The mission of Just Roots is to increase access to healthy local food by connecting with people, land, resources and know-how. ‘Know-how’ was in evidence as folks got together at the Greenfield Community Farm on a Saturday morning last month to lay out plots for the new community gardens.

Coordinator Shelly Beck had mapped out on graph paper where all the plots would go. She presented a large square grid with four quadrants, intersected in the middle by a 12-foot-wide tractor road. Within each quadrant are individual (20′ by 20′ or 10′ by 20′) garden plots, delineated with 4′ wide paths. Our task was to take what was on paper and realize it in the field. At first we scratched our heads a bit but gradually we felt more and more confident to proceed.

It was an exercise in collective wisdom. Once we established the starting point and one of the sides, Kirsten knew how to make a square corner by using the 3-4-5 technique:

(This is an application of the Pythagorean Theorem (a² + b² = c²) which some of us dimly remembered from school.)

So we started with a 30″ by 40″ by 50″ triangle and were on our way. Once that corner was established, we used field tape measures to project those lines the whole length of the sides. With the perimeter established, a few of us knew how to double-check for squareness:

Geoff using improvised plumb bob

As we staked out the plots within the grid, Geoff improvised a plumb bob by hanging a rock from a string. He then looked through the string to verify that the stakes were aligned.

Where does this stuff come from? School, the world of work, books, parents, grandparents—a collective wisdom that is part of the human experience and lets us know how to engage the world.

by Jon Magee

After the Civil War, when the Army turned its primary attention to exterminating the Plains Indians, wagon trains and railroad crews were already crossing the vast prairies these tribes inhabited. Population pressures and rising land prices back East were compelling people to seek out the new territories. Autonomy and opportunity were there for the taking, or so the story went. New immigrants, younger sons lacking inheritance, and any others shut out of the general prosperity of the eastern states were generally quick to answer the call of the frontier.

The railroad companies were eager to increase the flow of settlers to the West. If more people lived out west, they would need a steady stream of merchandise and commodities from back east, and the transcontinental railroad would carry that freight. However, if trains only carried loads headed westward, the railroad would bear the cost of empty cars heading back east to pick up more freight. For this reason, the railroads invested in elaborate campaigns promoting the farmland of the Great Plains. If commodity crops were grown in these new territories, the rail cars would return to the East filled with grain and fiber. Thousands of flyers and bills proclaimed the virtues of the Plains: Virgin land, of untold fertility! Pennies on the acre, and the banks are lending! By 1900, thousands of potential farmers were heading west. The ‘booster’ mentality of the railroads, their lending partners, and the horde of speculators was contagious. Industrialists saw a paradise of flat land, where single-crop fields of thousands of acres were ideally suited to new equipment like the McCormick reaper—this would be the perfect place to experiment with Taylorist^[1]principles in food production.

Thus began the bonanza of the Red River Valley. North Dakota and Montana welcomed many homesteader families, as well as some of the largest corporate farms in U.S. history. These experimental farms were as large as fifty or one hundred thousand acres, almost entirely wheat. The most famous and out-spoken proprietor of a mega-farm was Thomas Campbell, whose Montana Farming Corporation (founded in 1918) planted roughly fifty thousand acres of wheat each year.^[2]

Even the ‘small’ family farms of this new territory were hundreds of acres on average, several times larger than those of the Midwest and considerably less diversified. The thin soil of the northern prairies were not as rich as those further east, and transportation costs and the connivance of middle-men meant that the returns per acre declined the further a farmer was from the eastern markets. Farmers on the plains were hardly self-sufficient, either, usually growing only cash crops. Later, when extension agents encouraged farmers to ‘diversify,’ this mostly meant raising hogs in addition to the wheat production.

And yet, for a while, it seemed as if all of the hype were true. Prices were bolstered by the first World War, as Europe effectively ceased to produce its own food, and yields were boosted by the virgin prairie’s fertility and by an unusually wet decade. The price of farmland rose 70% nationwide as speculators jumped to take advantage of the boom, and farmers just couldn’t grow enough wheat to satisfy demand.

