Got Lactase?

Randall Stephens

In a recent issue of Nature, Andrew Curry offers up the latest theories on milk and civilization in the West.  How and why did ancient herders supplement their diets with cheese roughly 6,800 to 7,400 years ago?  Who were these early cheese makers? What were the results of the new cheese diet and the later reliance on milk?

Says Curry:

farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.

Red Meat

Dan Allosso
.

I was thinking about writing a short post about all the academic history I’ve been finding at the bottom of some pretty popular books recently.  Alfred Crosby’s ideas about the Colombian exchange in Charles Mann’s 1491, for example.  Or Vaclav Smil’s story of the Haber-Bosch process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen, from his Enriching the Earth, in Simon Fairlie’s 2010 book, Meat: A Benign Extravagance.  Maybe it’s no coincidence that these are both canonical environmental history texts (they were both on my field list, thanks to my EH advisor, Ted Melillo).  Perhaps because their interest is on the edge of science, readers of popular books on environmental issues are more open to the fairly dense technical arguments.  Maybe it’s easier to move ideas from academic books to popular.  But I’m not so sure.  Science writers often have a lot of skill taking excruciatingly complicated stuff and making it comprehensible to the rest of us.  Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, Matt Ridley, and Colin Tudge are just a few of the names that jump to mind.  Richard Dawkins was Oxford’s “Professor for Public Understanding of Science” until 2008.  We could probably learn a thing or two from these authors.

And Simon Fairlie’s book is part of this tradition.  Fairlie is a British farmer and writer, and a former editor of the British environmental journal The Ecologist.  His book about meat’s place in the food chain draws heavily on Vaclav Smil’s work on nitrogen fixation, and digs a little more deeply into the downside of the green revolution Smil describes.  But the thing that really jumped out at me as I read Meat was Fairlie’s response to the famous food-mile study that stunned us all a few years ago. 

Blueberries

Dan Allosso

When I read old books, I’m always on the lookout for references to other old books, or to topics that were relevant when the book was written, but that may not be well known now.  These sometimes lead in new and surprising directions.  There were several things in Bolton Hall’s Three Acres and Liberty, the book that launched the back-to-the-land movement in 1907, that seemed to deserve more investigation.  The thing that really jumped out at me, though, was a passing remark he made about blueberries.

In spite of being a hardy native plant that the Indians had harvested from time immemorial, Hall says “with our present knowledge of the blueberry, it is doubtful if it can be made a commercially cultivated crop.”  This surprised me, since one of my family’s favorite activities when we lived out East was picking blueberries at a big berry farm in the shadow of Mount Monadnock.  But Bolton Hall was no dummy.  Three Acres and Liberty describes a variety of intensive gardening techniques that are popular today (and that many people think were invented by their current proponents), including the use of manure instead of commercial fertilizers; “super close culture,” where plants are set very close together to use the land and water efficiently and keep down weeds; “companion cropping” and “double cropping,” to extend the growing season; rotation to reduce the impact of pests; soil inoculation using nitrogen-fixing legumes (just recently discovered when he wrote); mulching to save water; raising chickens, ducks and rabbits to use waste and produce food and manure; canning and drying to preserve even small quantities of food; and even disposal of city sewage by using human waste on urban gardens.  So I had to believe he was right about blueberries not being commercially viable in 1907.  And of course, the obvious next question was, when did this change?

Good Fences

Dan Allosso

Robert Frost famously epitomized New Englanders with the wry phrase, “Good fences make good neighbors.”  But even if your neighbors are far enough away for comfort and you like them, fences have their uses.  I’ve been thinking about these as I continue to work on 19th-century American history while starting up a small farm in the upper Midwest.  It’s interesting, because I suspect I’m living through a moment of historic change, and it’s all about fences.

In addition to influencing the relationships of neighbors, I’m learning fences have a number of other uses on the farm.  Of course, they help keep your animals where you want them.  And hopefully they help keep predators off your animals.  And they may keep wildlife off your vegetables, although hungry deer will jump any fence less than eight feet high.  Less obviously, though, fences define our relationship to the land and the uses we can put it to.

Most everyone is familiar with the story of the colonial split-rail fence.  There’s one on the cover of William Cronon’s Changes in the Land.  The rail fence, roughly cut from the timber settlers needed to clear in order to turn wild eastern forest into farmland, symbolizes European ideas of land use and ownership that settlers brought with them and imposed on the environment and the natives they found there.

This style of fencing was cheap and easy where settlers found trees needing to be cleared.  I took this photo at the Genesee Country Village and Museum in western New York.  This section of the museum represents life around the year 1800, when farming was a family enterprise done with ox, horse, and human power (I spent a 4th of July weekend in that cabin with my family as "The 1800 Farm Family").  An energetic farmer could clear about seven acres of land in a year, and often the family farmstead was split between a small cultivated field, a pasture for grazing animals, and a woodlot for fuel.  As families moved west, however, they discovered plains of prairie grasses that towered over the heads of children like Laura Ingalls.  The wooden fences of the East were impractical in many parts of the Midwest, where lumber came from far away at great expense, and was reserved for building things like houses, barns, churches and saloons.  And without internal combustion and irrigation, much of the land farther west was unfit for cultivation, but ideal for grazing if the animals could just be contained.

