My land is a good land
The grass is made of rainbow waves
Its fields & its rivers are blessed by God
Its a good land so they say
My land is a rich land
Its hills & valleys abound
Its highways go to many good places
Where many good people are found
My land is a free land
its a free land so I'm told
Freedom is a thing that money can't buy
And its worth even more than gold
-Eric Andersen
I left Bloomington on Saturday morning. The pendulous honey locust flowers were spreading their thick honey fragrance, the leaves were fresh and green, and the air was thick and cool. It was a typical spring day in the midwest - the night before I was awoken by massive thunderstorms, and the morning was thick and grey, but threatened no further rain. The sun poked through holes in the clouds occasionally, and when I pulled over to eat lunch at a rest stop on I-70 in eastern Indiana, the wind whipped by, wet, warm, and luscious. I listened to Balzac & The Little Seamstress by Dai Sijie, and the miles flew by.
The destination for my first night was Malabar Farm State Park, in Ohio between Columbus and Cleveland. My parents and I had noticed this place the last time we drove from Amherst to Bloomington, and my parents stopped there on their way back from Bloomington, and urged me to do the same, so I made a reservation to stop at the IHA hostel in the state park.
Louis Bromfield was an extremely successful novelist of the 1920s and 1930s. He won a Pulitzer for one of his first novels, and many of his novels were made into well known movies. He also wrote the screenplay for the first Dracula movie. Like many American artists and intellectuals, he lived during the interwar years in France, where his home outside Paris was a hangout for the great intellectual flowering of that period. In the late 1930s, with war gathering on the horizon, Bromfield left Europe and returned to the United States, and bought a farm in the rolling hills near his childhood home of Mansfield, Ohio. It is not entirely clear why he named his central Ohio farm after a region on the south coast of India - the host at the hostel told me that his well-known novel, The Rains Came, was set in Malabar, but I found a copy of it & it appears to be set in Gujarat. In any case, Bromfield set several novels in India, and may have travelled there.
Malabar Farm became the center place for Bromfield's experiments with soil conservation and progressive agriculture, and Bromfield spent most of his later years plowing the money he earned from his fiction into his agricultural experiments & innovations. He worked closely with people such as Aldo Leopold & J.I. Rodale, and appears to have been a pioneer of conservation tillage practices now standard in much of the US. The property is now a State Park, and continues to be a working farm & museum monument to a great, though largely forgotten, writer & conservationist.
Did I mention that it is spectacularly beautiful? The flowers were a few weeks behind Bloomington, so I got to reacquaint myself with lilacs, dandelions, and apples, and see the honey locusts still lifeless.
As you can see, Bromfield could afford to build quite a farmhouse, and quite a barn. In fact, his farm was three old farms, which he consolidated into one. He had made quite a bit of money with his writing, and his estate was a sufficient attraction that apparently his friends Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall held their wedding there in 1946. I've always wondered about these gentlemen farmers - are their proposals for improving farms practical for the farmer whose farm has to feed the family? Thomas Jefferson is widely credited for being an agricultural innovator, and I still read in plant catalogs how he favored this or that variety, but it is worth remembering that he lived most of his life, and finally died, deeply in debt. According to a park interpreter I spoke with, Bromfield used his literary talents to explain how his ideas for changing agriculture could be implemented by the common man. But I do not know enough to know whether his goals were achieved. Often it seems to me that what is practical for a cash limited farmer, and what is desired by idealistic dreamers who don't have to pay the bills by selling corn or tomatoes, is quite out of sink.
