Eating Locally

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle written by Barbara Kingsolver details the authors one-year experiment to eat only locally grown food on her childhood farm in Appalachia. While many people do not have access to a farm nor the ability to take a year off to grow their own food, Kingsolver's book inspires people to think more locally about their food.  She also includes recipes in her book that are practical, delicious, and transferable to normal cooks across the country. Her book made me think about how we can incorporate local eating in Cache Valley and I researched several business that are devoted to this concept.  I hope this research will inspire you to support local agriculture.

Central Milling

 

Central Milling is located at 122 East Center Street in Logan, Utah.  The company began milling in 1867 and remains one of the oldest businesses in Utah.  Central Milling buys its grains from Western farmers and produces organic flours using hydroelectricity.  Several local businesses use Central Milling products in their efforts to bring the farm to the table. You can learn more about this company and its products through this link Central Milling.

Crumb Brothers Bakery

 

Crumb Brothers Artesian Breads crafts its delicious bread from organic flour largely produced by Central Milling. Located at 291 South 300 West in Logan, Utah, the bakery occupies the first commercial building in the city designed to use geothermal heat which reduces energy consumption.  A visit to the café and bakery is well worth the time. The atmosphere is inviting, the staff helpful and the commitment to community important, You can learn more about artesian bread, the café, and the local businesses it supports through this link Crumb Brothers Artesian Bread.

Gibbons Green Gate Farm

Gibbons Green Gate Farm is an operating farm that began by selling local grown beef.  They have since added a family-atmosphere café that quite possibly makes the best farm breakfast in the valley.  Operated by the Gibbons family, customers are greeted like old friends, and in addition to the farm breakfast, the cook supplies different specials each Saturday morning.  The waffle and peaches special was divine.  The farm uses local companies including Central Milling in its amazing menu.  Everyone should experience a breakfast on the farm.  You can find out more information about the products and services offered at Gibbons Gibbons Green Gate Farm. Green Gate Farm located at 4680 North 800 West, Smithfield, Utah through this link Gibbons Green Gate Farm.

Farm Breakfast at the Carriage House on Gibbons Green Gate Farm.

 

Cache Valley provides many opportunities to join the eat local movement and the companies listed above are a few of the businesses that incorporate local agriculture.  Everyone who visits the valley soon discovers its amazing link to dairy and cheese products.  A future post will look into the amazing local dairy products available.

Grandma Mort's Ginger Snaps

 

The original recipe in Grandma Mort's writing.

I am of the opinion that the best food in the world comes out of a farm kitchen.  As we near Thanksgiving and Christmas, my mind turns to the cookies I made with my Grandma Mortenson. The thoughts of a warm kitchen, the smell of spices, and the image of her beautiful arthritic hands rolling balls of dough in sugar feed my soul like nothing else can.  Her coveted cookie recipe is posted below.  Take the time this season to make some memories with someone you love.

 

Grandma Mort's Ginger Snaps

 

1 1/2 cup shortening
1/2 cup molasses
2 eggs
2 cups sugar
2 tsp. cloves
2 tsp. ginger
2 tsp. cinnamon
4 tsp. baking soda
1 cup flour

Mix together and roll into balls the size of a walnut then dip into sugar.
Bake at 375 degrees for 7-10 minutes.



 Maddie & Tae's A Girl in a Country Song

 

 

 

Farmer's daughters and country girls know what its like to be stereo typed as "hotties" without brains.  Maddie & Tae address the issue with some amazing lyrics, a great beat, and a message for the male artists in the country music business. I'm all for Twitty and Straight (6th verse) because they did know how to treat a lady.

 

Well, I wish I had some shoes
On my two bare feet
And it's getting kinda cold
In these painted on cut-off jeans
I hate the way this bikini top chafes
Do I really have to wear it all day

Yeah, baby

I hear you over there
On your tailgate whistlin'
Sayin', "Hey, Girl"
But you know I ain't listenin'
'Cause I got a name
And to you, it ain't "pretty little thing",
"Honey", or "baby"
It's driving me red-red-red-red-red-red-redneck crazy

Being the girl in a country song
How in the world did it go so wrong
Like all I'm good for is lookin' good for
You and your friends on the weekend, nothin' more
We used to get a little respect
Now we're lucky if we even get
To climb up in your truck
Keep our mouths shut, and ride along
And be the girl in a country song

