Russell Lord
The Forgotten Populist Agroecologist who paired soil health with social health.
It is necessary and proper now to advertise this new calling – soil healing – and its needs young people who are wondering what to do with their lives. There is work here for you, if you will get the training. It will never make you rich, but it will support you; and it is real, vital and absorbing work.
- Russell Lord, Behold Our Land, 1938
History picks and chooses voices to represent movements and generations; we’ve chatted recently about the Permanent Agriculture movement in the early 20th century in the United States, and despite a number of names who have been largely forgotten, a few have managed to stick around. John Hershey & J Russell Smith are the two names that people interested in this history first learn about, if only for Hershey’s forest and Smith’s fantastic writing and the interest in his work from the permaculture movement. While their contributions to the movement should by no means be dismissed, many larger— and in this case, much larger— voices in the movement have been all but lost. Today we’re discussing Russell Lord, a man whose work as an agricultural journalist and farmer advocate spanned nearly nine decades.
For the folks who recognize the name Russell Lord, it’s likely for his work as the editor of the agricultural literary journal The Land, which was a mouthpiece for the permanent agricultural movement. Despite this, it was only one small piece of his significant contributions to agriculture. It’s hard to believe that the man who was proclaimed by the Baltimore Sun to be “the country’s foremost farm writer” during the New Deal years has been largely forgotten. Much like many of his contemporaries, Lord focused his concepts of agricultural reform around not just environmental defense but also within a larger socio-environmental framework.
Russell Lord was born in in Baltimore in 1895, and moved to Worthington Valley, outside of Baltimore city’s reach, in the early 1900s. His father had become infatuated with the idea of returning to the land. This would manifest in a sudden move to Iona in 1907 to a 58-acre farm where Russell would grow up. His father, Henry, was driven by the back-to-the-land movement of the late 19th century, which filled endless magazines, books, and essays lamenting the loss of rugged individualism and romanticized self-sufficiency. While we don’t know Henry’s specific beliefs around the subject, but a large portion of this back-to-the-land movement was also framed in a Malthusian belief that food shortages would inevitably hit cities and make city life unbearable. Russell would later enroll in the first class of the first agricultural high school in the country, and it would be one of the first exposures to the diversity of ideas around what agriculture could and should be.1
Agricultural High School
We can’t fully appreciate Russell’s first experiences in agriculture without understanding the person who guided the development of educational and rural reform, Liberty Hyde Bailey. We talked quickly about Bailey in the past, as he had overseen the Cornell agricultural program while Efraím Hernandéz was a student (read about it here)— this push for massive rural reform was called the “Country Life” movement, and it was functionally a top-down movement to make rural communities modernize both their agricultural practices as well as their civic practices.2 This movement was framed in a pragmatic, utopian progressivism that’s described in extensive detail in William Bowers’ The Country Life Movement in America 1900-1920. Bailey criticized the back-to-the-land movement from the Country Life movement which he was a part of, arguing that the back-to-the-land movement was framed within “a fear of immigrants” and a movement that “disregarded the realities of agricultural economics”, and that not only were these movements unrelated but “in many ways are antagonistic.”3 This nuance is important to be aware of and how we can see similar but disparate movements happening in contemporary times in the same space.
Despite this movement back to the land, the exodus from the city did not put a dent in the population shifts as rural tenant farmers continued to move to the city centers for work. This was in large part because of the increasing inability to make farming profitable, and was only accelerated by, at this time, the 1893 depression, which had ripped the economy open before Russell’s birth. The government had invested in the Country Life movement through a number of tools, including extension schools and President Theodore Roosevelt’s personal involvement in rural reform.4 With Roosevelt’s advocacy to restore America’s agrarian greatness, he spoke both to the Country Life movement and the back-to-the-land movement, for better or worse.
The interdependence —even if unequal— of these movements would continue to be a thread that tangled through Russell’s life and his vision for what ethical land stewardship and food systems looked like. Russell’s father, Henry, also found himself eager to find himself in both paths, drawn to farming through a need for self-sufficiency and a desire for a life that didn’t exist while also searching for a way to become financially resilient and meet the demands of the marketplace.
Within this context, Russell became intimate with both fields of thought both at home and school. And it was Russell himself who chose to enroll in the Agricultural High School; it was a new school and Henry, his father, was quite proud of his son for choosing this new venture while his mother found herself feeling more and more alienated as the vision of prep school for her son seemed ever further out of reach. The new school offered an extensive array of classes in agriculture and the sciences, but even offered functionally the same courses freshman in the Cornell agriculture program received. This shouldn’t be a surprise, given Liberty Hyde Bailey’s involvement in both programs. Part of his role with Cornell was to build scientific awareness for rural farmers, which would be best done by educating future farmers who didn’t go to college.5 The program at the Agricultural High School was designed to prepare future farmers not to just operate as machines, but to understand farming holistically. To Bailey, this meant classes weren’t just about agricultural mechanics, engineering, and agronomy, but also fine arts, music, and civic engagement. This was a tenuous position, as students graduated with excellent qualifications for college and could easily leave the rural communities for work, which was explicitly the opposite the goals of the Country Life Movement.
For a polymath like Russell, the program was a perfect fit; not only did he excel in the agricultural courses, he was a prolific writer who thrived writing for the school paper. In one particular interview, he spoke with farmer Marvin Oren, who lived in an area known for poor soils, and he discussed using different manure treatments to improve his yield. The farmer dedicated his entire life to his tests, assessing his sheep’s bones and wheat for any sign of improvements from his practices. He explained that the:
“Earth is the farmer’s instrument. He plays upon it in the dark as best he can. The individual who undertakes to prescribe for the land and to see that his plants are fed their quota of mineral waters in the correct proportions, may call his choices scientific, but he is still fumbling among mysteries unsolved.”6
This moment was transformational for Russell, and was an event that continued to influence his decision-making for the remainder of his life.
