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Malabar Farm
Louis Bromfield, Friends of the Land, and the Rise of Sustainable Agriculture
Anneliese Abbott
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eBook - ePub
Malabar Farm
Louis Bromfield, Friends of the Land, and the Rise of Sustainable Agriculture
Anneliese Abbott
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About This Book
How Malabar Farm pioneered soil conservation and grew the sustainable agriculture movement
Established in 1939 by Pulitzer Prizeâwinning author and farmer Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm was once considered "the most famous farm in the world." Farmers, conservationists, politicians, businessmen, and even a few Hollywood celebritiesâincluding Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who married thereâflocked to rural Ohio to see how Bromfield restored worn-out land to lush productivity using conservation practices. Permanent, sustainable agriculture, Bromfield preached, was the "New Agriculture" that would transform the postwar world.
Anneliese Abbott tells the story of Malabar Farm within the context of the wider histories of soil conservation and other environmental movements, especially the Ohio-based organization Friends of the Land. As one of the few surviving landmarks of this movement, which became an Ohio state park in 1976, Malabar Farm provides an intriguing case study of how soil conservation began, how it was marginalized during the 1950s, and how it now continues to influence the modern idea of sustainable agriculture.
To see Malabar strictly as a modern production farmâor a nature preserve, or the home of a famous novelistâoversimplifies the complexity of what Bromfield actually did. Malabar wasn't a conventional farm or an organic farm; it was both. It represents a middle ground that is often lacking in modern discussions about sustainability or environmental issues, yet it remains critically important. Today, as Malabar Farm State Park remains a working farm with a new interpretive center that opened in 2006, its importance and impact continue for current and future generations.
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Chapter 1
Louis Bromfield Comes Home
In the fading light of a clear winterâs day in 1938, the world-famous author Louis Bromfield knocked on a farmhouse door in northcentral Ohio. Accompanied by his wife, Mary, and his secretary, George Hawkins, Bromfield had been driving along narrow, winding country roads for most of the afternoon. âIt was already twilight and the lower Valley was the ice-blue color of a shadowed winter landscape at dusk and the black, bare trees on the ridge tops were tinted with the last pink light of the winter sunset,â Bromfield reminisced several years later. He had spent his childhood in this valley, and the sight of each hill and stream stirred up memories from the happy days of youth. But this was no mere nostalgic trip; Bromfield intended to settle his family here, far from the war that would soon engulf Europe. He finally stopped in front of an especially attractive farm, with the farmhouse perched halfway up a picturesque hill. âLike Brigham Young on the sight of the vast valley of Great Salt Lake, I thought, âThis is the place,ââ Bromfield said. Soon the door of the farmhouse opened, and out stepped the farmerâs wife to greet Bromfield. Behind her, a delicious fragrance wafted out from the farmhouse kitchenâa combination of wood smoke, apple butter, sausage, and pancakes. The smell brought back memories of his childhood, sharply and vividlyâand Louis Bromfield knew that he had come home.1
Forty years earlier, on December 27, 1896, Louis Bromfield had been born in the city of Mansfield, Ohio. His parents, Charles and Annette Brumfield, regarded his birth as nothing short of a miracle. After Annette had nearly died giving birth to her first son, the doctor told her that she would be unable to bear more children. When her second son was born healthy, Annette christened him âLewis Brucker Brumfieldâ; he would later change the spelling of his name to âLouis Bromfield.â According to Louis, before he was even born his strong-willed mother decided that her son should be a writer. She purchased an entire classical library and encouraged him to read and write as much as possible. Whether due to his motherâs âpre-natal influence,â Louis Bromfield indeed developed a love of writing and literature that stayed with him his entire life.2
The farmhouse Louis Bromfield saw that winter evening. (Malabar Farm archives, courtesy of Ohio Department of Natural Resources)
Bromfieldâs love for literature was matched only by his love for the land. His own family lived in town, but every Sunday they would harness up the horses and head out to his grandparentsâ farm on the outskirts of Mansfield. This land had been in his motherâs family since the late eighteenth century, when the first pioneers settled Ohio. Young Louis loved everything about this farm, especially the foodâfresh milk and cream from the cows, chicken and sausage, home-grown fruits and vegetables, pies, and maple syrup. He enrolled at Cornell Agricultural College in the fall of 1914 to study agriculture, intending to return to the family farm in Ohio after graduation. But he had completed only one semester at Cornell when he received news that his grandfather had broken his hip and could no longer run the farm. Louis returned to Mansfield and managed the farm, ânot too badly,â for a year. He quickly realized that he was too restless to be a farmer; he could not endure the thought of spending his whole life tied down to one piece of land. When his grandfather died and the farm began to struggle financially, Bromfield decided that writing was a wiser career choice. In 1916, the ancestral farm was sold, and Louis Bromfield left for the Columbia University School of Journalism.3
