Michael Pope, Executive Director
My grandparents on my mother’s side, Mance and Bertha Warrick Dickens, grew peanuts in the warm chalky soils of their southeast Alabama farm. Like many small farmers in the south, they likely switched to peanuts after the Mexican boll weevil entered Alabama in the early 1900s and devastated cotton crops. Archeologists suspect that peanuts may have originated in the valleys of Peru and Paraguay, and along with cotton and squash were some of the oldest cultivated crops in the Americas. Apparently peanut shaped pottery and ancient jars decorated with peanuts dated to over 3,500 years ago were found in South America, evidence of the longevity of this remarkable plant in human culture. South America Spanish conquistadors on Andalusian warhorses encountered peanuts being sold in the marketplaces when they rode into Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) in the 1520s. Peanuts from South America were carried by Portuguese and Spanish sailing ships to Africa, the Philippines, Southeast Asia and China, and brought to North America in the 1700s perhaps by slaves transported from Africa. Peanuts are self-pollinating legumes and rich in fats, fiber, vitamins and proteins. During hard times, such as the Great Depression, they provided an inexpensive source of nutrition for poor families. Runner, Spanish, Valencia and Virginia are the major types of peanuts grown in the United States. Peanuts are also fed to livestock, and apparently some of the flavor that graces Virginia’s Smithfield hams comes from hogs fed on peanuts. Fire-roasted and boiled peanuts are sold in many street stalls in China; they are the base for many Indonesian dishes such a gado-gado and karedok; they are used in spicy meat stews in Mali, the rich curries in India, and in many other dishes in Africa, Southeast Asia, South and North America, and Europe.
My grandfather’s farm was in Brundidge, a small, quiet town just south of Troy in southeastern Alabama. Brundidge celebrates the annual Peanut Butter Festival which includes the Nutter Butter Parade, the construction of Alabama’s largest PB&J sandwich, a Peanut Butter Run, and a street dance under the stars (serenaded in 2013 by The Dill Pickers). The town had two of the earliest peanut butter mills (Johnston Peanut Butter Mill and the Louis-Anne Peanut Butter Company) in eastern Alabama. Another historical note (nothing to do with peanut butter) from the Brundidge Historical Society says that Eddie Fisher, the singer and paramour of Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor, ate at Mrs. Anderson’s Sandwich Shop in Brundidge and that Jerry Lee Lewis performed at the local Armory. Dothan, a larger metropolis to the southeast of Brundidge and near the border of Florida, is the self-proclaimed “Peanut Capitol of the World” and hosts that National Peanut Festival attended by over a 120,000 people.
Johnston’s Peanut Butter Mill in Brundidge, Alabama (Brundidge Historical Society)
Oregon is not likely to be an immediate hot spot for peanut farms. However, a few years ago I planted okra in my community garden plot and was harvesting small pods for some creole gumbos in late August. Others at the garden are producing sweet potatoes. The Missoula Floods that swept through the Columbia Gorge in the late Pleistocene deposited some of the richest agricultural soils in the west on the floor of the Willamette Valley. Well drained Abiqua, Chehalis, and Willamette silt loams when seasonally irrigated with waters from the Willamette River or its tributaries are some examples of the highly valued soils in the Willamette Valley that produce an amazing variety of fruits, grains, vegetables, and nuts. Our Saturday Farmer’s Market is an exhibition of the seasonal diversity of foods produced in these wonderfully fertile soils. I spend my Saturday mornings from late April-late November at the Corvallis Farmer’s Market perusing a remarkable and growing array of leafy greens such as Russian and Black kale, spinach, thick-leafed collards, and red-veined Swiss chard, many shapes and forms of yellow, white, and purple potatoes and other hearty root vegetables, numerous varieties of sweet bushberries, an assortment of deep and light red and yellow apples (including my favorite – Gold Rush), Springcrest and Redhaven peaches, Bing and Rainer cherries, several varieties of quince, kiwis and hazelnuts, a dozen or so types of squashes and melons, an emerging assortment of grains such as wheat, rye, and tricale, an astonishing mix of beautifully patterned and colored heirloom beans (including my favorite Snow Caps), a dozen kinds of peppers and tomatoes, Walla Walla sweet onions, and a host of other foods harvested on small farms surrounding our community.
The bounty of crops at the Corvallis Farmers Market.
The American Farmland Trust states that we are losing more than an acre of farmland per minute in America. Between 2002-2007, agricultural lands that equaled the size of Massachusetts were lost because they were converted to developed uses. In many states, land trusts have played a key role in protecting agricultural lands from conversions like developments. The Vermont Land Trust was formed in part to ensure that lands in Vermont with the best farm soils were kept in agricultural uses and that family farms were sustainable and affordable for future generations. The Marin County Land Trust in California has protected nearly 47,000 acres of coastal lands so that farming families who have worked the land for generations can stay on their farms and not be forced to sell because of escalating development pressures. Oregon’s land use laws to some extent provide a buffer for farm lands against development. However, the human population in the Willamette Valley is expected to nearly double in another 40 years particularly in cities, increasing the need for urban areas to expand into agricultural lands. Land protection that includes conservation for fish and wildlife habitats as well as the continued production of farm crops on highly valued agricultural soils may well be an important model to ensure that the Valley’s rich agricultural and natural resource legacies are available for future generations.