While in school, Russell was drawn specifically to caring, training, and breeding draft horses.7 This included learning blacksmithing, farrier skills, and general repair of equipment related to draft animals. These skills were offered despite the school's focus on training the next generation of farmers which inevitably would be working the fields with tractors instead of horses. However, for this generation to take over the farms as they existed today meant that they'd have the skills to handle the farms as they were today, not just as they would be in the future.
At this same period, the fears of food shortages never materialized and farmers had increased production once again. Massive investments in rail depots and road improvements by the government allowed for food to more efficiently get into cities without being wasted, also alleviating the pressures on farmers for higher production.
In 1912, Russell graduated along with the first class at Agricultural High School. The improvements in productivity and improved resources for farmers gave the class optimism as they entered the workforce, while also painting a future which inevitably would push aside the romanticized version of agriculture in favor of an increasingly mechanized endeavor. As Russell experienced, whether during his talks with people like Orin or during the awkward commencement speech at his graduation, in which the dean of the school spoke about the future of agriculture which dismissed the lived experiences of the farmers who were watching their kids graduate with a fundamentally different understanding of what farming was- the future would be full of contradictions.8
1912 was a big year for the Lord family; Russell went to college after graduation and Henry brought the family back to the Baltimore suburbs, although his farming experiments never subsided, and he continued to invest in farms for the remainder of his life.9 Unfortunately, 1912 was the last time for decades where farming appeared to be a sustainable and viable occupation. His four years at the Agricultural High School would continue to influence his work for the remainder of his life as he worked to navigate these two different visions of agriculture.
Tumultuous Years
Despite the purpose of Agricultural High School, Russell eagerly prepared for the next step of his education. He followed the dean of the Agricultural High school to Berkeley, as his progressive attitudes didn't win him many favors in the rural communities, particularly as the first graduating class went off to college instead of staying on the farm, as promised. Entering college, Russell found himself as part of a new class of students whose holistic agricultural education were quickly becoming obsolete as the march of progress pushed aside much of the knowledge they had gained in high school.10 Agriculture was explicitly driven by chemistry and a variety of programs like plant breeding, and the well-rounded education Russell experienced did not prepare these graduates for college programs. This was accelerated by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which created a Cooperative Extension Service associated with each land-grant institution.
By the end of Russell’s freshman year, he returned home. He had required nearly a year of pre-requisites just to enroll in the agricultural program, and he was frustrated at how little prepared he was for college.11 While home, he thought about his time in high school and the inspiration he received from Liberty Hyde Bailey and decided to apply to Cornell, where his credits at Berkeley allowed him to enroll that fall as a sophomore, 20 years before Efraím.
While the courses at Cornell weren’t fundamentally different than Berkeley, the optimistic spirit of Bailey filled the program. Russell spent as much time as possible visiting the small town he knew so well during his high school years, despite his family having moved back to the suburbs. He found a new appreciation for working on the farms, and more importantly, listening to the farmers and their understanding of the landscape around them. Their knowledge was quickly being dismissed as the extension schools were nationalized and underwritten by large corporate agricultural interests.12 The new programs pushed for investment in technology and showed little interest in the knowledge the farmers had.
The clarity in which industry defined the future of agriculture is exhibited most obviously in agricultural school newspapers, such as the one at Cornell, where Russell not only attended but worked as a contributor, assistant editor, managing editor, and even Editor-In-Chief. The front half of each newspaper was filled with the newest developments in agriculture technologies, from tools to pesticides and breeding and everything in between.
As 1917 rolled forward and President Woodrow Wilson addressed Americans with “A Call to Farms” student interests and priorities shifted, and the eruption of the Great World War would fundamentally change farmers' relationships with extension programs forever. In the issue which plastered Wilson’s address, rallying the students to both farm every inch of soil on campus and motivating students to sign up for the military, Liberty Hyde Bailey released a small piece, in which he advocated the following:
Its principle of union will be the love of the Earth, treasured in the hearts of men and women. To every person who longs to walk on the bare ground, who stops in a busy day for the song of a bird, who hears the wind, who looks upward to the clouds, who would protect the land from waste and devastation realizing that we are transients and that multitudes must come after us, who would exercise a keepership over the planet, who would love the materials and yet not be materialistic, who would contribute his skill and his excellence to the common good, who would escape self-centered, commercial and physical valuations of life,—to all these souls everywhere the call will come.13
These words would stick with Russell for the remainder of his life; Bailey advocated for an unorganized and democratic association, which would later manifest in Russell’s work with the Society for the Friends of the Land.
