An Amish farmer's struggle with drought

“We need the rain."

I’m talking with Eli, the Amish owner of a farm in northern New York, not far from where my grandfather was born. At 11 am, it’s already 88 degrees, with not a cloud in the sky. It’s been so dry this month that the entire county is under a no-burn order. The fields of corn look parched.

 Eli is in his late 30s. He looks like actor Jesse Plemons, except he’s wearing a blue work shirt and trousers and no shoes. Eli’s straw hat has seen a lot of use, and at one point was repaired with a squiggle of pink yarn.

The fruits and vegetables in his family’s roadside stand look fresh. A box of green beans and a cantaloupe cost $1 apiece. A pint container of pickling cucumbers is $2. I offer $3 for a dozen enormous eggs, but he’ll only take $2.50. He says if the melon isn’t good, to bring it back and he’ll give me another one.

I point at the other melons on the shelf. “Don’t those need a lot of water?” I ask.

“We fill up a tank from the well every day, so the water is warm,” Eli explains. “Then we water the front garden after dinner.”

Nearby, a ewe and her lambs urgently bleat from their small piece of shade, an open-sided loafing shed constructed of sheet metal. Beyond lies an old wooden barn. Ancient farm equipment is arrayed outside: a manure spreader, a stalk chopper, and wagons that might have been featured in the 1908 Sears catalogue. I spot two of Eli’s barefoot sons wrestling a giant bale off of a hay wain.

Eli and his family are living a life not much changed from the 1800s. Everyone reading this has parents or grandparents or ancestors further back in time who tilled the land. They would surely recognize the scene: a sprawling rural property with a farmhouse, barn, and a dozen outbuildings. Farm animals. Sturdy work clothes and dresses hanging from a clothesline off the porch. Horse-drawn farm equipment. A workshop to repair furniture and tools, and make things that can be resold.

Our ancestors paid close attention to the weather, and feared extended periods of dry weather. A lack of water could ruin a harvest, or even cause a farm to go bust. In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl led to millions of people migrating out of the Great Plains, mostly to California and other West Coast states. 

Eli is likes to chat, but there is concern in his voice. He and his wife have 7 mouths to feed. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, they will harvest less corn and hay. In recent years, there have been more hot days and long stretches without rain. Winters have been milder. 

Around Eli’s farm are yellowing fields. Selling produce and repairing furniture brings in a little cash, but it’s the crops and pastureland that are the foundation of the family’s income. Hay has been harvested early from one field. The stacks look shorter than usual. 

And then there is the land itself. “The soil is not deep here,” Eli complains. “My plow often hits rock.”

But it was cheap. Around here, farmland costs just $1,000 to $3,000 per acre. It’s not just because the soil sits on a shelf of rock 18 inches down. The population of northern New York has been in decline for decades, and few English families stick with farming.

Eli and many other local Amish were originally from Ohio. “There was no more land there,” Eli explains. “You needed millions of dollars to buy a farm.” Even if it were a sale within his Amish community in Ohio, the minimum price would be $6,000 per acre, he says.

I glance at my phone. “Forecast says a 65% chance of rain tomorrow,” I tell him.

“Really?”

“Yes, around midday,” 

“Let’s hope,” he says.

Ardoch Scotland revisited

Last year I wrote a post about Ardoch, an abandoned Catholic village in the Scottish Highlands from whence my forebears came (see Lamont genealogy and the lost hamlets of Glengairn, Aberdeenshire). Since that post, I have conducted additional research about Ardoch and Glengairn which I will share below. Genealogists interested in researching Lamont, Michie, McIntosh, or other Glengairn families are welcome to contact me at lamont -at- sloan dot mit dot edu. (Update: In 2019 I published Ardoch, Scotland in 1830: Recreated map and census)

“Glengairn” means “Valley of the [river] Gairn.” It is in this valley, located north of Ballater and the river Dee, that a vibrant Catholic community existed in the early 1800s. There were small hamlets located on the hills, sometimes little more than farmsteads, with names like Richarkarie, Tomnavey, Clashanruich, Dalfad, Laggan, and Lary. Inhabitants were Gaelic speakers, with only a limited number having any English education. They engaged in subsistence farming and weaving, but they did not own the land—they were tenants of wealthy landowners who limited activities such as hunting and salmon fishing. A 2006 genealogy by Nita Caffrey described living conditions in this part of the Highlands during the 1700s:

“The lower class lived in hovels built of rough boulders held together by dried mud, and thatched with heather or broom (bunch of twigs or straw). Usually there was an enclosure on one end of the house for the animals. It usually had an earthen floor, often so uneven that in damp weather, pools of water had to be stepped across to reach the peat fire. The fireplaces had wide open chimneys, with a seat at each corner and an iron with chain and crook to hang the kettle or three legged pot upon. Wood and peat (partially carbonized vegetable matter, usually mosses, found in bogs) were the fuel burned, as coal was not yet heard of. The cruisie lamp (fish oil) was used for light. Notwithstanding such conditions the race of people was strong and healthy; there were few hardier, stronger men than the Highlanders. The crofters possessed a cow, and oatmeal and milk were their food. Those who were better off had a few sheep and the wool was spun by the women and woven into blankets and tartan cloth.”  