Ever restless, Bromfield never graduated from college. Before the end of his first year at Columbia, he left for France to serve as an ambulance driver in World War I. He stayed in France for a while after the war ended and then returned to the United States, where he began his writing career as a reporter in New York City. In New York, Bromfield fell in love with Mary Appleton Wood, a quiet woman from an upper-class New England family, and they were married in 1921. After working several other writing jobs, Bromfield published his first novel, The Green Bay Tree, in 1924. Set in a midwestern industrial town that was a fictionalized version of Mansfield, The Green Bay Tree was favorably received by readers and reviewers alike and launched Bromfieldâs career as a bestselling author. Louis Bromfield wrote more than thirty books in his lifetime, turning out nearly a novel a year during the 1920s, and quickly became one of the wealthiest and most famous American authors of the time. In 1927, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his 1926 novel Early Autumn, set in New England. One of his most famous books was The Rains Came (1937), about contemporary India, but many critics regarded his 1933 fictionalized autobiography, The Farm, as Bromfieldâs best novel ever.4
Louis and Mary Bromfield had three daughters: Anne, Hope, and Ellen. For over a decade, the Bromfield family made Senlis, France, their home base, though Louis Bromfield often traveled to England, New York, Hollywood, Switzerland, and India, sometimes taking Mary or his secretary, George Hawkins. Everyone considered Hawkins, who edited Bromfieldâs most successful novels, a member of the family. Jean White, the girlsâ nanny when they were young, was also an integral part of the Bromfield household. In Senlis, the Bromfields lived in the PresbytĂ©re de St. Etienne, an old house with a rich history that they leased from three elderly ladies. Louis Bromfield was happy in Senlis and might have stayed there for the rest of his life, if not for the impending threat of World War II. Louis sent Mary and the children back to America but was reluctant to leave France himself. Finally his good friend Louis Gillet urged him to return home. âThere is nothing you can do here,â Gillet urged. âGo home and tell your people. You can help France most by doing just that.â5
So, after wandering the world and gaining fame and wealth, Louis Bromfield returned home, to the land he had known as a child, to Pleasant Valley. In 1939, he purchased three adjoining farms, totaling 355 acresâthe Herring farm, where he had knocked on the door on that snowy evening; the adjacent Beck farm; and the high and lonely Ferguson farm. He added a marshy seventy-acre triangle of land called âThe Jungleâ in 1940 and a fourth farm, purchased from Laura Niman, in 1942, bringing the total to six hundred acres. Bromfield christened the combined property Malabar Farm, after the beautiful southwest coast of India where he had spent several happy months doing research for his popular novel The Rains Came.6
Bromfield family on a ship, 1932. From left: Louis, Anne, Hope, Mary, George Hawkins, Jean White. (Malabar Farm archives, courtesy of Ohio Department of Natural Resources)
Using the old Herring farmhouse as a nucleus, Bromfield commissioned a Mansfield architect named Louis Lamoreux to construct a one-of-a-kind dwelling called the âBig House,â which took a year and a half to build. Bromfield wanted the house to look like it had been added onto over many years, so it contained elements of architectural styles from many different periods of Ohio history. He found local craftsmen who were skilled woodworkers and could make every detail look authentic. The rooms were large, brightly colored, and designed specifically for each member of the family. Bromfield spared no expense in building the house, but it was meant to be lived in. As Lamoreux put it, âWith the aid of his dogs, many guests, children and the continual flow of activity, the place soon looked as if it had always been there.â7
Part of the reason Bromfield put so much time and care into the Big House was that he intended it to be his fortress. When he returned to Ohio, he was in a sense running away from the war and turmoil that was shaking the entire world. He wanted Malabar to be an old-fashioned âgeneralâ type of farm where everything that was served at the table had been grown in the fields outside. With the threat of war on the horizon, he foresaw rationing and possibly even food shortages. Bromfield wanted Malabar to produce practically everything: chicken, eggs, milk, butter, beef, pork, fruits, vegetables, assorted poultry, fish, maple syrup, honey, and more. He believed that the farm could support four or five families comfortably and lavishly, under a management system that he called âthe Plan.â Bromfieldâs Plan was modeled after the Russian collective farm, with Bromfield serving the role of the state. He would provide housing, electricity, heat, produce from the farm, and a salary to the workers and their families, and they would farm the land. Bromfield envisioned Malabar as a self-sufficient, secure, peaceful âisland of securityâ that could âwithstand a siege and where, if necessary, one could get out the rifle and shotgun for defense.â8
Bromfieldâs utopian vision of a productive, self-sufficient farm received a cruel blow when spring came. âWhen the snow was gone, I discovered that the valley of my childhood was no longer there. Something had happened to it,â he wrote later. Formerly fertile fields were barren and produced only scraggly, acid-loving vegetation. While some of the lower fields were still fairly productive, the steeper slopes suffered from severe soil erosion. Jagged gullies cut into the sides of the hill behind his new Big Houseâone was so large that Bromfieldâs newly hired farm manager, Max Drake, joked, âYou could lose a horse in it, bury it and nobody would ever know it was there.â Almost all of the original topsoil on the tallest hill in the region, which locals called âPoverty Nob,â had washed down onto the lower fields, creating a âsickly, unnatural marsh.â Later, Bromfield would find drainage tiles (usually installed just a couple feet deep) fifteen feet below the soilâs surface. He even dug up an old bridge that had been buried under six feet of displaced topsoil. And the hills on neighboring farms looked just as bad or even worse. In 1937, a reconnaissance survey of soil erosion in Ohio discovered that three-fourths of Ohioâs farmland was affected by soil erosion, 12 million acres had lost more than a quarter of their topsoil, and 1.6 million acres had âbeen rendered useless for farming.â In Richland County, where Malabar was located, most of the land had lost 25 to 75 percent of its original topsoil, with a gully every hundred feet or so on hilly land.9