During the summers in college, he worked as a milk inspector in northern Maryland from 1915-1917. Farmers and other hands complained about the unnecessary inspections, and Russell saw first-hand the impacts of both lack of scientific education as well as the capacity of agricultural interests to fight food safety science. This was a formative experience for him. As the Great War drove demand for American milk higher and higher, the increasing costs of fertilizers to grow feed began to overwhelm farmers, and folks like Professor E.S. Savage and Liberty Hyde Bailey began discussing the benefits of returning to a “permanent agriculture”, a term coined by Liberty Hyde Bailey in the early 1900s.14
As the Great War continued on, American farming fed the world, and industry underwrote the growth. In late 1917, Russell enlisted in the army. His time in service invariably changed the course of his life, as he understood the war as the price to pay for advanced technologies. In his words, “[i]f mechanization is the price of progress, what was the alternative?”15
Russell was sent to France, awaiting orders. While waiting to move to the front lines, the soldiers were given permission to assist local farmers with the harvest.16 Of course, Russell was in his element. He noticed that the soil was managed entirely different than at home, that the "hillsides and slopes, carefully terraced and maintained by generations of farmers had been tended for over seven hundred years. The soil made rich by hand-turned and applied amendments included composts, livestock manures, and winter cover crops of clover and grass that turned under in spring for planting. Corn, grain, apples, grapes, sweet hay for cattle, and sweet potatoes came in from hundreds of small fields that lay in a patchwork across the land, divided by thousand-year-old hedges and the stone walls of stable and barn swards."17 Russell explained that this was the most transformative periods of his life. On August 25, 1918, 39 days after arriving and still without guns or horses, were moved closer to the front. They were schedule to arrive at the front on November 10th, a day after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the end of the Great War. His unit was transported to Maryland in March of 1919, and he was no longer in service on May 27th.
Russell Lord the Journalist
After returning home, Russell began to teach in the agricultural extension programs and was a freelance farm journalist in Ohio. He became intimately aware of the destruction of the soils across the region which had once been some of the most fertile soils in the country. Further, while the roaring 20s seemed to paint a rosy picture of the future, he saw that the tensions growing between farmers where he worked- in Ohio's Allegheny Plateau- and the government who pushed the extension programs which were bankrolled by industry.18 His own position was in fact to provide support in rural communities to help county agents contribute to independent and community newspaper stories in order to provide unbiased information around modernizations on the farm. The Ohio Farm Bureau, founded during the war to lobby for farmers' economic interests, were not interested in the work of folks like Russell, and pushed them to only report through their own papers in order to control the narrative and put community papers out of business.
As he watched farmers feverishly plant massive monocrop plantations to feed the commodity industry, he realized what he was seeing was neither sustainable nor was it meeting the self-fulfillment the farmers desired. In fact, after the war, the price supports were restructured and the farmers were left without markets to sell. Land prices collapse and farms were consolidated. While the soil needed rest after the hard years during the war, farmers had to work the land even harder to make up for shrinking margins while inputs doubled. Farms that had been in families for generations had been sold, only for those same farmers to work the same lands as tenants.
While the cities continued to experience growth and prosperity, it was clear to him that the agricultural sector would continue to struggle while also destroying the wealth within the soil. It wasn’t just the agricultural industry— any natural material that could be extracted from the Earth was done so at a scale larger than ever before. As he traveled across the state, the success stories from listening to the extension agents became fewer and harder to find outside of the overwhelmingly mechanized, capital-backed farms. Disillusioned and frustrated, he resigned after 3 years.
This period was significant in his understanding the relationship between economies of scale, economic policy, and the sociological impacts of decisions made by bureaucrats hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. The populism of the farmers spoke to an undercurrent that distrusted the agricultural interest groups and monopolies that claimed to speak for them. As the government pulled back from its support for farmers, they also cut back salaries for extension agents, allowing groups like the Ohio Farm Bureau to step in and monopolize support services for rural farmers in the state.
It wasn’t just Russell who saw these issues and was disgusted by the consolidations happening on rural farms; the Grange & the National Farmers Union protested the influences of extension agents and organizations like the Ohio Farm Bureau, which were mouthpieces for corporate interests. The National Farmers Union had stood up for democratic farming practices throughout the early twentieth century, and we discussed some of their work in another piece here. Between the work of these organizations and Henry A. Wallace’s work, writing in Wallace’s Farmer, he became disgusted with the work he was doing.19
Before he resigned, however, he happened to stumble across the farm of Mr. Alva Hartley, a farm which sat on steep hills that would otherwise be considered incapable of successful agriculture. The farm was healthy, showed no signs of wear, had been profitable through milk, calf, and bull sales, and had improved the soils during Mr. Hartley’s tenure through daily paddock rotations. Alva Hartley had kept meticulous records, reduced inputs as much as possible, and was not afraid to apply scientific data to back the work he was doing. To Russell, it was the first time he had felt he saw the successes he’d seen in France back home.
Disillusioned and frustrated, he resigned after 3 years. It was also at this time he married his wife, Kate Kalkman.
After his resignation, Russell landed a writing position with Crowell Publishing, which owned the popular magazine Farm and Fireside. Russell was tasked with reporting on success stories in farming. In his words:
“I found a few outstanding farm families here and there with two cars and a bathroom,” he wrote, “Most of them were fine people. I wrote about them. But little by little the fact bit in to me that they hadn’t made it farming. They had made it as topsoil miners and salesmen as a rule. Through a curious combination of ignorance, innocence, greed, and need, they were selling America and our future down the river; and here I was a Park Avenue farm reporter, taking as much as $500 an article, to celebrate their success as farmers. It didn’t make sense.”20
Traveling the country, it was clear that rural communities across the country were all in the same place— on the brink of collapse. Cities were no longer able to absorb the labor surpluses of rural communities that had replaced manual labor with machines, and farms were going bankrupt trying to produce more while simultaneously pushing prices down. Government policies to reduce land in production were failing and Russell saw this first-hand. Back in New York, where he lived during his time with Crowell Publishing, soon-to-be governor of New York Franklin D. Roosevelt was advocating for a “permanent agriculture”, and introduced a massive program to purchase and reforest wasted lands. The goal was to put these newly-owned lands into public ownership for conservation management and to help displace farmers work as conservation workers. This was the model that would drive many New Deal policies two decades later, as we discussed in the Permanent Agriculture of the 20th Century article.
