The Forgotten Smells of Rural Life

 

Image from National Museum of Health and Medicine via Wikimedia Commons

I ran across this interesting poster produced during World War Two by the Texas Military Forces Museums Art Department at Camp Barkeley Texas.

I am interested in collecting images of World War Two posters, and I came across the  one above while searching online. What I found most striking was the agricultural examples it gives to alert people to a phosgene gas attack; the smell of green corn and musty hay. I know what green corn and musty hay smells like having spent much of my life working in and around agriculture, but today in our mostly urbanized world, and especially in the U.S., few would. Today to communicate, what would you use? Cut lawn grass smells very different from a field of corn or hay. World War Two was a time when the average American still had contact with agriculture and food, but today, most don't. We are a nation disconnected from our land and food sources.

 I remember a Census meeting when a representative from Texas asked me a question I had never thought I would hear: "What is Hay?" The conversation had progressed after I had told him that I had grown up on a farm, to which this advocate for migrant farm workers recoiled a bit as if I had said I worked for a tobacco company. I explained that northern farms depend very little on migrant labor because they are primarily mechanized. Having been a farmworker, putting in long hours with no overtime or benefits and without workplace protections most people take for granted, I know there is a place for advocacy.

As a youth, I recalled having spent some time hoeing beans with migrant families and found keeping up with their work pace hard. That experience and my experience sweating in fields have given me empathy and appreciation for such work. After this, he asked me questions about farming, and I explained the dynamics of hay. 

The boundaries between our urban and rural cultures have become too broad because the agricultural roots of human civilization are the deepest in the rural. The urban has always depended on the rural to sustain cities that are unsustainable without them.