Well, shakin' my moneymaker
Ain't never made me a dime
And there ain't no sugar for you
In this shaker of mine
Tell me one more time
You gotta get you some of that
Sure, I'll slide on over
But you're gonna get slapped
Ha, these days, it ain't easy bein' that

Girl in a country song
How in the world did it go so wrong
Like all I'm good for is lookin' good for
You and your friends on the weekend, nothin' more
We used to get a little respect
Now we're lucky if we even get
To climb up in your truck
Keep our mouths shut, and ride along
And be the girl in a country song

Yep, yep, yeah, baby

Aw, naw, Conway and George Strait
Never did it this way
Back in the old days
All y'all, we ain't a cliche
That ain't no way
To treat a lady

Like a girl in a country song
How in the world did it go so wrong
Like all I'm good for is lookin' good for
You and your friends on the weekend, nothin' more
Whoo! We used to get a little respect
Now we're lucky if we even get
To climb up in your truck
Keep our mouths shut, and ride along
Down some old dirt road we don't even want to be on
And be the girl in a country song

I ain't your tan-legged Juliet!
Can I put on some real clothes now?
Aw, naw
*giggling*



It's a Girl Thing

The view from the hayfield.
 

The first five children in my family are girls. We grew up farming and working alongside the men in my family and the need to cultivate the land runs in our blood. My younger sister Cindy owns an alfalfa farm and operates it with her three daughters. I visited her farm and interviewed her about the role the land and farming plays in her life. Our interview, along with pictures of her farm, follows.

Q. Why did you decide to become a farmer? What did you like about the way of life?
A. Because I love the type of work and the way of life. What I like most about the way of life is that the profession is family oriented. I like working a long side my husband and children. I like being able to teach them to work, that we don't quit working until the job is done. I like that every day I get to do something different. I like the seasons. There is a good variety in the jobs that have to be done and in the skills required to do them. I like pushing myself to accomplish all that has to be done in a day and to be able to look at my work and see that I've accomplished something worthwhile. I like that farming is variable, risky and requires hard work. That keeps it fresh. I love to be outside.

Q. Do you do what some people would consider men's work? If so how do you view that work, as gender specific or just work?
A. Yes. And yes I view it as gender specific because men and some women remind me that it is men's work. I don't let that stop me from doing what I love. I hate it when someone tells me that I can't do something because its a man's job. I hate it even worse when they assume I can't do it. I view the work as a challenge. I think there are some types of work that men are better at than women and vice versa. Other than men having more physical strength I haven't come across a farming job that I think women couldn't do.


Swathing the hay.

Baling the hay.

Q. What has farming taught you?
A. Farming has taught me to be a hard worker. To have determination, persistence, faith and optimism. It has taught me to be a better conservationist. To always keep learning and expanding my knowledge base. To take risks but to be conservative also. It has taught me that I can do anything that I set my mind to. Where there's a will there's a way. It has taught me not to procrastinate. It has taught me to appreciate the small things in life and to enjoy the moments and to live the journey. It has taught me to appreciate the good days and trudge through the bad.

Q. Can farming support you economically? If not why?
A. No. Because it takes more $ than you make.

Q. What do you hope to pass on to your daughters about farming and their legacy?
A. I hope that they will have a very good work ethic. That they will learn to love family, the land, the livestock, God and that they can do anything.

Q. Does farming give you a sense of place meaning do you feel a greater tie to nature or the land? If so how?
A. Yes. Because without the land and the renewable resources required to farm you don't farm. You have to manage it correctly to sustain it. Choices made today are going to effect outcomes not only tomorrow but years down the road. 


My farming nieces.

 

WEEDS: A FARM DAUGHTER'S LAMENT

 

Authors Note: I wrote this piece as part of my final paper for a graduate seminar on Western Memoir at Utah State University taught by the exceptional Dr. Melody Graulich.  I wanted to include a portion of it on my blog because it is this book, and Melody's sincere belief that I had stories to tell, that sparked my interest in the study of women and farming.





My farmer father made no secret about being disappointed that God didn’t give him sons.  After having five daughters in a row, he was convinced that he was a modern day Job.  Instead of accepting his fate, he decided to play the hand he was dealt by making his daughters into farmers. While he never tired of telling others about how the Davis girls were “top hands” and worked harder than most of the boys in the county, he never praised his daughters for their hard work and spent most of his time instructing them on how to do it better.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I always knew that no amount of work, no level of perfection, would ever make up for me not being born a boy.  This idea influenced my identity and fueled my desire to succeed but what I didn’t understand until recently is it did the same thing for other farm daughters. I made this discovery when I read Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament written by Evelyn Funda for an  graduate seminar on Western memoir. Her experiences as woman in a rural farming community were hauntingly familiar and I was instantly taken with her prose.