Unfortunately, at this time, President Hoover didn’t see eye to eye with Roosevelt, and it would take over a decade before anything would change to support a policy of permanent agriculture. While Hoover tried to apply various techniques, the agricultural sector tanked. Eventually advertising revenues for Farm and Fireside plummeted, and the magazine was re-invented as The Country Home, a fashion monthly, in 1929, and a thirty-four year old Russell Lord had begun to understand the ways in which politics, capitalism, science, environment, and democratic society functioned as an integrated whole.
“I did not see landscapes, rural and urban, and seascapes and cloudscapes as a part of a unified organic, living structure until I was thirty, and not until I was forty did I see the American scene in its entirety - forests, farms, wildlife, gardens, streams, factories, fisheries, livestock, cities, and people – as a living structure going dead on us, running down.”
During this period, Russell joined Fortune magazine as a freelance reporter to write about the impacts of farm regulations which demanded farmers to reduce production as the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl began to unfold. While traveling the country, during an unplanned break in traveling west, he had a short opportunity to meet with Henry A. Wallace, who would later be Secretary of Agriculture only 4 years later under FDR. Each man remembered the other later on, and Wallace would eventually be the subject of many of Russell’s pieces as the FDR campaign ramped up. This same day that he met Wallace, he also met a man named M.L. Wilson, who had been learning from Cree & Blackfoot farmers the practice of dryland farming. The techniques he learned would be amplified by Russell’s work, landing Wilson a position in FDR’s “Brain Trust” only a few years later.
At this point, Russell had already collected a national awareness, and his words were listened to by farmers, backyard gardeners, and policy makers. He had already published a number of books, plus his monthly articles with Farm and Fireside, pieces in Vanity Fair, the upstart magazine New Yorker, and he was arguably the best-known person advocating for a new applied ethic around land relations framed in a scientific agrarianism that paired ecological health with farm and ultimately human health. He had connected with radical economists and agronomists like John R. Commons & M.L. Wilson, who would later go on to be household names in defense of Labor & alternatives to conventional agriculture. Russell was able to leverage his massive audience & connections to pitch through a variety of stylistic choices the reasons why land stewardship directed food production, and that food production tied to local conditions was the only way to live within the capacity of ecological conditions. The common thread between these names was both a disdain for conventional agriculture and a concern that “the old agricultural traditions of the yeoman farmer and the heroic sodbuster were more a threat to the survival of modern agricultural landscapes than a help.”21
Russell Lord & FDR’s Brain Trust
FDR’s team eventually recruited Russell to serve as one of the hand-picked journalists in Washington. His job was to be a ghost writer to sell the New Deal’s agricultural program, and he wrote speeches and articles on behalf of nearly anyone advocating for permanent agriculture. At this time he also wrote a particularly successful piece for Vanity Fair where he highlighted M.L. Wilson’s proposals around dry land farming and financial incentives for ethical agriculture, which exploded into one of the most talk-of subjects in high society. Russell was renowned as having a unique skill in translating complex social and scientific ideas into accessible concepts for educated readers— and it was this particular skill that made him the face of a movement for a future where agriculture was framed within a land ethic.
This skill was particularly important as many of the attitudes of the Brain Trust behind FDR walked a fine line between populism and communism— as we explored with Rexford Tugwell in the Permanent Agriculture piece referenced earlier. Tugwell’s previous interest as an academic in the Russian transition period from czarism to communism, as well as a research trip to Russia in 1927, made him an easy target for conservatives looking to prove that FDR was a communist, and Russell spent much of his time translating Tugwell’s radical ideas into digestible bits which people could support.
As the first programs began to show the effects, which in many cases were direct payments to landlords to leave lands fallow while the tenant farmers were left with nothing, Russell and many other New Dealers realized their plans did not go as proposed. Farmers felt demoralized after massive cuts to production, the national outrage to the ‘six million suckling pig kill’, the great cotton plow down, and there had been little improvement in the daily lives of farmers yet. The American Farm Bureau Federation tapped into this frustration and railed against FDR’s policy changes, despite the fact by the second year, states and other farm lobby groups had begun to observe positive economic effects. However, these metrics didn’t account for the problems of increasing tenant-farmers and the fact that leaving land fallow wasn’t enough in creating meaningful results around soil conservation.
In fact, one of the major failures of these policies was that land owners received checks from the government while the tenant farmers themselves had no work and received no payments, driving tenant farmers specific further into poverty. This took place most egregiously in the South. Russell wrote that “What had not been foreseen was the remarkable behavior of the bear.”22 What he referred to as the bear was the insatiable appetite of landlords who became acutely aware of the potential for profiting from government policies while reducing their labor expenses.
What made Lord unique against the backdrop of back-to-the-land advocates was that he occupied a space which paired these values without the Luddite concern for technologies. In response to the fact that small farmers saw their income cut in half since the crash of 1929, FDR put into policy a vision led by M.L. Wilson under the umbrella of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, which envisioned restoring small rural communities by advocating for factory work in rural communities supplemented by individual homesteads of a few acres. Unsurprisingly, these were largely impractical plans, with all of the over one hundred plans only surviving a few years. This was all driven by the interests of the New Agrarians, which would later drive a lot of the back to the land that sprung up in the latter half of the 20th century, and which could be pointed to as the basis for much of the homesteader movement today. In Russell’s words, they were “ideal plans for ideal people rather than practical plans for real people”.