Unfortunately, the bubble was destined to burst: the armistice was signed in November of 1918, just as Montana and North Dakota returned to the more typical arid climate. The US government recognized the threat that peace posed to the market of agricultural commodities and promised to maintain war-time prices of wheat into 1920. Nonetheless, by July of 1921 the price of wheat had fallen 85% from its peak. From the end of the war up to 1925, farmers abandoned two million acres of land in Montana, and half of the state’s commercial banks failed.^[3]

For the nation’s farmers, the ‘Jazz Age’ was anything but grand. Family farms were already losing out before the bust, prey to the middle-men, lenders, and shippers whom they relied on to market their goods and finance their businesses. Even farms in the more stable areas of the Midwest and South suffered from the depression that followed the boom. In 1922 alone, 1.2 million farmers left the countryside.^[4] Groups such as the Farm Bureau, the National Farmers Union, and (on the more progressive end of the spectrum) the Non-Partisan League formed to address the plight of the farmer. Despite meager efforts by the Coolidge and Hoover administrations, most of the nation’s farmers had already endured a full decade of hard times before the rest of the nation joined them in their plight in 1929.

The conversation among the nation’s elites, as represented in the press, in lecture halls, and in many a government study, questioned the origins of the rural depression. Many said that farmers were to blame—eugenicists were quick to point out that many farmers were recent immigrants, of ‘poor blood,’ from southern Europe.^[5] Many commentators drew attention to the poor living conditions on farms and the poor state of rural schools. Some of these commentators tried to be sympathetic, asking ‘What can we do to improve our farmers?’ In the words of Deborah Fitzgerald,

The debate was framed by those who were in a position to debate—financiers and industrialists whose influence was keenly felt in the government, and the first class of Agricultural Economists and Agricultural Engineers, fresh out of the new land-grant universities. Their opinions would set the stage for the New Deal programs which once and for all enshrined industrial-style farming in national legislation.

Next month I hope to cover a little of what the New Deal wrought on the countryside. Before we get to that point, though, one has to wonder: Why was the fault laid on farmers, who were following the lead of the railroad companies, lenders, and all the other cheerleaders of the new settlement?

For those who would like to read more about this period of farm history, I can recommend several books. The first is a general history of rural America, entitled Born in the Country, by David B. Danbom. The second book, particularly good for its coverage of the period 1900-1930, is Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, by Deborah Fitzgerald. On agriculture and economic development more generally, I highly recommend Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott, which covers the themes of industrializing agriculture here in this country, in the early Soviet Union, and more recently in the ‘developing’ world.

[1] Frederick Taylor is known for his ideology of “scientific management,” a set of guidelines for optimizing the industrial process. Major elements include an extreme division of labor, small and highly repetitive tasks, de-skilling of workers and elimination of craftsmen,  and a primary emphasis on the engineer as the agent of production. Taylorism is closely associated with Fordism (that is, Henry Ford’s mass production ideology).
[2]   New York Times, “Plans Cultivation of 200,000 Acres,” June 5, 1918. Fetched from www.nytimes.com. After a nearly total crop failure in the first year, operations were scaled back considerably.
[3] Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory, p. 19.
[4] Fitzgerald, p. 30.
[5] Fitzgerald, p. 20.
[6] Fitzgerald, p. 21.

From the section on the town farm (pages 17-18), I gleaned a number of observations. The residents at the farm were referred to as “inmates,” and many of them were elderly, with a centenarian mentioned in this report. The town employed caretakers and laborers on the farm. It profited most from the sale of butter and stock (assuming this refers to livestock). It is notable that milk is not mentioned in this report. In subsequent years, milk was the farm’s main source of income.

Here is an excerpt from the actual report of 1881-82 that includes a balance sheet for farm operations:

The books balanced to the penny. What else can we learn about life on the farm that for more than a century stood on land now being reclaimed by Just Roots? Stay tuned…

As beautiful and fascinating as these images are, what is more astonishing is what scientists have learned about how the energy of the sun reaches earth. As a result of nuclear fusion, photons, miniscule packages of heat and light, are created in the sun’s dense core. It takes millions of years for these photons to reach the surface of the sun. But once the photons are released from the sun, it takes just a little over 8 minutes for them to reach the earth. They travel 93 million miles at 186,000 miles per second and arrive right here for me to see in the form of sunlight. Of course, I am not seeing the photons themselves. Rather the light from the photons makes it possible for me to admire the snow and watch the colorful birds at the feeder outside my window.