In her memoir, Funda writes about her life as the only daughter of an Idaho farmer.  She shows her reader how being born a girl on a farm shaped her personal identity and confronts the role gender bias played in her life.  Funda titles her chapters after types of weeds found on her family farm in Idaho and uses their characteristics to echo her life experiences and her identity as a farm daughter. The metaphor effectively sets her apart as a living organism rooted to a land that was never meant to embrace her existence.

This methodology is readily apparent in the first chapter of her book titled Dodder. It is here we learn how family convention kept Funda out of the field, confined to traditional female farming roles and influenced her early identity. Funda reinforces her use of weed as metaphor when she recounts emptying out her childhood home after the death of her parents. During this process, she comes across an information pamphlet written for farmers about the noxious weed dodder. “I was a grown woman before I discovered that the word for dodder, the brightly colored Medusa-headed weed my father righteously battled on our farm, was not spelled, as I had always assumed, d-a-u-g-h-t-e-r” (8). She goes on to provide a botanical explanation of dodder as an indestructible parasitic plant incapable of independent existence.  The survival of dodder is solely dependent on the nutrients it sucks from its host plant.

Funda’s passage about the physical characteristics of dodder further engrains the weed in the mind’s eye as part woman. “With its brilliant curling tendrils of gold and auburn and strawberry blond, dodder does have about it a fiendish, feminine beauty” (10).  It is easy to imagine the weed as a wild woman’s wayward locks. The complexity surrounding these images increases when you consider that the common names for dodder, such as maiden's hair, witches' shoelaces, lovevine and witches hair are also rooted in the feminine.

When I think of dodder in terms of imagery, I see my great-grandmother bent double over the galvanized steel tub we used to pluck the chickens in during the fall butchering season.  Her hands are moving so fast I forget she is 80 and struggle to keep pace. Her hair, once thick and deep auburn, is now thin and white and tendrils are escaping her bun.  I look at her and watch the wind unwind her curls as tiny pin feathers float around her.   This is my Grammy’s witches hair. I’ve often thought about this scene because I recall it with perfect clarity.

Grammy was a farmer’s daughter too. She married a farmer and gave him a daughter, my father’s mother.   Did she feel inadequate because she was a girl? Was she disappointed to have a daughter? Did she know, like I did, that her existence was a disappointment? It may be difficult for people born outside of rural communities to understand the complexities of the weed/woman metaphor but Funda explains it beautifully with the following line “Yet that essential misconception of equating dodder and daughter, however, unfounded it was, has long ago engrained in me an analogy I found hard to shake, one where the boundaries between two things, weed and woman, are permeable and fluid” (9).

What contributed to the formation of this analogy? We may get insight into this when Funda discusses the gender bias that exists between fathers and daughters on farms when she talks about her birth as told by her father.

Whenever my father spoke of my birth, he never failed to begin the story with the words of his own father.  With something strangely akin to pride, he used to say his father Frank has admonished my mother when she was pregnant with me, “If it’s a girl, you send it back!” My father would laugh then add, “But once you were here, he wouldn’t have traded you for the world. (12)

Men wanting sons to carry on their names and legacies isn’t new, but on family farms this need seems more urgent.  As Funda recounts the frankness in which her gender is discussed by the men in her family, the reader can’t help but sense that her birth as a female was somehow marked by disappointment.  The idea that being born a girl to a farmer somehow makes a daughter “less” is woven into her personal narrative before she even draws breath and plays a key role in shaping her personal identity. The place of women in the daily operation of farm life also influenced my personal identity.  Farming communities embrace the roles of men as bread winners and women as bread makers as essential aspects of American family values.  

Nothing Runs Like a Deere

A wood crate with a John Deere logo has a prominent place on my front porch.  Before I took Dr. Funda's class, I never thought about the crate or its' logo.  However, when I passed it the other day I couldn't help but notice that the logo was different than the logo that appears on the side of my riding lawn mower.  I decided to do a little research and discovered that the John Deere logo on this crate is the company logo from 1936 and was only used for one year.