As these projects were shuttered one by one, Russell was named the Chief Information Officer of the USDA under FDR and traveled the country to observe the successes and failures of these projects. The destroyed lands had not been suddenly restored, and farmers argued that the government didn’t understand anything about agriculture. The drought that had been destroying the midwest had continued, despite the policy changes by the government. Given the large spending packages under FDR’s tenure, Henry Wallace, then the Secretary of Agriculture, understood there was nothing the federal government could do to try and restore lands with cover crops as the drought continued to whip the topsoil into the atmosphere. Wallace' pushed states and regions to address their most serious problems as best as they could.
In 1934, rain came. Too much rain, in fact, and topsoil washed away, sending images of mutilated landscapes back to Washington, where policy makers looked in horror of gullies fifty feet or more deep highlighting the damage done. Lord wrote appeals to Congress to release funds for conservation efforts. As Congress refused to allocate funds, Russell and others worked to get populist support for conservation. As the dust storm rolled across North America, it arrived in Washington as the Senate debated funding. As the sky grew black in the middle of the day, the Senate suddenly was moved to release 25 million and enacted Public Act 46 on April 27th, 1935. These conservation policies were no longer about restricting production, as the current dust bowl had not been impeded by the previous attempts, but rather a scientific-agrarian policy that integrated more specific regional attributes and social needs through community restoration, drawing from the work of Russell and his interests in the emerging field of ecology.
Thorn Meadow Farm
After over a decade of advocating for a new land ethic, traveling across the continent multiple times, and standing alongside the biggest names in agriculture, Russell left Washington to purchase an abandoned farm in Harford County, Maryland. The post-Civil War era stone and frame farmhouse came with twenty acres of overgrown briar-filled fields. He found many farmers working to restore and protect the Deer Creek Valley, many of whom whose families had been in the valley since the early 1700s, and they were actively using conservation practices such as terracing, contour plowing, and more. The valley was a unique place— many of the most fertile lands in the area had been extirpated by the fedeal government during World War One to build mustard gas factories and munitions test ranges. Between these actions and farm abandonments much like the rest of the country over the late 19th and early 20th century rallied local farmers to work cooperatively to defend their home and their history. Because of this, the Harford County Soil Conservation District was one of the first in the country to form under the Soil Conservation Service, and its successes served as models for successful rural lands preservation.23
While on his new small farm, which he lovingly described as a 'word' farm, Russell began to receive hundreds of stories from farmers about their improved yields and restorative results from the practices he had been advocating for decades. He pushed for farmers in Deer Creek Valley to write about their successes. Russell continued to receive a canvas bag of letters a day from farmers discussing their successes, poems, and newspaper clippings they felt were relevant to Russell’s work— material which he called “more pertinent information as to what was actually going on at the grassroots and in the minds of people farming than what could be gathered in any book.”24
During this time, as the homesteading fervor that had been pushed by Tugwell and others ebbed, a focus was brought to help re-employ displaced rural poor farmers through the Resettlement Administration, which was established in 1935. This program worked to transplant farmers, especially those in drought-prone areas. Farmers were given resources to develop conservation farming. Russell was the primarily contributor for these resources, advocating explicitly for farmers to learn the ecological constraints of their land. He advocated more explicitly for helping landscapes by understanding that landscapes adapted to specific regional climates, soils, and rainfall were the most efficient, effective, and resilient, and that these structures were best left in place. He pointed to the successes of the farms in France he had seen, to the farms that surrounded his own, and to the history of humanity living in alignment with local ecosystems as the basis for his argument, as he put his own theories to the test on his small farm.
Throughout this time, soils across the country continued to deteriorate, as prescriptive practices by the government were put in place on larger scales, not addressing the nuances of each landscape. As farms fell apart, the underpinnings of rural society also collapsed. In 1938, Russell resigned from his role as the Chief Information Officer at the USDA to freelance. Without the constraints of government officials, he could fully articulate his vision and his concerns— that the work being done today was just a small step, just a start towards long-term solutions. He believed that the government was too far removed to address both the ecological and the social problems, and that centralized regulatory power threatened the health of rural democratic society. This was most obvious in the South, where poor farmers were tasked with massive landscape changes and no resources to do them. Often times, the plans laid by government officials led to worse results due to lack of resources and poor understanding of specific, local conditions. At the same time, white southern landlords were the ones who had benefitted the most from New Deal payouts, and they were also the most threatened by the idea of changing their economic system and giving landless, black farmers any bit of self-determination.
Thinking Globally, Working Locally
In his 1938 book Behold Our Land Russell articulates the context of the work done up to this point. “What has been done by way of defense amounts to but random scratches far scattered over vast areas, undefended. But what has been done does show, I think, that soil erosion can be controlled.” 25 At this point, he had only seen proof of concept, and the real work was only just beginning. And he was already seeing the impacts of a centralized, detached government not considering the economic conditions of poor farmers, especially poor black farmers, who didn't have the resources to apply the techniques recommended to them. Ultimately, rural community health and well-being was being pushed to the side in the name of soil restoration.