Another thing you can see in these pictures is how incredibly luscious and beautiful this part of the world is. Rolling hills, fertile soils, plenty of rain. The New Englanders who settled Connecticut's western reserve surely thought they had found paradise, and they brought with them to Ohio their traditions of political and religious freedom and dissent, and abolitionist activism. Long before Bromfield purchased it, his property had been a stop on the underground railroad, and Oberlin, to the north, was a center of abolitionist activism. Bromfield might be considered to be just another stop in Ohio's long tradition of political and cultural engagement - one that to my mind, continues today when Ohio is a center of Amish culture and other radical approaches to alternative agriculture - as is well documented, for example, in the writings of Gene Logsdon. Given that I've flitted through these same movements for a dozen or so years now, you'd think I would have heard of dozens of young couples or communes - eager for inexpensive, fertile land, close to major cities (Malabar farm, halfway between Cleveland and Columbus, must be within a 2 hour drive of 5 million people - yet the stars shine crystal clear there at night, and one cannot hear the interstate 10 miles away) - moving to beautiful Ohio. But to the contrary, I have heard self-righteous leftist activists and farmers on both coasts tell me how the Midwest is lost to corn, soybeans, reactionary politics, and roundup - how the coasts will thrive when the rest of the country sinks due to whatever the latest apocalyptic nightmare is (most recently peak oil) - and how superior their harsh, unforgiving climates and terrible soils are to the fertile Midwest. This all seems rather ridiculous, but it is real, and I am reminded of a friend of mine who recently spent a couple years as a post-doc at Ohio State, complaining about the lack of natural beauty, and praying for the day he could return to the left coast. It seems like the hip wanna-be farmers are still foundering in Berkeley and Brooklyn, while the fertile heartland remains a frontier for my generation of alternative agriculturalists. This is really a shame, as we would probably have more success if we moved somewhere where land prices were more modest, and where the climate and soils are really well suited for crops. (and just to add to my point - I kept thinking this all the way from Southern Indiana across upstate New York - all great farmland, much of it in beautiful areas, and much of it with very cheap farmland prices, at least relative to the prices I knew on the coasts, and nearly all being ignored by today's new agricultural movements in favor of areas with far less agricultural promise)
A couple days before I left Bloomington, I received an email from the hostel host at Malabar Farm, asking me when I was planning to arrive, and mentioning that the Malabar Farm Foundation would be holding an annual barbecue benefit on Saturday, where Wes Jackson would be the keynote speaker. Wes Jackson is a pioneering plant geneticist, and the founder of the Land Institute , a research center in Kansas whose goal is to revolutionize agriculture by introducing perennial grain crops that would allow grains to be grown in ways that would mimic the nutrient cycling, soil building properties of native prairies.
Of course I wanted to see Wes Jackson speak! So I headed up from the hostel (a "small" beautiful Sears kit house that Bromfield lived in while building his mansion) to the big house, where I took a tour, and then got my ticket for the dinner.
I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but Jackson wasn't quite who I thought he would be. He looked more like a slightly chubby professor than some wild visionary farmer pirate. And the audience was also not quite what I expected. It looked like there might be some farmer pirates there, but at the table I sat at I met the editor of Ohio Farmer, a trade publication which makes its money hawking agro-chemicals to corn and soybean farmers, and a man wearing a Scott's Miracle-Gro jacket and a Pebble Beach Golf Course t-shirt - whose wife, sitting next to me, kept on reapplying her makeup. This was not the hip young farmer crowd, nor was it the radical hippies - it was more the standard white bread America, and as if to confirm my suspicion, the food was about as bland as American food could get. Ribs, Chicken, scalloped potatoes, grey limp "green" beans, airplane lasagna, and iceberg lettuce with croutons. In a way I was relieved to get away from the hip gourmet every ingredient has a story world of Bloomington. But couldn't we find a middle ground where the food was both unpretentious and also good?
