfection. High-capacity combines now cost as much as a million dollars and feature sidehill leveling, cruise control, and electronic monitoring of threshing functions that automatically adjust to crop load. Modern farmers invest scarcely fifty minutes in total annual per-acre labor, and can harvest three hundred acres in a ten-hour day with a combine header forty feet wide to yield some 30,000 bushels (900 tons) of wheat, or 72,000 bushels of corn. Sickles endure. Modern versions feature four-inch-wide chromed, serrated triangular sections arranged toothlike in a row that runs the length of the header and moves back and forth at lightning speed. Such mechanical marvels represent the output of a thousand reapers and twice as many binders laboring in harvest fields before the Industrial Revolution. (Substantial numbers of others were tasked with carting unthreshed stalks to barns, flailing grain, tending livestock, and other related tasks.) A phalanx of these modern behemoths cruising through a field of golden grain evokes appreciation for techno-mechanical ingenuity, and still stirs ancient feelings of gratitude for agrarian bounty. Dayton watercolorist Paul Strohbehn’s dramatic Sorghum Hollow Gold (2018) shows three immense John Deere Titan combines rising from a Palouse hillside chaff cloud.

Among the most recent developments in farm mechanization is the application of autonomous driving capabilities to tractors and combines. Technology has also transformed bulk grain handling facilities at strategically located places like Endicott and other locations along railroads and river ports. Endicott was platted in 1882 by the Oregon Improvement Company, a subsidiary of the Northern Pacific Railroad, on its Columbia & Palouse branch line. This route tapped the fertile grain district along a route from the main NPRR transcontinental line at Palouse Junction (present Connell, Washington) eastward to Endicott, Colfax, and eventually Pullman and Moscow. An extensive network of feeder lines later fanned across the northern and southern Palouse to other farming communities.

Columbia & Palouse Railroad Grain Storage Flathouses, Endicott, Washington (c. 1910)

Northwest Grain Growers High-Capacity Unit Train Loading Facility, Endicott (2022)

With the recent merger of the local Endicott-St. John grain storage cooperative with Walla Walla and other groups to form Northwest Grain Growers, the new entity constructed a storage and 110-car unit train loading facility in Endicott since the line there had been constructed with heavier rail weight capacity. The project called for construction of seven immense steel silos located to bring total capacity there to approximately 3,100,000 bushels. The new facility, which became operational in 2020, is designed for rapid one-day loading of the trains which are capable of holding 100 tons of grain per car for a total capacity of 420,000 bushels. Grain is trucked from farms and other elevators for rail shipment and barging along the lower Columbia River to Portland and Kalama for distribution worldwide.

Questioning Popular Assumptions

Jacqueline Daisley, Palouse Hills—End of Harvest (2018), Oil on canvas, 42 ½ x 32 inches, Columbia Heritage Collection

Recent Palouse Country fine art exhibitions that have explored themes of food security and agrarian landscapes have been sponsored by the Pullman Arts Council, Moscow Arts Commission, and Colfax Arts Council. They have featured works by George Bedirian, Vicki Broeckel, Anna Blomfield, and by Jacqueline Daisley, who lives on a farm near Pullman where the surrounding countryside inspired her curvaceous masterpiece, Palouse Hills—End of Harvest. Anna Blomfield embarked on an artistic farrago in the fall of 2006 to explore and depict Palouse grain production throughout the seasons. The British newcomer had studied painting and printmaking at St. Martin’s School of Art in London and in Liverpool before moving to California in 1987 to work as an animator and muralist. Her popular online “frogblog cartoondiary” commenced on November 7, 2006 when she observed, “If I wanted to buy a combine harvester there are 3 dealers in town to choose from.” Blomfield, whose family had operated a farm implement business, first applied her special interest in the venerable forms of manual labor to paintings of foundry and tannery workers.

Relocation to the Northwest brought unexpected agrarian vistas and serendipitous friendships with area farmers, combine dealers, shop mechanics, and others engaged in agricultural pursuits. “I was entranced with the landscape, the people, and the various crops” she remembered; “each one had a story to tell and show.” Over the course of her five-year residence in the region, these encounters yielded dozens of such colorfully illustrated posts as “Out Amongst the Wheatfields (8.28.07),” “Threshing Bee (9.3.08),” and “A Combine Chorus Line (4.25.2010)” with commentary provided by the artist’s alter ego Froggie who traveled year-round in Studio Subaru. Characterizing her captivating genre as “visual storytelling,” Blomfield combined illustration and information to transport and amuse readers through expeditions to harvest fields, grain elevators, inspection stations, rural railroad sidings. Public “gallery” showings of her popular work were appropriately held in repurposed silos, barns, and the farm equipment dealerships she had first noted in her earliest online posts.

Henry Stinson, Untitled Wall Mural (2019), Fonk’s Store Mural; Colfax, Washington

Columbia Heritage Photograph

Pullman, Washington, artist Henry Stinson has painted beautiful representational canvases of harvesting combines and other modern farm equipment in action, but is especially known for whimsical views that reflect his lifelong fascination with gadgets and electricity that attest to modern American society’s ubiquitous connections to technology. An enormous untitled Stinson 2019 exterior wall mural looks as if American Gothic appeared in an 1960s episode of Lost in Space. The painting reflects the artist’s interest in a world where people and livestock increasingly share rural landscapes with with drones and satellite-controlled, computer-monitored  field equipment. The work may also suggest dehumanization of the countryside as well as frayed intimacy and responsibility to landscapes.