Photons travel at varying wavelengths, and different species of animals have evolved ways to detect those differing wavelengths, mostly through their visual organs. The shortwave, high intensity photons are at one end of the light spectrum. Gamma rays and x-rays are the shortest but are not visible to us. And we can’t see in the ultraviolet range either, but many birds and insects can. Human eyes evolved to see in the middle wavelengths that we call visible light. The world looks very different for species that can see ultraviolet light however. For example, some hawk species, like the kestrel and the red tailed hawk, can see in the ultraviolet range and can spot mice hundreds of feet below them in grass because mice leave territorial urine scent marks. The urine marks happen to be visible in ultraviolet light, alerting the hawks to the trails frequented by the resident mouse. We could be looking right at these trails and be unable to find them.

At the other end of the spectrum are the low intensity, long wavelengths like infrared, which snakes can use to hunt at night in the dark. The snakes are not actually seeing red light, but rather have a highly sensitive organ in their head that allows them to detect minute thermal signals. Interestingly, there are insects that also have this ability; one of those is the bed bug!

So what happens to all these photons when they get here? I love this part. They are either absorbed or reflected back out to space. So, when I am sitting in my garden feeling the warmth of the sun on my skin, I am absorbing photons that were made millions of years ago and have traveled 93,000,000 miles!!! Every day little bits of the sun become part of me. Not just by absorbing sunlight, but also because all the plant food that I eat has also absorbed photons, and the milk from my goats is the metabolic product of all the plants that they have eaten. All the plants in the world use photons as an energy source to photosynthesize.

You don’t have to be a physicist to appreciate how fabulous our sun is. On earth, the energy radiating from that immense star is made manifest in every plant and animal, in the wind, and the waves, in rainbows, the great cycles of our weather, and the eerily beautiful light shows of the aurora borealis. And isn’t it fantastic to realize that there is part of the sun made manifest in each and every one of us too. It is astounding to think that, in so many ways, we are made of starlight.

David Graeber, an anthropologist and author, has a clearly-stated agenda when he writes about history: by looking at the rich heritage of the generations which came before us, it becomes clear that any status quo is very short-lived. Yes, alternatives have existed and will exist again. Armed with that knowledge, we can recognize our power to shape the future. In that same spirit, I hope to use this space each month to consider a facet of our agricultural heritage.

Some episodes read like a great, tragic novel. The New Deal, for instance, was actually just as catastrophic for poor farmers as the Depression it sought to address, forcing a giant wave of migration out of the countryside while financing new equipment for the wealthiest landowners. In the same way, the collectivization of farms in the early USSR was a sad tale of the best intentions gone awry—leading to a death toll somewhere between 4 million and 20 million villagers.

Other episodes of history show the spontaneously recurring themes of egalitarianism, self-governance, and moderation. When European colonists landed on the Atlantic shores of North America, the agrarian villages they found were not terribly different from the ones which filled the countryside of Europe: property was held communally, agriculture was subsistence-based, unemployment was unknown, and leisure time was plentiful. Neither of these cultures had it ‘easy,’ and neither was perfect. But in the case of medieval Europe, this era was remarkably peaceful and just (when compared with the periods of the great empires which surround that epoch—the Roman empire before, and the various colonial empires after). When considering the European village and the Native American tribe, one wonders how distant cultures formed themselves around such similar principles. European villages, remote and mostly autonomous, were the vestiges of the old manor system which broke down around the time of the plague. It has likewise been proposed that the agrarian, egalitarian, ‘hippie’-like cultures of the coastal Native Americans may have resulted from the collapse of earlier urban cultures such as Cahokia.

In the cases of medieval Europe and pre-colonial America, as in so many other cases, agrarian societies did not arise by chance, nor did they arise by royal decree. These arrangements derive from the hard work of everyone involved, the work of resisting the authorities, the work of self-government, the work of sustaining their villages.

I find these little corners of history very relevant to the present day and our struggle for social justice. Over the coming months, I’ll paint a more detailed picture of these historical moments, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

From “Region’s farming boom provides much to chew on”
By RICHIE DAVIS, Greenfield Recorder
Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Full Article: http://www.recorder.com/news/nation/world/3524111-95/says-region-farm-farming (PDF)

Great thanks to board member Devorah Rosenberg who organized Just Roots’ participation. She even painted her van (with poster paint) for the event. Did you see the tomato giving carrots to the crowd?

Here are some photographs…

~Andy Grant