Jackson began his talk with a famous quote from one of FDR's brain trust, and a former student of Scott Nearing from his years at Penn, Rexford Tugwell: "Make no small plans, for they have not the power to move men’s souls." Although this quote made me think of my friend Amy, and the Bloomington Community Orchard, Jackson was talking about his own plans to revolutionize agriculture. He read heavily from the agricultural writings of Bromfield. This passage is from the preface to The Farm, written as a dedication to his 3 daughters:
Dear Anne and Hope and Ellen:
“The Farm” is written for you, who were all born long after the war ended, so that you may know a little what it was like to have lived before 1914. Something came to an end about that year and I fancy it was the nineteenth century. You will never know that it was like at first hand, and you will never know the country from which your father came, because even if you ever went to visit it, you would fail to find it. You might discover a stream or hill which you would recognize from hearsay and legend, but that is all. The rest has vanished. One thing you would never find, and that is the feel of the country as it was thirty years before you were boern, anc certinaly you would never find people like greataunt Jane and Old Jamie and Zenobia van Essen. …. In your father’s childhood, the eighteenth century was just round the corner. For you, born after 1914, it has become as remote as the tenth centuty…
“The farm” is the story of a way of living which has largly gone out of fashion, save in a few half-forgotten coreners and in a few families which have stuck to it with admirable stubbornness in spite of everything…. It has in it two fundamentals which were once and may be again intensely American characteristics. These are integrity and idealism. Jefferson has been dead more than a hundred hyears and there is no longer any fronteier, but the things which both represented are immortal. They are tough qualities needed in times of crisis.
According to Jackson, when Bromfield was criticized for being a romantic, he proudly reclaimed the label - yes! a romantic, like Da Vinci, Rosseau, Einstein.
Jackson is a great visionary and idealist, like these other romantics. I do not know enough to know if his dreams are practical. I also thought it was strange to speak of imitating the native prairie ecosystem in eastern Ohio, in the depths of what was once the greatest hardwood forest the world has ever known. Perhaps a grain prairie would require less energy and chemical inputs, perhaps it would build more soil than it would exhaust. But it would not be any more natural in the forests of Ohio than the hay and corn that dot it today.
Jackson pointed to the great attention focused on the problems of soil conservation in Bromfield's time - not only by Bromfield and Aldo Leopold, but also by the pioneering generation of the Soil Conservation Service. He then spoke with sadness about how little was accomplished by these men - how the problem of soil erosion remains substantially the same today as it did back then. Thinking of Piers Blaikie (who played an important role in founding the discipline of political ecology by arguing that discourses of soil erosion in developing countries were more often attempts by certain adminstrative elites to channel the practices of peasants into practices from which rents could be more easily extracted than genuine concerns about soil losses, which were at best undocumented, and at worst nonexistent), and of the implementation literature in public administration (which attempts to understand why policies fail to have their intended effects), I asked Jackson after his talk if he could point me to any history which might explain this failure. Jackson told me that his forthcoming book addresses this issue head on. The problem, according to Jackson is annuals. In other words, our agricultural technology - annual plants - is doomed to create soil erosion, and there is nothing social institutions can do about it.
As a student of Elinor Ostrom (and less directly, of Piers Blaikie!) I find myself pretty skeptical. First, one has to ask why, if perennial agriculture is so promising, the USDA or land grant colleges or the Farm Bureau have not pursued funding it. It is not hard to imagine that all of these institutions could be disempowered by Jackson's radical approach, and therefore might look unfavorably upon it. And if this is the case now, will similar forces stifle the next stage of related innovation? Is soil erosion really such a serious problem, as Wes Jackson has argued, or is it, as Piers Blaikie has argued, an excuse for bureaucrats and well-meaning elites to dominate over peasants and extract their wealth from them? At the same time, I still am not sure that perennial agriculture would solve the problem of soil erosion if it is serious. As I pointed out, perennial agriculture is no more natural to Ohio than soybeans. And perennial agriculture would still require weed controls - an increasing problem, as noted by today's New York Times piece on the rapid evolution of roundup resistant pigweeds and ragweeds. I admit, however, that I remain fairly ignorant of the details of Jackson's plans, which sound pretty amazing (he brought with him a bag of wheat flour ground from a new perennial plant created by long breeding work with wild wheat relatives). I hope to learn more in the future, although at the moment I've got a bunch of other projects on my plate.
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