McKinley Jones - Father of Fridge Trucks
Happy Black History Month!
There is a rich history of Black Leaders in Farming and this year we are focused on the contributions of Frederick McKinley Jones, who introduced refrigerated truck technology to the world in the 1940's among many other pivotal inventions. Jones was a prolific inventor and is recognized as both a winner of the National Medal of Technology and an inductee in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, as well as a co-founder of the now global HVAC company Thermo-King.
Jones' inventions had a massive global impact not only on the ability to move fresh produce safely through the distribution chain from more rural areas to more densely populated ones for agriculture, but also a new ability to transport medicine and blood at controlled temperatures which vastly improved our country's outcome in WWII and advanced modern medicine simultaneously. These giant leaps in food safety and medicine are used in all parts of our daily lives still, to which we owe a great debt of gratitude.
When considering the demographic landscape of agriculture today (farm ownership falls mostly to white men by the USDA statistics) one may wonder how many other people like McKinley Jones never had a chance to contribute their ideas and inventions. How much better off might we be collectively if black and brown people were allowed, encouraged, or invited to participate in the industry’s growth and technologies? How much individual and family wealth was lost for generations to these systemic barriers? And thus a scarcity of landholdings, lasting for generations and still to this day became the norm for Black folks in America. Jones wasn’t exceptional just for being smart and hardworking - it was exceptional that he was able to own a global enterprise and push dozens of patents through in his own name and right.
Oregon’s own history of miscegenation, segregation and harassment is well documented in the essay by Darrell Millner for Oregon Historical Society titled Blacks in Oregon, made it nearly impossible to for people of color to acquire land or business permits in most of the state until halfway through the last century, and even still Black communities remain a common target for gentrification, loan denials, eviction by imminent domain, and foreclosures. You’ll often read that most farmers are white men without the context that lots of other people - specifically women, Queer, Black, Indigenous, & People Of Color - have vast ancestral knowledge of and desire to farm but no access to the industry or land therein.
Jones also invented a slew of other useful things - automatic engine starters, compressors, ticket vending machines, 2-cycle gas engines, and thermostatic control for compartmented HVAV (like your refrigerator’s temp control) among others. Jones did this without much formal education and with little to no technical support - how much more could he have accomplished with access to that training and those opportunities? This consideration is what fuels our dedication to supporting BIPOC farmers right in this moment - at a time when the world desperately needs new thinking on how to approach land stewardship, conservation, and biodiversity in agriculture it seems logical to build inclusive spaces for those new ideas to germinate and proliferate.
So we are very grateful to Frederick McKinley Jones for his contributions to our industry, against the odds, and we are pondering our own use of that technology as we notice where these inventions are popping up in our lives and around the farm: We have been building out a re-purposed refrigerated box truck for the past year or so at the farm, and hope to get that project fully funded for use this season. We’d like to think Jones would approve of our creativity and do-it-yourself motivation as a small independent farm. The Food Safety Modernization Act rules are built in large part on access to Jones’ technology, and these rules are a backbone of farm policies at our farm and throughout agriculture. Jones also invented a portable x-ray machine, a machine that was used in Domenika’s surgery just a couple months ago.
You can read more about Jones’ life and accomplishments in this article from the Minnesota Post Minnesota Knows Cold You’ll find more information about other Black Farm Innovators in this article Black Innovators in Ag History by Gill’s Onions Co.