The release of this book couldn’t have been more appropriately timed. In 1937, Henry A. Wallace, his personal friend, had been named FDR’s running mate, departing from his position as the Secretary of Agriculture. Russell joined him on the “Tobacco Road” tour as a journalist, passing through the poor, rural south where most farmers were still struggling, even with all of the New Deal assistance programs. Wallace had known of the struggles in the South, but seeing how visibly the poorest sharecroppers had been abandoned by even government programs left him in awe. Wallace would often abandon his tour stops to walk the barren fields to talk with sharecroppers, most of whom had no idea who they were talking to, about what their lives looked like and what they needed to succeed. It became clear to both Wallace and Lord that human poverty & poor land were inextricably linked, and without addressing one you could not address the other. This tour led to the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act & the Resettlement Administration was restructure as the Farm Security Administration, which remains the strongest rural poverty relief and aid agency in the USDA today.26
Russell continued to write, releasing his fifth book in 1939, The Agrarian Revival, which was focused on tying a century of topsoil loss to the evolution of agricultural education. Instead of diving through library archives, Russell set out to tour the country once again with the goal of speaking with all of the elders of the Extension programs he had worked with in the 1920s.
“Despite an accelerating sweep of powerfully centralizing forces, commercial and governmental, the United States is still a rather loose confederation of various soils, climes, region, and people”
-Behold our Land
No one had toured the poorest rural communities in the United States to the extent of Russell. While he believed the government had offered some piecemeal improvements, the idea of top-down solutions was fundamentally at odds with the nuance of soil, and that only when farmers themselves gained the capacity to determine and define their own changes and methods, that change could happen. Agricultural permanence was dependent on also having a socio-ecological system that could change alongside it. What this meant was that the only thing that was truly permanent was change.
Immediately after returning home, Lord went back on the road with the Soil Conservation Services to speak with the folks on the ground working with farmers. During this travel, Russell saw farmers working across property lines voluntarily to design landscape-scale conservation plans that benefited all community members instead of working with the federal government. He spoke with farmers who spoke about how land stewardship had been dictated by ordinance that were put in place by small farmers prior to World War One, when local farmers had been displaced and ordinances were ignored in the name of the war efforts. Visiting the Navajo, he spoke with ecologists about how only when “improved breeds” & technology arrived that the unique and brittle dune grassland environment that had sustained communities for hundreds of years were suddenly destroyed.
When one began to look for stories like these, it wasn’t hard to find. The canyons known today as the Providence canyons started in the 1700s, and in the course of a few short centuries, due to a combination of deforestation, monocropping, and poor farming methods had created the soil conditions which washed away unimaginable amounts of soil.
Russell did what he could— he wrote. In his recent books, he worked to help the layman understand how soil was built and how it was lost. He soberly discussed the future of soil, about the failures of the agrarian icon Thomas Jefferson, and the long, ongoing battles that would have to exist to save soil, forests, and waterways. In To Hold This Soil (1938), he explains how World War One had accelerated mass destruction of soils. The book was a call to all who cared about a healthy environment to find their place in the new efforts. Soil restoration advocates found the collection of essays in To Hold This Soil to be as close to a manifesto that could exist and that it was a foundation for their ideas of a new conservation society, formed outside of both government or corporate ties. Merrill Cooke, Hugh Bennett, & Russell Lord (the former two were discussed at length here) began discuss the idea of developing such an organization, based on Liberty Hyde Bailey’s plan for a Society of the Holy Earth as he had described in his book Universal Service, and soon after a meeting of was set for those interested in such an idea.
But before the birth of a new movement could coalesce, Russell was back on the road.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge
The successes of Russell’s recent books offered him another opportunity to travel the country for another work, Forest Outings, destined to be a U.S. Forest Service publication. The experience reinforced the concept of place-based knowledge, as he explored Appalachian lifeways, the jibaros subsistence farmers of the Puerto Rican rainforests, defending the work indigenous people did living within the demands of the unique landscape at a time when the concept of TEK was unheard of in formal institutions. He saw the desert forests of New Mexico and wintered at the Choctawatchee National Forest in northwest Florida. He became interested in the “woods people”; Creek-Seminole who lived there illegally in isolated subsistence farming & fishing camps in the forest.
While the Creek-Seminole were blamed for the dry season fires, during Lord’s visit, he saw the intentional fires to clear tinder from the understory and how they collected the char for their gardens. The farming grounds and camps of the Creek-Seminole were safe from fires because of their management, and the forest farmers utilized the char along with wetland much, mineral sands, and composted grasses to build soil that would be inherited by the next generation to grow food just as good— if not better— than those grown by the best farmers in the nation.27 Russell developed a new appreciation for prescribed burns, and became more interested in the knowledge of indigenous people.
Returning home, he sold Thorn Meadow, fully aware that he could not continue to do his work and maintain the farm. He accepted his fate as a writer of agriculture, not a farmer himself.
The “Unlearned Society”
The imagined organization continued to develop. Cooke, Russell, and Bennett described a “national organization of non-technical people, working voluntarily, outside Government, to interest more and more city people in the conservation of our indispensable soil.”28 On January 23rd, 1940, they gathered for the first time, along with a number of other major figures in conservation. It was here that the name the Society of the Friends of the land was coined. What made their organization different was that agricultural and ecological education should be free and shared for the public to build broad support of the protection of nature and agricultural lands. Further, this was framed within a context focused on democracy, egalitarianism, and most importantly, an understanding that everyone had a duty to understand and work with the land when possible. Fundamentally, the organization was based on the concept of interdependence that had underscored all of Russell's work. The organization was focused on developing a membership of both scientific & 'citizen' members.