The lairds of Glengairn were Catholic, which afforded their tenants a certain degree of protection from official oversight and anti-Catholic policies that dominated most other parts of Scotland. However, priests were persecuted throughout the 1700s into the early 1800s. A correspondent who grew up in the area and is researching the Ewen line told me:

"The whole of the Braemar area was a catholic stronghold (as also was Glen Gairn) right up to the 1745 uprising and I would be surprised if the Braemar Lamonts were of any other persuasion.   I know that there was persecution of Catholics taking place in Braemar  is 1785 as the priest was then living in a remote cottage at Inverey, and again in 1822 the Catholic School moved from Braemar to Inverey for the same reason."

Many residents of Glengairn were Catholic, but retained superstitious beliefs not unlike those found in Ireland. The following excerpt comes from research conducted by John Stephen and published as part of a PhD dissertation at the University of Glasgow in 2004:

Paradoxically, the residents were also in close connection with their Catholic faith. Glengairn had its own priest, Father Lachlan McIntosh, a remarkable character known as the Apostle of Glengairn who tended to the inhabitants of the valley from 1782 to 1846. He lived in the village of Ardoch (Gaelic for “High Land”), which was a hamlet of more than one dozen buildings, including at least one shop. There is an account of life during this period in an 1892 publication, Notes on Glengairn, Catholic Glengairn- Early Nineteenth Century, cited in Caffrey’s 2006 genealogy. One of the former inhabitants, Mrs. McKenzie (nee Michie), had this recollection:

“When I was 5 or 6 years of age I went to Ardoch to be Fr. Lachlan [McIntosh’s] servant. He came and took me by the hand and asked me to live at his house and herd his 2 cows. At that time, about 1830, Ardoch was quite a Catholic hamlet. It contained fourteen fire houses, [with chimney and fireplace] There was a shop kept by Chas. Calder. Calder drove merchandise between Blairgowrie and Ardoch, and over his shop door he displayed a sign board from which I took almost my first reading lesson. He was ’licensed to retail tobacco and snuff’ There were in the village two weavers, Wm. Ritchie and James Cattenach, who did a thriving business.”

 She also remembered Father McIntosh’s habits:

 “His life was very homely. He rose early, and said Mass regularly every Friday. People from a distance were always sure of Mass on Friday. Every day the old man kept moving about amongst his people. His only outdoor recreation was angling. Children knew his ways and would steal from him to the Gairn, when they were always rewarded by a gift of the take of trout. They used to help the old gentleman to disentangle his hooks which frequently got caught in the birch and alder trees that overhang the water. Many a time too he carried ’black sugar’ ( licorice) with him and we bairns knew this habit and expected some of the sweet stuff, which we guessed was meant for us. He generally wore a Spanish cloak of dark material. It was fastened at the neck by a silver clasp. When walking he always used a well-mounted stick with a long tassel hanging from the head. He took a keen interest in his farm and often carried, under the folds of his wide cloak, pieces of oat-cake and tit-bits for the horses that did the work of his croft. Fr. Lachlan had a grey mare which was mettlesome and very strong. His niece did the work of the farm in great part; she harrowed and went to the hill (worked at the peats) His dinner was just potatoes taken in their skins over the fireside and for supper brochan ( a kind of oatmeal gruel) and potatoes, which the neighbours often shared round his hearth.”

The priest’s old house at Ardoch is just ruins now, but the impact this man had on the region is still remembered today. Here is a picture taken by relatives who visited in 2015:

Father Lachlan McIntosh's house in Ardoch, Glengairn, now in ruins.

My relatives wrote:

“It’s a rough landscape with steep slopes and lots of stones and boulders. Few crops are seen except hay and potatoes, and few of the latter. The old tenant farmers were kicked off the land to make way for grouse and deer hunting, or for religious reasons. ... That said, the scenery is majestic and serene. Rugged peaks, burns, falls, deer everywhere and red grouse. The people are friendly and quite jolly, too. Pubs are crowded in town with locals and visitors. Two Highland weddings took place in town yesterday and they were dancing until 1 am next to our hotel.”