In fact, the John Deere logo has its own history and timeline which became of particular interest to me when I thought about it as a representation of visual rhetoric in American farming culture.  I discovered that the first logo or trademark of a leaping deer was registered by the company in 1876 and the last change to the trademark occurred in 2000.  The company website identifies the leaping deer trademark as "one of the world’s most recognized corporate logos" and tells the story of its evolution.

The logo has changed eight times in the last 135 years.  The logos, along with the date they were first introduced, are as follows:

2000

 While the company website notes the reasoning for each change in its trademark over the years, the information about the most recent logo was particularly interesting and reads as follows:

The style and shape is reflective of today's technology world: bolder, stronger, high technology oriented. In the symbol itself, the deer's feet are rooted firmly into the ground for a strong leap into the new millennium. The body, head and antlers have a purposeful attitude, a sense of direction and a clear commitment to taking charge by running smart.

 

Breakfast at Gibbons Green Gate Farm

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to join some of my fellow graduate instructors for breakfast at the Gibbons Green Gate Farm in Smithfield, Utah.  A perfect autumn morning in Cache Valley was made all the more charming by the atmosphere at the farm. Our breakfast was prepared from fresh  ingredients in the kitchen located off of the dining area and our friendly hosts served  breakfast family style. I had a lovely morning talking with my colleagues about the joys of graduate school.  

 

The farm breakfast was delicious.

The Carriage House Kitchen at Gibbons Green Gate Farm.

Apple Picking

My son picking apples.

In my family, fall wouldn’t be fall without apple picking. It just happens that the property I live on has a tiny old-growth apple orchard and this year the women in my family gathered to celebrate our favorite fall fruit. We picked one bushel of Golden Delicious apples and two bushels of Macintosh.  Watching my nieces and son pick apples with my mother reminded me of my childhood and I was overcome with nostalgia for my own grandmother who used to send me to the top of the ladder to get the apples she couldn’t reach.  As long as I can remember, picking apples and making deserts with them has been part of my harvest tradition.

My grandmother also passed down her recipe for apple pie filling which follows: 

 







A batch of apple pie filling done.

Apple Pie Filling

4 1/2 cups white sugar
1 cup cornstarch
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons salt
10 cups water
3 tablespoons lemon juice
2 drops yellow food coloring
6 pounds apples

Directions:

In a large pan, mix sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon and nutmeg. Add salt and water and mix well. Bring to a boil and cook until thick and bubbly. Remove from heat and add lemon juice and food coloring. Sterilize canning jars, lids and rings by boiling them in a large pot of water. Peel, core, and slice apples. Pack the sliced apples into hot canning jars, leaving a 1/2 inch headspace. Fill jars with hot syrup, and gently remove air bubbles with a knife. Put lids on and process in a water bath canner for 20 minutes.





A bushel of Macintosh apples picked from my orchard.

Carmel apples for dessert.

Women’s Work

During the early 20^th century, society clearly defined a woman’s role inside of the domestic sphere.  Despite this, Willa Cather and Elinore Pruitt Stewart wrote about the personal empowerment women achieved through physical labor on a farm which was a sphere traditionally occupied by men. Many academics have written about Willa Cather’s reversal of gender roles in My Ántonia and noted that Cather creates one of the first feminist heroines in modern American literature.  Recently, I had the opportunity to revisit the novel and was struck by the images of Antonia working alongside men on the farm and being proud of her strength.

Nowadays Tony could talk of nothing but the prices of things, or how much she could lift and endure. She was too proud of her strength. I knew, too, that Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do, and that the farm-hands around the country joked in a nasty way about it. (Cather 100)

I was particularly interested in how closely Antonia’s experiences echoed the real life narration of Elinore Pruitt Stewart in Letters from a Woman Homesteader.

Well, we had no money to hire men to do our work, so had to learn to do it ourselves. Consequently I learned to do many things which girls more fortunately situated don't even know have to be done. Among the things I learned to do was the way to run a mowing-machine. . . But one morning, when he was chasing a last hope of help, I went down to the barn, took out the horses, and went to mowing. I had enough cut before he got back to show him I knew how, and as he came back manless he was delighted as well as surprised. I was glad because I really like to mow, and besides that, I am adding feathers to my cap in a surprising way. (Pruitt Stewart 227-237)

Both Cather, through Antonia, and Pruitt Stewart find personal fulfillment by working in the field and open for women the possibility of independence through farming.  For centuries, men have dictated woman’s roles in society. Despite great strides by women towards equality, gender bias in rural communities is still prevalent in the American West.  I grew up in a farming community that embraced the roles of men as bread winners and women as bread makers as an essential aspect of American family values.  In spite of this, there are still women today, like Cather’s heroine and Pruitt Stewart, who refuse to be defined by these roles.  My mother is one such woman and I am proud of the working legacy she passed along to me and my sisters.