The first gathering occurred in March of 1940. As the speakers lamented the needs for a future framed in an ecology, the perennial writer in Russell saw future contributors to an unfunded and unpublished journal he had tentatively titled The Land Quarterly. Unfortunately, the event was a sober reminder of how forward-thinking the group of ecologists and impassioned citizens were— reviews were mixed, suggesting that their concerns were too far away, and that “The project appeals, rather, to the kind of man who plants an oak tree, or endows an orphans’ home”, according to reporter Gerald W. Johnson.29 While the manifesto read that “We, too, are all of one body. We all live on, or from the soil", criticisms that their approach was far too philosophical and not framed in a world on the brink of World War 2.
The following month, Germany invaded Norway. Momentum for the movement faltered. Nearly a year had passed before the organization had raised enough money for its first journal. Lord worked around the clock preparing and reviewing materials, and found the face of the organization he needed in celebrity author Louis Bromfield, who had managed Malabar Farm, an experimental farm that highlighted the successes of permanent agriculture as a tool for ecosystem rehabilitation.
The magazine grew— the quality improved, and alongside national figures like Bromfield, Sears, Bennett, Vice President Wallace, E.B. White were poems from farmers, often with little formal education at all. Debates would erupt in the columns of the magazine— agronomists debated with farm wives. The Land had become an open space for all views which were well supported were published, regardless of their origin. One of these farmers was Edward Faulkner, who would only a few years later write the book Plowman’s Folly, which became an international sensation and advocated for the disc plow, which cuts up and incorporates organic matter into the soil instead of burying that material deep into the soil.
The magazine also began to expand its content matter, including the problems and realities of war technologies, and agricultural industrialism. While seeming out of place, to Russell it was a pertinent reminder of the interconnectedness of permanent agricultural and quality of life for all living things on the planet. The shift in content was a reflection of a shift in how environmentalism was understood at the time. Far before their time, questions around climate change was being raised and whether or not industrialization could be sustained in the long-term.
Of course, with any radically progressive journal came the risks— including a high turnover because of its wide scope of content and against the grain positions on a multitude of subjects. And again, the timing of the magazine hadn’t been ideal— from the war to 1945 over a million and a half people had abandoned the farming profession, and by 1950 that number had escalated to 2 million.30
Further, the technological revolution which took place after World War 2 meant farming could easily be scaled up. Lord and other argued that science and mechanization was not the enemy; the way it was employed was the danger.
In 1951, The Land had reached over 7,000 subscribers. However, it quickly faltered as Russell, for the first time in his life, couldn’t keep up with the demands of the role and the bullseye placed on himself and his collaborators. He was still introducing new authors who would go on to leave their mark in history, like Rachel Carson, but more often he was recycling content from other magazines and using poems he’d collected years before. Questions had arisen about whether the magazine had become primarily for a certain type of farmer— rich farmers only. A professional forester from Montana wrote to the magazine that “I enjoy The Land but I am beginning to have my doubts about the usefulness of your organization. It has lost its punch. Land in the West is growing worse and I can’t picture Friends of the Land doing anything about it.”31 By 1954, the magazine had dropped to below 1,500 subscriptions in 1954 and was quietly ended. In the final section, we'll discuss the political conditions which led to its collapse.
The Cold War & its Ecological Consequences
It should be no surprise that advocates for interdependence were painted as anti-American & communists as anti-communism rose during the 1950s & 1960s. At this same time, the seeds of the Green Revolution had been planted and were framed as progress as genetics, pest management, and soil chemistry were explored in new ways (for more about the Green Revolution, read about Efraím Hernández & Erna Bennett).
Advocates of permanent agriculture quickly became targets as anti-communism fomented across the country— from folks like Rexford Tugwell to Vice-President Henry A. Wallace. Anti-communist inquiry grew to the point where any members of “collectivist organizations” like the Friends of the Land were under the watch of J. Edgar Hoover & the FBI.32 Russell fired back from his editorial pulpit, calling the McCarthyists defenders of "entrenched Bureaucracy".33
Anti-communist sentiment towards permanent agriculture expanded into pacifism being treated as a facet of communism, which was also advocated by the Friends of the Land. Despite Russell’s attempts to quell the political division ripping the country— and its readers apart, its contributors became even more outspoken agains America’s political climate and global events during an escalating Cold War.
During this same period, corporations began to collaborate more heavily with the government under the guise of the Green Revolutions in Africa, Central America, & India as the promise of solving food insecurity in 2nd world countries was leveraged as a tool to block communism from expanding. Corporations provided the resources and technologies as the government funded research on behalf of corporations. The USDA quickly became an adversary to the permanent agriculture movement.
Russell didn’t back down, and in 1953 included an essay from a scientist criticizing the use of synthetic chlorinated hydrocarbons (DDT, DDE, dieldrin, aldrin) among others, which had been described as safe by their producers. Despite the onslaught of attacks, the article pointed to the profound changes happening in all of our backyards. Rod Chochan, in his essay, described the work he did studying the effects of chemical drift with DDT as much as he could without breaking classified protocol. This release was the first public criticism of these new synthetic compounds and, despite only reaching a few thousand readers, would spur others to become more weary of these chemicals that had otherwise been accepted as improvements across the agricultural spectrum. The line in the sand had been drawn between the permanent agriculture movement and the corporatist movement that was championed by policy makers within the United States.
As 1954 rolled forward and the final issue of The Land was released. Frustrated by the treatment by politicians and McCarthyists, Lord published the final chapter of Louis Bromfield’s latest book, A New Pattern for a Tired World.
“The truth is that we have wandered a long way from reason and reality during the past generation. Our destinies have been largely controlled by men with curiously distorted and misshapen personalities from Hitler to Stalin to Communist leaders and traitors everywhere to figures in our own immediate history whose balance and wisdom have been dubious. It is time for the simple people to revolt.”
