Collecting area: Organic farming

A pioneer in organic agriculture in New England, Bill Duesing has been as an environmental educator, writer, artist, and lecturer over for four decades. After graduating from Yale University (1964), Duesing worked as a Cooperative Extension agent before turning to organic principles in the early 1970s. Emphasizing sustainability and greater local food sufficiency, he has been instrumental in developing organic standards for gardening and land care and he has served as both founding president and later executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association Connecticut and president of the NOFA Interstate Council. During the 1990s, Duesing produced two radio shows, “Living on the Earth” (WSHU) and “The Politics of Food” (WPKN), and he is author of (1993).

The Duesing collection consists of transcripts of his radio show, “Living on the Earth” (1990-2000) and fourteen recordings of “The Politics of Food,” which was broadcast monthly over WPKN (89.5 FM) in Bridgeport in 1997-1998. Each half hour segment of “Politics” included news, a fifteen minute interview, recipes, and tips, with interviewees including Mel Bristol, Jac Smit, Vincent Kay, John Wargo, Hugh Joseph, Joseph Kiefer, Julie Rawson, Michael Sligh, Kathy Lawrence, Lee Warren, and Elizabeth Henderson.

An organizer, consultant, and educator in the alternative agriculture movement, Grace Gershuny has been active in the field since the 1970s when she worked for the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), developing its first organic certification program. As a leader in the movement, Gershuny helped to establish both the Organic Trade Association and the Organic Farmer: The Digest of Sustainable Agriculture. Today she continues to write and teach on the subject, serving as a faculty member at a number of colleges, most recently Green Mountain College.

The collection consists chiefly of printed material from a run of the Organic Farmer to Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA) publications and organizational newsletters, such as the Rural Education Center. Amongst these publications are a few small but significant groups of materials including notes from Gershuny’s role as the NOFA VT coordinator in 1979 and her drafts and notes for the second editions of The Soul of Soil.

A long-time agricultural and environmental writer and editor, Susan J. Harlow has deep roots in New England and Vermont agriculture and organic farming communities. Harlow Farm, where she lives and grew up, was one of the first organic vegetable farms in New England, and was named Vermont Sustainable Farm of the Year in 1998. Her interests in journalism, communications, and farming have led to numerous publications, projects, and collaborations, including a period as Associate Editor for the Farm Progress Companies, serving as the Director of Communications at Antioch University New England, a published history on the University of Vermont Extension System, and numerous articles, including recurring pieces in American Agriculturalist.

The Susan Harlow Organic Farming Oral History Collection consists of six audio oral histories and additional notes from other interviews conducted by Harlow with Vermont organic farmers. Many of the interviews were part of a 2013 exhibit “Plowing Old Ground: Vermont’s Organic Farming Pioneers,” a collaborative effort with photographer John Nopper, who photographed the subjects of Harlow’s interviews. The visual exhibit featured interview summaries and quotations alongside photographs from six farms and their farmers, all pioneers in the history of organic farm production, marketing, and distribution in Vermont. The collection contains Harlow’s notes and transcriptions along with oral histories and interviews with: Jake and Liz Guest, Jack and Anne Lazor, Joey Klein, Bruce Kaufman, Howard Prussack, Paul Harlow, R. Houriet, Samuel Kaymen, Will and Judy Stevens, Richard Wiswall, and Enid Wonnacott.

A farmer, activist, and writer, Elizabeth Henderson has exerted an enormous influence on the movement for organic and sustainable agriculture since the 1970s. Although Henderson embarked on an academic career after completing a doctorate at Yale on the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1974, by 1980, she abandoned academia for Unadilla Farm in Gill, Mass., where she learned organic techniques for raising vegetables. Relocating to Rose Valley Farm in Wayne County, NY, in 1989, she helped establish Genesee Valley Organic CSA (GVOCSA), one of the first in the country, and she continued the relationship with the CSA after founding Peacework Organic Farm in Newark, NY, in 1998. Deeply involved in the organic movement at all levels, Henderson was a founding member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) in Massachusetts, has served on the Board of Directors for NOFA NY, the NOFA Interstate Council, SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) Northeast, and many other farming organizations at the state, regional, and national level, and she has been an important voice in national discussions on organic standards, fair trade, and agricultural justice. Among other publications, Henderson contributed to and edited The Real Dirt: Farmers Tell about Organic and Low-Input Practices in the Northeast and co-wrote Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture (1999, with Robyn Van En) and A Manual of Whole Farm Planning (2003, with Karl North).