Works Cited

Willa, Cather. My Antonia. New York: Penguin, 1994. Print.

Pruitt Stewart, Elinore  (2012-01-16). LETTERS OF A WOMAN HOMESTEADER (Illustrated) (Kindle Locations 227-229 & 235-237).  . Kindle Edition.

Found Poetry in The Grapes of Wrath

In Chapter Six of Farm: A Multimodal Reader the authors discuss found poetry in the inter-chapters of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.  Found poetry is writing a passage of prose out in poetry form.  I chose prose from Chapter 7 for my poem.

 

A Hundred Jalopies

Hot sun on rusted metal,
Oil on the ground.
Tires, used, bruised tires,
Stacked in tall cylinders.
Got a Lincoln ’24.
There’s a car.
Radiator cleaner?
Spark intensifier?
Wipers, fan belts, gaskets?
Spattering roar of ancient engines.
Row on row, headlights
glinting in the afternoon sun.
Good Used Cars.

 

 

 

 

Elinor Pruitt Stewart

 as Jefferson's Farmer-Citizen

Except for the occasional paragraph devoted to Sacajawea’s role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition, women and their contribution to the settlement of the American frontier are largely absent from the history books I grew up studying.  Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s excerpts from Letters of a Woman Homesteader are a reminder that women did play a critical role in the development of farming culture in the West.  Stewart’s letters, in particular, provide us with a glimpse into the life of a woman who embodied the virtues endorsed by Thomas Jefferson and entwined in farming mythology. 

Elinore Pruitt Stewart operates a hay maker at her ranch in Burntfork, located in Sweetwater County, in 1925. It was not uncommon for ranch women of the time to help with field work in addition to keeping house and rearing children. (Courtesy of Sweetwater County Historical Museum) http://trib.com/elinore-pruitt-stewart

In her letter dated January 23, 1913, Stewart writes Mrs. Coney “At the same time, any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end” (Kinkead, Funda, and McNeill 132).  This passage reveals the similarities Stewart had with the men who came west before her including a desire for land ownership and the security provided through self-reliance.  Stewart’s writing reinforces the idea that the quest for the American Dream isn’t gender specific.  Both men and women possessed the pioneering spirit that helped define our farming culture.

In the nineteenth and twentieth century, women willingly left the domestic sphere to improve their economic and social circumstances by homesteading the West.  Stewart’s desire to own her land independently of her husband supports the idea that women were capable of owning and operating their own farms.  Stewart goes further by expressing joy in this activity and writing about her pride in a successful harvest.

Thomas Jefferson writes "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds” (Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1785. ME 5:94, Papers 8:426).  Stewarts tie to the land she homesteaded in southwestern Wyoming is obvious and deep.  She loves the land and she loves farming.  Her maternal pride in her daughter’s ability to grow her own potato crop at the age of six represents a female agriculture legacy that should be more fully celebrated in American Studies.

As our text points out, the correspondence between Stewart and Coney occurred during a period in history that focused on the working conditions of women and children in industrial factories and was published as a book “within context of a national dialogue” (Kinkead, Funda and McNeill 130).  The work also contributes to a larger discussion about women succeeding and thriving independently on American farms. Literature about women in the American studies often represents them in stereotypical gender roles and farming today still remains a largely male dominated profession.  It is important to open the discussion to include the successes of female farmers as independent business owners and agricultural stewards. 

Works Cited

Kinkead, Joyce, Evelyn Funda, and Lynne S. McNeill. Farm: A Multimodal Reader. Southlake:Fountainhead, 2014. Print.

Women in Ken Burns' The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl, a film by Ken Burns for PBS 2012.

In his documentary The Dust Bowl, Ken Burns focuses on female homesteader, Caroline Henderson, as an example of a farmer who endures the largest environmental disaster in modern American farming history.  Burns’ portrayal of Henderson as a person who dreamed of owning her own piece of land and the hardships she overcame in the process brings feminine insight to the view that homesteaders were predominately male.  Burns uses Henderson’s writing about life as a homesteader and wheat farmer to narrate much of the film.  His decision to choose the words of a female writer as representative of farmers’ experiences in the dust bowl implies a certain gender bias. However, the viewer comes away from the film with the perception that the hardships, in addition to being an experience defined by male and female roles, were also part of a larger human experience. The narration serves, in a sense, to bring together both males and females as equal players in ecological tragedy.

