The Good Farmer

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Our gustatory industries treat food items like spoiled little celebrities, zipping them around the globe in luxurious air-conditioned cabins, dressing them up in gaudy outfits, spritzing them with makeup, and breaking the bank on advertising, for heaven's sake. My farm-girl heritage makes me blush and turn down tickets to that particular circus. I'd rather wed my fortunes to the sturdy gal-next-door kind of food, growing what I need or getting it from local "you-pick" orchards and our farmers' market.

It has come to pass that my husband and I, in what we hope is the middle of our lives, are in possession of a farm. It's not a hobby homestead, it is a farm, somewhat derelict but with good potential. It came to us with some 20 acres of good, tillable bottomland, plus timbered slopes and all the pasture we can ever use, if we're willing to claim it back from the brambles. A similar arrangement is available with the 75-year-old apple orchard. The rest of the inventory includes a hundred-year-old clapboard house, a fine old barn that smells of aged burley, a granary, poultry coops, a root cellar, and a century's store of family legends. No poisons have been applied to this land for years, and we vow none ever will be.

Our agrarian education has come in as a slow undercurrent beneath our workaday lives and the rearing of our children. Only our closest friends, probably, have taken real notice of the changes in our household: that nearly all the food we put on our table, in every season, was grown in our garden or very nearby. That the animals we eat took no more from the land than they gave back to it, and led sunlit, contentedly grassy lives. Our children know how to bake bread, stretch mozzarella cheese, ride a horse, keep a flock of hens laying, help a neighbor, pack a healthy lunch, and politely decline the world's less wholesome offerings. They know the first fresh garden tomato tastes as good as it does, partly, because you've waited for it since last Thanksgiving, and that the awful ones you could have bought at the grocery in between would only subtract from this equation. This rule applies to many things beyond tomatoes. I have noticed that the very politicians who support purely market-driven economics, which favor immediate corporate gratification over long-term responsibility, also express loud concern about the morals of our nation's children and their poor capacity for self-restraint. I wonder what kind of tomatoes those men feed their kids.

I have heard people of this same political ilk declare that it is perhaps sad but surely inevitable that our farms are being cut up and sold to make nice-sized lawns for suburban folks to mow, because the most immediately profitable land use must prevail in a free country. And yet I have visited countries where people are perfectly free, such as the Netherlands, where this sort of disregard for farmland is both illegal and unthinkable. Plenty of people in this country, too, seem to share a respect for land that gives us food; why else did so many friends of my youth continue farming even while the economic prospects grew doubtful? And why is it that more of them each year are following sustainable practices that defer some immediate profits in favor of the long-term health of their fields, crops, animals, and watercourses? Who are the legions of Americans who now allocate more of their household budgets to food that is organically, sustainably, and locally grown, rather than buying the cheapest products they can find? My husband and I, bearing these trends in mind, did not contemplate the profitable option of subdividing our farm and changing its use. Frankly, that seemed wrong.

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