 Here is a photo of Ardoch, where a few ruined houses can still be seen:

Ruined houses in Ardoch, Glengairn, Scotland, 2015

So why did people leave Glengairn? Economic and demographic trends taking place in the Glengairn region from 1830 to 1870 (described in Stephen’s 2004 PhD thesis) are relevant. These factors included:

1. Large Catholic landowners selling their holdings in and around Glengairn.
2. A shift from small farms operated by tenants to consolidated farms and large-scale sheep grazing.
3. The expansion of “deer forests” and hunting grounds for aristocrats/gentry.
4. Increasing availability of emigration options, especially to Canada and Australia, with a corresponding rise in emigrant communities overseas.

Many Highland crofters were cleared from their homes. Some found employment on the sheep farms or aristocrats’ estates, while others moved to other parts of Scotland and England. But many emigrated overseas, encouraged by relatives and friends who had already moved, as well as by advertisements that celebrated the opportunities available to hard-working Highland folk. Free passage was offered to people emigrating to the British colonies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Passage to the United States was inexpensive. For the families who boarded the ships, the lure of cheap land and freedom of worship must have seemed very appealing.

The last residents of Ardoch, including the last native Gaelic speaker in the area, died in the 1980s. Their story is told by Andy Wightman, who noted:

Unlike most of the rest of the Highlands, Aberdeenshire was never included within the scope of the Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 because the powerful lowland landowners refused to countenance such a move. As a consequence, vast swathes of the Highlands in the non-crofting counties have lost their people, their language and their culture as the tenants of the land were never more than one year away from eviction. This includes the “other” Ardoch which features on the cover of my book, The Poor Had No Lawyers, more images of which can be seen at James Dyas Davidson’s portfolio here. Had things been different, highland Aberdeenshire might today be home to a thriving gaelic culture. Places like Ardoch would be occupied by crofting tenants with secure, heritable tenancies. As a result of this failure to provide legal protection to tenants, Deeside Gaelic is now extinct and Ardoch was put on the international property market by Savills on behalf of Invercauld Estate last year [2011]. It was sold earlier this year for £212,500.

WorldTV - our MIT Media Lab final project

One of the more interesting class projects I took part in during my last semester at MIT was our MIT Media Lab final project for MAS 571 ("Social TV: Creating New Connected Media Experiences"). The project was called WorldTV, and with my team (Jungmoo Park, MBA '11, and Giacomo Summa, MSMS '11), we created a pretty slick video demonstration of the proposed software UI. The video was shown at the MAS 571 demo day at the Media Lab (you can watch it below) and we wrote an accompanying concept paper that we are in the process of preparing for an IEEE CCNC workshop. In the following post, I'll describe not only what WorldTV is, but its genus and some of the reaction we've received so far.

WorldTV is a television app and accompanying mobile app for browsing user-generated video from one's social circle, as well as event video produced by strangers that tie into one's news and cultural interests. Instead of using traditional browsing methods -- scrolling through channels or searching for videos -- the proposed service uses a 3D globe as a navigational tool. WorldTV is aimed at people with global networks, which might include people with friends, relatives, and colleagues from other countries; people who spend a fair amount of time travelling; or people who are interested in news or culture in other countries.

The concept had great appeal to the entire team, not only because of our backgrounds (Giacomo is from Italy, Jungmoo is from Korea, and I spent most of the 1990s living overseas) but also because all of us have observed the exponential growth of user-generated video and realize its power and appeal to ordinary people. In 2006, I wrote about the potential of geotagged, time-stamped online photos to give insights into local events. I expanded the idea to include tweets and user-generated video in a proposal for my Linked Data Ventures class called PPP (PixPeoplePlaces). When I began the Social TV class, I took the PPP concept even further with user-generated video, emphasizing the social aspect of plotting event video on a local map (this was the basis of my first assignment for Social TV -- you can see the poster here).

Developing WorldTV - our MIT Media Lab final project

I envisioned all of these ideas as Web apps displayed on a computer monitor. For one of the early poster sessions for the Social TV class, Giacomo independently came up with a different approach. He asked, why not use a full-sized television screen to display a map of the entire earth with hot spots that reflected breaking hard news events that might be captured by amateur shooters? (This happened as anti-authoritarian demonstrations were breaking out across the Middle East in early 2011). Instead of being a "Lean Forward" experience (something that requires user input or interaction, such as a video game) this would be a "Lean Back" experience, in which the viewer could sit on the couch and take in the video. Giacomo also considered how video could be differentiated on the global map with different sized or colored markers, and how "likes", social networks, or newspaper articles could determine what appeared on the screen. He called it "WorldTV".