Offering insight into the growth of the organic agriculture movement and the organizations that have sustained it, the Henderson Papers document Henderson’s involvement with NOFA, SARE, and the GVOCSA, along with her work to establish organic standards and promote organic practices. Henderson’s broad social and political commitments are represented by a rich set of letters from her work educating prisoners in the late 1970s, including correspondence with Tiyo Attallah Salah-El and John Clinkscales, and with the American Independent Movement in New Haven during the early 1970s, including a nearly complete run of the AIM Bulletin and its successor Modern Times.

Since 1987, Michael and Carrie Kline have written, documented, and championed the stories of everyday people. Using the written word, documentary film, oral history, audio recordings, and podcasts, the Klines have documented immigration, Appalachian culture, war tax resistance, the Underground Railroad, gender, and more in various locales throughout the United States.

Michael Kline and Carrie Nobel first met in western Massachusetts at a human rights rally to support Randy and Betsy Kehler, who had recently lost their home to the IRS after refusing to pay war taxes. The two soon discovered a shared love of social activism, folklife documentation and old-time singing. At the time, Michael, who had earned his Ph.D. in Public Folklore from Boston University, was staff folklorist for the Pioneer Valley Folklore Society (PVFS) conducting field research documenting changes to the Connecticut River Valley. Carrie, who received her Master’s Degree in American Studies from SUNY/Buffalo, was an organizer and events planner for the Institute for Community Economics helping to create affordable housing through community land trusts and had recently completed a degree in the politics and cultures of the U.S. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Throughout their 40 year career, Michael and Carrie have worked with communities in Maine, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Caroline, and West Virginia. These projects have been produced under the Talking Across the Lines umbrella, which began as a 22-part radio series of fifteen-minute programs about the people, neighborhoods, and industries of Wheeling, West Virginia, and is now an ongoing podcast. They have received grants to document the stories of people and places for folklife societies, museums, municipalities, and educational institutions. They also offer workshops in “Listening for a Change,” which describe alternative approaches to conducting meaningful field research.

The Carrie and Michael Kline Collection contains several dozen analog and digital recordings on a variety of topics and people related to Western Massachusetts history including this histories of Deerfield and Northfield, the Quabbin towns, Kelly School in Holyoke, Wally and Juanita Nelson, and outsider art. There are also interviews with people from Orange, Shelburne, Sandisfield, Puerto Rico, Erving, and other places on a variety of topics including: family, culture, singing traditions, music, poetry, and activism. The collection also includes notes, release forms, grant applications, production notes, and recording logs. The Klines also have a collection of material at Berea College in Kentucky. A portion of that collection related to western Massachusetts was deaccessioned by Berea in 2024 and added to this collection.

Founded in August 1968 by Marshall Bloom and a group of colleagues from the Liberation News Service. From the outset, the Montague Farm Commune was a center of political and cultural (and countercultural) creatvity. In its first year, it was the headquarters for the Montague branch of the Liberation News Service and Farmers were involved in a range of other causes. Most famously, in 1974, Farmers lit the fuse of the antinuclear movement. Rallying against a proposed nuclear power plant in Montague and Farmer Sam Lovejoy’s act of civil disobedience that felled a weather monitoring tower set up in preparation, the Farmers carried waged a campaign of non-violent direct action that became the hallmark of antinuclear groups across the country. Their actions against the Yankee Rowe and Seabrook (N.H.) power plants were instrumental in dampening further development of nuclear power in the United States. In 2003, the Farm community agreed to sell the Farm property to Zen Peacemakers.