As the voices of permanent agriculture were systematically erased from popular culture, Russell reflected on his three decades of work. He came to the conclusion that adaptiveness was far more important than permanence, and that his vision for the future would not win during his lifetime. As consumerism subsidized by cheap fuel pushed for suburbanization and overconsumption. “We need to be begin to distinguish between wants and needs and bring within more reasonable limits our consumptive demands,” he wrote in 1962.34
In his final years, he focused his concerns instead on the suburbanization of America. The thousands of acres of farms he had worried about had been systematically sold off to be paved with homes and grasses scattered about in a new and horrific way the ecology was destroyed. As a new generation tried to move back to the land during the 60s, Lord noted that “No one of country rearing can be wholly unsympathetic regarding this back-to-the-earth stampede of transients and new residents in rural parts,” but argued that they simply would “live out in the country and [be] not at home there.” Those returning to the land were often not doing so out of necessity, and frequently came from families of privilege and general security. The conditions which led to this movement were less about need and more about the failures of modern capitalist conditions providing meaningful lives.
Only two years after the release of his final book, The Care of the Earth, Russell died from coronary illness. His decades of work had been focused on finding a balance between holistic and mechanistic in terms of land stewardship and left a lasting impact on permanent agriculture, organic farming, and the intersections of ecology and agriculture. Today, his name is hard to find, except for his books on sites like Amazon. He bares no Wikipedia article nor the cultural relevance of many of his colleagues. In fact, an image of him cannot even be found on the internet. Despite this, his work lives on through the ripples from his writing, his travels, and his focus on farmers instead of corporations.
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Eppig, M. L. (n.d.). Russell Lord and the Permanent Agriculture Movement: An Environmental Biography (thesis).
Bowers, William L. “Country-Life Reform, 1900-1920: A Neglected Aspect of Progressive Era History.” Agricultural History. Vol. 45: 3 (July,1971): 211-221.
Bailey, Liberty Hyde The Country Life Movement in the United States (1915)
Lord, Russell “Colleges on Our Land” in: The Agrarian Revival (1939)
Danbom, D.B., “Rural Education Reform and the Country Life Movement,” (1979)
Lord, Russell, in: “A Short Story,” (1943) The Land, 3(1): pp. 19-26.
Clemens, Shirley From Marble Hill to Maryland Line: An Informal History of Northern Baltimore County (1983)
Lord, Russell. (1931), in: “Soil Builders and Managers,” pp. 119-120.
Eppig, M. L. (n.d.). Russell Lord and the Permanent Agriculture Movement: An Environmental Biography (thesis).
Robison, Daniel. “Agricultural Instruction of the Public High Schools of the United States” (1911)
Lord, Russell. Men of Earth. (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1931)
Danbom, D.B. (1979), “Rural Education Reform and the Country Life Movement”
Bailey (1917), in: “A Society of The Holy Earth,” The Cornell Countryman, “War Issue,” Vol. 15, No. 9: pg. 730.
Savage, E.S. (1916), in: “War and the Manurial Value of Feeds,” in: The Cornell Countryman. Vol.13, No. 1: pp. 115-116.
Lord, Russell. The Wallaces of Iowa. (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947).
Lord, Russell. Captain Boyd’s Battery A.E.F. An Intimate Account of an Outfit which Will Never Admit that it Won the War. (Ithaca, New York, Atkinson Press, 1920).
Eppig, M. L. (n.d.). Russell Lord and the Permanent Agriculture Movement: An Environmental Biography (thesis).
Lord, Russell. The Wallaces of Iowa. (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947).
Henry A. Wallace would go on to become FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture & later Vice President to FDR. His father, Henry C. Wallace, serviced as Secretary of Agriculture for Presidents Hoover & Coolidge. Russell was so enamored in their family’s contribution to agriculture he went on to publish “The Wallace’s of Iowa” in 1947.
Lord, Russell. Forever the Land: A Country Chronicle and Anthology. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
Eppig, M. L. (n.d.). Russell Lord and the Permanent Agriculture Movement: An Environmental Biography (thesis).
Lord, Russell. The Wallaces of Iowa. (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947).
Auch, R. F., Napton, D. E., Kambly, S., Moreland, T. R., & Sayler, K. L. (2012). The driving forces of land change in the Northern Piedmont of the United States. Geographical Review, 102(1), 53–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2012.00130.x
Lord, Russell. Forever the Land: A Country Chronicle and Anthology. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950)
Lord, Russell. Behold our Land (1938).
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/about-fsa/history-and-mission/agency-history/index
Lord (1940), in: “Camps,”
Lord, Russell. Forever the Land: A Country Chronicle and Anthology. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
Gerald W. Johnson, “The Wasting Land,” The Baltimore Sun, March 27, 1940.
1945 US Census, “Farm Population and Farm Labor,” pg. 279; NRCS “Black Farmers in America” (2003) in: “New Deal agriculture was a bad deal for black farmers,” pp. 8-10. Stevens, “On the Up – A Sketch of Progress in my County,” in: The Land, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 207-211.
“Cattleman from Wyoming,” The Land, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter 1953): pg. 357
Culver, John C. American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace. New York: W.W. Norton Company, Inc., 2000.
Lord, Russell. (1953), in: “Across the Land,” The Land, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring 1953): pg. 7.
Lord, Russell. The Care of the Earth: A History of Husbandry. (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962).