Burns devotes a portion of the documentary to the female dominated domestic sphere when he examines the futility of keeping the inside of the home clean over a decade of dust storms. The images of women sweeping dust out of the interior of their homes, hanging wet sheets around windows and setting dishes upside down on the table remind the viewer that the consequences of the great plow up effected professional and domestic, male and female spheres equally. We also see the equal treatment of gender in the stories of men and women who, whether because of financial difficulties or domestic struggles, committed suicide to find relief from the madness the dust bowl created in their lives.

The film concludes with a look at Henderson’s life after the dust bowl. Burns’ points out that she never sold out or left her land despite the trials she faced.  She stood as a symbol of character in a male dominated occupation. He also discusses how her experiences in the 1930’s affected the rest of her and her husband’s lives as farmers.  She refused to irrigate her land after the Ogallala aquifer was accessed and lived a simple life within her means. Henderson seemed grasp the lesson that other men struggled to learn; that nature was ultimately in control of no man’s land on the prairie and man was not.

Living the Dust Bowl

My grandmother, Naomi Fisher Davis and
 her brother Frank Fisher, Oklahoma circa 1931.
 

I remember clearly the first time I heard about dust storms.  I was sitting on a red step stool watching my Grandmother Davis standing against the kitchen sink peeling potatoes. I was always fascinated by how she could peel a potato so thin that you could see the knife blade beneath the skin.  I remember asking her where she learned to do that, and she told me about the Great Depression and the dust storms that forced her family to migrate to Idaho in the 1930’s.  She told me she learned to peel potatoes so thinly because there was no food, and you didn’t waste anything.  “If you ate potatoes and carrots for supper, you soaked the peels in water overnight so you could fry them in bacon grease if you had it, for the morning.”  My question about why she didn’t have any food prompted her to tell me about how the dust had taken over the farm land Kansas.

Her stories about blowing dust always frightened me but, as most curious children do, I would pelt her with questions about what it was like.   She told me the dust would blow in and block out the sun so it was so black that she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face.  She also told about how she and her mother would stuff wet rags underneath the doors to keep the dust out of the house and how she and my uncle would wear bandanas over their nose and mouth so they could breathe.  Nothing captured my imagination or crept into my dreams like the stories about dust storms.  I remember asking her what the dust was like, and she compared it to flour.  “Imagine if someone just came in the house and dumped flour all over the floor, 4 inches thick.  That’s what the dust was like, flour.”

None of her stories could prepare me for the impact that Ken Burns’ “The Dust Bowl”, a PBS documentary, had on my understanding of my grandmother’s childhood.  The images of dust clouds roiling miles in the air and descending to engulf everything in their wake into darkness made her childhood real to me in a way that nothing else had.  I understood that I could never make sense of how frightened she must have been or how desperate the situation was to make her grandmother and mother, both single women, pack up everything they owned to travel to somewhere, anywhere else. 

In my teenage years, I used to wonder what would possess someone to settle in the Bear Lake Valley because I was positive it was 50 miles past the middle of nowhere.  How could a valley forsaken by modern times and lagging 20 years behind the rest of the world be the place you would want to settle for the rest of your life? I realize now that it must have appeared to be a paradise with a blue glacier lake at its center; promising these women a life free from the drought that caused the dust to blow.

One Woman's Farming Legacy 

 

To say that farming is part of my genetic make-up is to give credit to the generations of my family who cultivated the West before me.  I am a fifth generation agricultural daughter and the farming legacy handed down from my ancestors makes up a large portion of my identity.   This blog examines thoughts and reflections about American farming.  I chose to format the blog after a scrapbook in order to incorporate photos and stories from my family history along with reflections and musing from Dr. Evelyn Funda’s graduate class titled “Literature and Culture of the American Farm” which I am currently enrolled in at Utah State University (USU).

I am particularly interested in farming’s relationship to woman’s studies.  The last four generations of women in my family have lived and worked on farms in Idaho and Utah.  A woman’s perspective about farming and surviving off the land is a unique and important, though sometimes overlooked, part of farm discourse.  While not every post can be written in relationship to women and farming, I hope the majority of posts here bring a female perspective to the topics we discuss in Dr. Funda’s class.  I also feel an obligation to continue the legacy of the women who have gone before me and hope to do that by telling part of their stories here.