The photographs in this collection were taken by three members of the Montague Farm Commune: early members Anna Gyorgy and Tony Mathews, and Tony’s wife Susan Kramer. The photos depict daily life on the Farm and its residents, primarily in he period between 1978 and 1981, including farm work, sugaring, domestic chores, family and children, holidays, and celebrations, such as May Day. A handful of images, mostly by Mathews, go back to the earliest days of the Farm, and there are later images from the 20th and 25th reunions. Of special notes are over 100 images taken by Kramer during the occupation of the Seabroon Nuclear Power Plant in May 1977, at which 1,414 occupiers were arrested.

A World of Possibilities logo, ca. 1998

Founded in 1995, by founder and former executive director Mark Sommer, the Mainstream Media Project (MMP) was a nonprofit public education organization focused on print and broadcast media about creative approaches in achieving peace, security, and sustainability in an interdependent global community. Until its closing in early 2014, it was particularly involved with placing top policy analysts, social innovators, and on-the-ground organizers on radio and television stations across the country and globe. One such project, A World of Possibilities radio show, founded in 2001, was an award-winning one hour weekly show hosted by Sommer. A program “of spirited global conversations,” featuring interviews searching for understanding of, and solutions to, longstanding global public affairs challenges, A World of Possibilities was nationally and internationally syndicated until it ceased broadcasting in 2011.

The MMP Records contain over ten linear feet of CD and DVD masters of uncut interviews and produced radio shows. Shows, including Heart of the Matter and A World of Possibilities, explore promising new thinking and experimentation in fields ranging from energy, food, water, and wilderness to human rights, global security, and public health, and include interviews with leading experts and innovators, such as Studs Terkel, Pete Seeger, Laurie Garrett, Wangari Maathai, Frances Moore Lappe, Howard Gardner, Lily Yeh, Robert Reich, Majora Carter, Van Jones and many more. The collection also contains MMP business files, consisting of correspondence, reports, articles, grant information, and organizational materials.

Published quarterly by the Northeast Organic Farming Association, The Natural Farmer is a widely circulated newspaper devoted to the support of organic farming. These files are made available courtesy of the editors, Jack Kittredge and Julie Rawson of NOFA Massachusetts.

Howard Prussack at High Meadows Farm in Putney, VT

A farmer for over thirty years along the Connecticut River in Vermont, John Nopper came to photography later in life. Drawn to the challenge of capturing individuals and environments in his and surrounding communities, Nopper focuses on portraits and landscapes, and specializes in 11”x17” or larger printing, emphasizing the depth of tone in his black and white photography. His photograph projects often focus on the instruments and individuals of a specific industry or place, and frequently document subjects and vocations he feels warrant increased attention, either due to their methods, like his work documenting traditional maple sugaring and printing practices, or due to current events, such as a more recent project as an embedded photographer within a Vermont city police department.

The John Nopper Photograph Collection currently consists of twenty-five, 11”x17”, black and white prints from the exhibit “Plowing Old Ground: Vermont’s Organic Pioneers,” along with the descriptions from the project. In a collaborative effort with interviewer and writer Susan J. Harlow, Nopper photographed the subjects of Harlow’s interviews for an exhibit featuring interview summaries and quotations alongside photographs from six farms and their farmers, all pioneers in the history of organic farm production, marketing, and distribution in Vermont. The collection also includes digital photographs not printed, as well as digital versions of most of the prints.

The Northeast Organic Farming Association began as the vision of a New York City plumbing supplies salesman and has grown into a large association supporting information-sharing, education, collaboration, and certification. Increasingly influential non-profit organization with chapters in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont, NOFA has “nearly 4,000 farmers, gardeners and consumers working to promote healthy food, organic farming practices and a cleaner environment.”

The NOFA collection includes records, publications, ephemera, photographs, and other materials from NOFA chapters in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont, along with material from the Interstate Council. The collection includes information on NOFA’s conferences and programs, educational work, lobbying, and their initiatives in organic certification and organic land care.

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