The tragic story of what had happened to the topsoil started with the first arrival of European settlers in the New World. Early explorers brought back reports of a seemingly endless forest that covered half the North American continent, filled with an âinexhaustibleâ abundance of wildlife and other natural resources. To European observers, the Native Americans seemed to be ignoring or even wasting the landâs potential wealth. The reality was much more complicated; humans had modified the American landscape more than the colonists acknowledged. Many indigenous nations in the eastern US had extensive villages and settlements, including agricultural fields that were sometimes hundreds of acres in extent. Because they relied on hunting for meat instead of raising livestock, native peoples often managed portions of the forest using controlled burns and other methods to provide forage and habitat for game animals. But diseases accidentally introduced by European traders and explorers had drastically reduced indigenous populations, and most settlers did not recognize the role native management practices played in maintaining the abundance of wildlife and other natural resources they saw on the North American continent.10
Colonists considered it their first order of business to âcivilizeâ this wild land by trying to replicate the agricultural landscapes of Europe. Thus began âa transformation unlike any in the history of western civilization.â The forests fell to axe and saw, and the soils beneath them were torn by the plow and seeded with various cropsâeither European staples, like wheat, or crops adopted from the Native Americans, like corn and tobacco. The pioneers were extremely wasteful as they converted the forest into farmland. An estimated 90 percent of the continentâs original virgin stands of hardwood timber were clear-cut to make room for agriculture, and since there was no way to transport the wood to market, any of the enormous trees not used to build cabins or fences were rolled into huge piles and burned, âa vast initial sacrifice to progress.â11
With a few exceptionsâmost notably the Dutch and German settlers in New York and Pennsylvaniaâpioneers practiced an inherently exploitative form of agriculture. While some lauded the pioneers as industrious, self-sufficient, and ingenious, others noted that the individuals who migrated to the frontier were often the outcasts of society and knew little about proper soil management for long-term, sustainable farming. Usually the newly cleared land produced phenomenal harvests for several years, but then yields started to decline. As early as 1747, some formerly productive land in the eastern United States could only grow turnips the size of buttons. At least one European visitor called the colonists âthe worst slovens in Christendomâ because they were such poor stewards of their land. But these criticisms did little to change American agriculture. Instead, the federal government continued to dispossess the Native Americans, opening up more âvirginâ land farther west for the pioneers to settle. When yields started to decline, rather than try to rebuild their soilâs fertility, many settlers just packed up and moved west.12
Many of the Founders, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and John Adams, were concerned with the slovenly state of American agriculture. On their own land, they practiced good agricultural practices such as crop rotation, manuring, contour plowing, and terracing hilly fields. During the 1840s and 1850s, many farmers in the Northeast and Southeast practiced agricultural improvement, which emphasized on-farm nutrient cycling in imitation of natural systems. Unfortunately, soil health was often neglected when the focus of the agricultural improvement movement shifted toward yields and profits in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the Civil War, many farmers, especially in the South, found that growing monocultures of commodity crops like cotton or tobacco was the only way to market enough produce to earn a living. Recommended âbestâ practices to grow these crops were sometimes detrimental to soil healthâfor example, when farmers began to rely on newly available commercial fertilizers instead of manure and crop rotations to maintain soil fertility, the resultant depletion of soil organic matter made the soil more susceptible to erosion.13
Meanwhile, many Americans began to worry about the destruction of other natural resources, such as forests, wildlife, and waterways. One of the most influential critics of the wasteful way Americans were managing their once-rich inheritance was George Perkins Marsh, who published a seminal book entitled Man and Nature in 1864. âMan has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste,â Marsh warned. If current trends continued, the earth would soon deteriorate âto such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the deprivation, barbarianism, and perhaps even decline of the species.â The only way to prevent such a decline, Marsh argued, was to preserve and wisely manage the remaining natural resources.14
Concern about the destruction of natural resources grew during the last few decades of the nineteenth century, with various groups campaigning to save forests, wildlife, and scenic natural areas like Yellowstone from exploitation. During the first two decades of the early twentieth century, these concerns coalesced into a new movement for the conservation of natural resources. Conservation, as Gifford Pinchot defined it, was âthe wise use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good of menâ and âthe foresighted utilization, preservation, and/or renewal of forests, waters, lands, and minerals, for the greatest good of ...