The Fall and Rise of Farmer John

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Foreclosure, film crews, free spirits -- ain't nothing that a country boy can't hack

One of America's enduring myths, honed by a thousand jokes and films, is that our farmers are ignorant, backward, and conservative. Sure, there's one in every bunch. In truth, farming demands intelligence, curiosity, and creativity, and that may be why the profession has given us more than its fair share of reformers and radicals.

Take John Peterson, the subject of the new documentary film The Real Dirt on Farmer John. Peterson, a third-generation northern Illinois agriculturist, is one farmer who single-handedly flattens the rube stereotype. He's handy with a tractor and haybine, and he's also an oddball artist who is unafraid to prance through his cornfields in a bee costume (complete with black-and-yellow tights and gossamer wings). Peterson is, to say the least, a complex character.

Beautifully shot and masterfully edited from some 55 years' worth of footage, The Real Dirt is both his autobiography (Peterson is credited as the film's writer) and a chronicle of radical shifts in the social, cultural, and economic landscape of rural America. The film begins in the idyllic 1950s. Filmmaker Taggart Siegel intercuts interviews with vivid super-8 footage shot by Peterson's mother, Anna, that brings the hard work and joy of farming into sharp focus. Peterson's father and uncle farmed a small acreage inherited from their father, but as the archival footage makes clear, community was the equal of family. Neighbors and relatives crowd the frames of Anna's camera and work together to thresh grain, raise a barn, and prepare meals. Young John Peterson is there, too, one of a gaggle of rough-and-tumble kids running along behind the tractor -- the only son, destined to inherit the farm and his father's skill of working the land.

Into this bucolic scene comes the 1960s "Green Revolution" -- a misnomer used to describe the intensive petrochemical farming that launched the long, slow decline of the American family farm. By the 1970s, as President Richard Nixon's agriculture secretary warned farmers to "get big or get out," virtually the entire farming industry was floating on credit -- and the ship sank in the 1980s farm crisis.

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