Joseph Glidden (1813-1906) was a New Englander who moved to Illinois in 1843.  He patented barbed wire in 1873 and died a millionaire.  Among his holdings were 335,000 acres in Texas: range land that his invention had allowed to be fenced.  The enclosure of the rangelands is one of the mythic moments in the story of the American West.  Through books and movies like The Virginian (1902), Oklahoma (1943), Shane (1953), Heaven’s Gate (1980), and Open Range (2003), it is as central to popular western history as Frederick Jackson Turner’s comments about the closing of the frontier are to the academic West.  Barbed wire fences dramatically expanded our ability to affordably control very large spaces.  Once again, Americans were able to impose our vision on the land (and also, once again, on the Indians).

Fences remain important to farmers, and their use is still a complicated affair.  Cattle and horses can be grazed on pasture enclosed by a few strands of barbed wire.  Sheep, with thick fleeces to protect them, will go through barbed wire.  Goats are even harder to contain – there’s an old saying that if your fence won’t hold water, it won’t hold goats.  And although chickens will usually come back home in the evening, there are a lot of varmints out there that will eat them in the meantime if they aren’t protected by a fence.  Farmers have used woven wire, hardware cloth, rigid panels, and electric wire to contain and protect animals.  Each comes at a price, and it adds up: a decent four-foot high sheep and goat fence will run you over a dollar a foot.  So these fences tended to be expensive and permanent.  Most small farmers use and endlessly reuse a variety of materials based on what they can get cheap, and hoard the bits they aren’t currently using.

As sustainability and soil depletion have come into sharper focus in recent years, innovative farmers have rediscovered what the old-timers knew before the age of chemical fertilizer: pastures will support a larger number of animals if they are grazed in succession.  Sheep and goats prefer to eat different plants than cows, so they can coexist with cattle on a pasture without competing.  And then the poultry can follow, eating bugs out of the droppings; which not only breaks up the fertilizer and spreads it over the fields, but also actually reduces the number of parasites and pathogens.  This is a win-win-win, the animals are better off, the farmer produces a larger quantity and wider variety of protein on a given plot of land, and the land itself is improved in the process.  The only catch is, you have to enclose and protect all these different types of creatures!  

That’s where the story gets interesting.  The cost of fencing has traditionally made it difficult for farmers to fence appropriately for intensive pasturing, and the effort involved in setting and moving fences has made land use inflexible.  But recently, battery-powered low-impedance fence chargers and moveable electric fences have changed the game again for small farms.  Deep-cycle batteries like the ones in your boat or RV can run miles of low-cost electric tape, twine or netting.  They can even be hooked to solar chargers.  And they’re easy to set up and move, allowing farmers to raise temporary paddocks and move animals as quickly or slowly as needed over the land.

This may not seem like such a big deal, but I think it may turn out to be.  The world’s food supply depends heavily on fossil fuels, both for transportation and for the production of synthetic fertilizers like anhydrous ammonia.  It currently takes fifteen calories of energy to put a calorie of food on your table.  If there’s any truth to either climate change or peak oil, multi-thousand acre cornfields and factory-style feedlots may turn out to be as much of a twentieth-century anomaly as McMansions and jet-setting to conferences.  But it has been suggested that the world’s food needs could be met by intensive techniques combining grazing with gardening.  Farmers like Joel Salatin claim that not only would intensive pasturing solve the world food problem, but “in fewer than ten years we would sequester all the atmospheric carbon generated since the beginning of the industrial age” (Folks, This Ain’t Normal, p. 195).  If true, this is a really big deal; and even if Salatin is not quite right about this, intensive pasturing still seems like a really good idea.  And these new fences make it possible.  That could be historic.

Advice to Farmers

Dan Allosso

People have been giving advice to farmers throughout American history.  Sometimes farmers themselves have written about their favorite techniques or innovations, but often experts have tried to compile the “best practices” of the past and add new ideas developed by scientists and technologists.  The progressive era amped up this process, and turned the USDA and land grant “Agricultural and Technical” universities into big producers of information for rural people.

But that process is a story for another day.  Today, what caught my attention is an old (1880) book I found in the UMass library stacks, called Farming for Profit (online here).  Written by John Elliot Read (who claims in the introduction to be “a practical farmer, acquainted with the details of farm management, and thoroughly used to manual labor”), the book promises to show “How to Make Money and Secure Health and Happiness on the Farm.”  I think it’s interesting that even a volume designed to be an “Encyclopedic” and “Comprehensive” source of “Mechanics” and “Business Principles” in 1880 puts the rural lifestyle front and center.

Farming for Profit is a fascinating combination of late-nineteenth century technique and culture—both of which can be compared with what came after.  At some point, I’m going to make a more thorough study of how the two elements of farm tech and farm life changed over time.  For right now, I thought these items were interesting:

In the illustration at the top, across from the title-page of the book, we get a more or less classical view of farm life—not of technology.  There are no new machines in the picture, and the buildings don’t even seem to be in the best repair.  The impression I get is of an ancient and venerable way of life.  Peaceful, slow-moving, and dignified.  Later in the book, there are more practical illustrations, like this diagram of an ideal farmstead.  And in another illustration, we see more evidence of a transition in farming: the first view is of corn plants (old-fashioned ones, not the super-hybrids we're used to seeing today) that have been “drilled or planted,” while the second shows corn planted in hills.  Hill-planting was the old technique colonists learned from the Indians, so it’s interesting that it still finds its way into a manual from 1880.  That suggests that maybe the author was a practical farmer with lots of experience in the fields.