Disturbing provocations have long been essential work for artists and authors who question popular assumptions about the benefits of innovation and globalization while trying to preserve what should not change. Shapes and names of the surreal artwork of contemporary Canadian painter Jo-Anne Elniski reflect rural environmental concerns. The Last Harvest depicts a fulminating sky in vivid swirls of yellow, purple, and white that rain down upon rows of grain that wave in the same garish colors. Other works by Elniski like Field of Gold and Prairie Harvest appear as flaming fields of abundance that rise to confront brightly lit horizons of pink, orange, and yellow. The depictions are awesome if unsettling. Yet concerns expressed through art and literature also present opportunities for reconsideration of assumptions, intervention, and progressive change. Such reconsideration is a principal theme of Indian author-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 book The Great Derangment. Ghosh’s ecumenical survey of world literature from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey explores storytelling as commentary on natural resource extraction and climate change. He holds authors and artists of the modern era as culpable as politicians and economists for a collective failure of imagination to express an unfolding “derangement” of natural systems, social stability, and food production.

A disturbing scenario of consequences resulting from such dislocation is the subject of Uncertain Harvest (2021) by Vermont sociologist Charles Simpson (1941-2021). The novel relates American journalist Ed Dekker’s hazardous global quest after uncovering evidence at a European biotech conference of minacious environmental and food security risks wrought by transnational agribusinesses. Dekker finds that the company “Naturetek” and others exert unprecedented control of the university and government research sectors and develop genetically engineered terminator seeds that produce sterile offspring and compel grower reliance on their patented germplasm. The engaging story draws on Simpson’s own experiences working with farmers and indigenous peoples in Mexico and Guatemala and investigation of U. S. government subsidies, lax regulation, and global trade policies that are inimical to small-scale sustainable farming and regional rural development.

I first learned about the scope of GMO commercialization in 2012 while traveling from Seattle to a global orphan care conference in Indonesia. I noticed the logos of prominent U. S. seed suppliers on the shirts and backpacks of other passengers on the Tokyo to Bali connection. I spoke with several while waiting for our bags at the airport and learned that the Asia & Pacific Seed Association Conference was also taking place that same week at the city’s posh Legian Seminyak Resort. During a break in the meetings I was attending in more humble surroundings, I ventured across town to the seed conference and met security befitting the visit of a head of state. After considerable effort and the intervention of delegates I had met on the plane, I was finally admitted. A combination trade show with large group presentations, the forum provided an opportunity for transnational agribusinesses like Sygenta, Bayer, and Monsanto to showcase proprietary seeds and technologies that I was told could “transform” Asian agriculture.

Small Farmer’s Journal 45:2 (November 2021)

Cover Photo: Measuring a Case thresher operating speed

One of the influential contemporary voices on small-scale sustainable farming and rural culture is painter-farmer-author Lynn R. Miller of Sisters, Oregon, who has written over twenty books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. In publication since 1976, Miller’s quarterly Small Farmer’s Journal reaches 20,000 readers and features articles on a wide range of topics for farmers and ranchers devoted to the “craft” of farming and husbandry and for those interested in the life and literature of the countryside. He decries industrial agriculture as well as trivialized boutique “fad” farming. The Journal has featured numerous harvest-related articles including Esther M. Jensen’s c. 1940 Willamette Valley memoir, “The Day the Threshers Came,” equipment reprints like H. R. Trolley’s “The Efficient Operation of Thrashing Machines” from a 1918 USDA Farmer’s Bulletin, and detailed accounts by twenty-first century operators of horse-drawn reaper-binders and stationary threshers like Khoke and Ida Livingston of Davis City, Iowa (“The Harvest of Grain”).  Miller’s photo essay “Anatomy of a Threshing” (2021) is a prelude to forthcoming books, “Threshing Machines” and “Grain Binders and Reapers,” which will be the culmination of his years-long mission to glean practical information from out-of-print books, manuals, parts lists, and catalogs.

 Miller describes the Journal as more of a “community odyssey” than periodical. In a recent editorial titled “Seedbeds & The Rooted Mend,” he recalls visiting a local high school where he was asked to speak about farming. “I told them, no I tried to show them, that the small s big F—small Farming—the one where the farmer is the measure—contains every single element of life, most every attainable pedestal of adventure, and the best chance at everlasting health.” Perhaps spurred by the immediacy youthful hearers, Miller then mused about the significance of their high desert homeland: “To take root here is to find and see the elements, wind, sun, trees, wildlife and our own meddlesome footprints as belonging. You do that in part by keeping sight of what is near at hand, by being ‘short-sighted.’ If you are looking off to imagined holiday vacations, to deep seedy city environs, to video fantasies, to cosmetics in pursuit, to worrisome accounting, you will NOT see yourself rooted, you will NOT see the other elements near you as rooted.” In closing Miller expressed hope that his enduring effort at “community journalism” had provided “a soft drumming of information, shared adventure, and kinship” to support, celebrate, and gather the vital assembly of “human-scale,” small farmers.