There was clearly some overlap between our ideas, and we decided to team up for the final project. We expanded the concept to include not only video from breaking news in other countries, but also cultural events (festivals, parades) and entertainment (sports, performances, etc.). The social filter would not only display streaming/recent videos from one's social circle, but could also reflect the collective interests of the social circle.

WorldTV business model

An additional requirement for the final project was a business model. I had already been thinking about using phone and laptop cameras as a way for ordinary people to access amateur expertise all over the globe, for a price. Examples of amateur expertise might be a power user demonstrating how to use a new gadget, advice on registering a company in a certain state by an experienced business owner, practicing foreign language conversation with a native speaker, etc. I dubbed the scheme Real Time Requests. (RTR). A live auction and reputation system would determine prices paid by people seeking expertise, and match them up with sellers. We decided to fold it into the proposal. The idea was then debuted at another MAS 571 poster session in April:

Jungmoo, who had a background as a professional television reporter for a Korean broadcaster, was intrigued by our poster session presentation and joined the team. Our next task was to take the concept and make a demo to show at demo day at the MIT Media Lab in the last week of class in May. For the final deliverable, we didn't have the skills to produce a working prototype. However, we did have the skills to produce a software mockup and accompanying video demo.

The team got to work. I created a simple WorldTV television UI using HTML and CSS, built the maps with Google Earth, and mocked up a mobile UX on an iPhone "remote". Giacomo wrote the script and starred in the video. Jungmoo took the raw video and graphics and used his professional editing skills to create a really slick video demo, which is shown below:



We presented the video and an accompanying slideshow on the business model last month at the Media Lab. Our Media Lab instructors, Marie-José Montpetit and Henry Holtzman, invited a group of industry pros from major cable and national broadcasters (including NBC and WGBH) to watch all six student presentations. After seeing our team present, one of the NBC visitors was interested in the idea of "shared experiences." Giacomo explained that user-generated video around sporting events and concerts could populate the global view, depending on how one's filters were set up. This prompted another executive, who I believed was from HBO, to question the legality of using amateur concert video. I responded that copyright law was decades behind the technological and social reality, but she was skeptical. I then said that there would always be artists who want to exercise strong control over this content, but there were also many artists who recognized the value of fan content to generate additional interest or loyalty, and in my opinion, the latter group would have a competitive advantage. But as I thought about it later, it was clear that addressing the entertainment industry's copyright concerns would be a huge issue, regardless of how outdated the laws are.

Our team also heard from Henry, who thought the Real Time Requests business model was really a separate concept that did not match WorldTV. We agreed. Jungmoo and Giacomo had actually raised the same concern in our planning discussions, but I felt we needed a business model that did not involve standard subscriptions. Henry noted that a subscription might actually work for some people.

So what's next for WorldTV? All members of the team have graduated, and none of the industry visitors seemed interested in taking it further. We hope, however, that if our paper is accepted to the IEEE CCNC '12 conference, it might get some traction. In the draft that we are now preparing, I outlined the "Future Work" required to make WorldTV a reality:

The next steps for WorldTV would be to create a working prototype using Google Earth, YouTube and Facebook APIs, the Android or iPhone SDKs, and other existing software and hardware components. Besides using the prototype to evaluate functionality and performance, ordinary users in the target audience (people having global networks) could also test the system with an eye toward determining which features and use cases hold the most promise. When the product is ready for wider distribution, identifying suitable “TV App” platforms and partnerships could take place. In the long run, creating a scalable architecture with its own API and opening up WorldTV to outside developers (much like Facebook and Twitter have done) would help unleash the greatest potential of the platform. This would require significant investments, but in the long run would help realize innovations for the next age of television.

If the paper is published, I will share a link on this space. In addition, if anyone is interested in learning more or helping to develop the idea, my contact information can be found here.

Baseline Scenario: Why China is unwilling to revalue the yuan

An essay of mine was published earlier this month on the Baseline Scenario economics blog. It talks about China's yuan policy, and some of the reasons why Beijing will push back against external efforts to let the renminbi appreciate against other world currencies.

The essay has generated a lot of discussion, both online and off. It will be interesting to see the end result of the current back-room negotiations over exchange rates, but I am highly skeptical of talk that China will let its currency float. We heard the same hopeful talk about China freeing the yuan from the dollar peg back in 2005 and Beijing's "commitment to allow the yuan to be set by the interaction of demand and supply forces." But the peg remained and China only let the Yuan appreciate slowly (about 17% in five years). For reasons that I explained in the essay, I think the best that the U.S. and other countries can hope for is a very gradual appreciation of the yuan that does not threaten China's export-driven growth or social stability.