The Fall and Rise of Farmer John

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Against this backdrop, Peterson faced his own struggles. His father died, leaving the 19-year-old to work the farm alone. When Peterson enrolled in some courses at nearby Beloit College, his world of tractors and crops collided full force with art, free expression, and radical youth culture. Soon his farm became an off-campus crash pad and arts colony. Peterson mounted speakers on the fenders of his tractor and blasted the Doors. The barn filled with puppets and masks. "For ten years," Peterson says, "the farm became a big experiment."

One of the artists who swam ashore at Peterson's "Midwest Coast" was The Real Dirt's filmmaker, Taggart Siegel. There he shot his first film, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, starring Peterson, as well as his pigs, chickens, and cows. Siegel also picked up the thread of Peterson's life where his mother's super-8 left off, eventually amassing more than 180 hours of footage of life on the farm.

By the age of 30, Peterson had racked up "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in debt, and in 1982 his land, tools, and equipment were auctioned off. The 360 acres that his father had nursed through the Great Depression were reduced to just 22. His college friends had fled, and Peterson was left alone with a barn full of masks.

In the aftermath of his farm failure, depression gripped Peterson. Moreover, the wild parties and eccentric art projects had alienated him from his neighbors. According to Peterson's script, he became a persecuted scapegoat, accused of devil worship and tormented until he finally fled to Mexico to recuperate. His account of this time is tinged, perhaps understandably, with a streak of paranoia. It's true that the bitter tincture of ill will and gossip can make a small town a terrible place to be. But it's also true that the price of nonconformity is often ostracism.

Every foreclosure in the '80s had a private story of guilt and shame, but most farmers remember the decade as a time when folks pulled together to face hard times. While Peterson nursed his wounds in Mexico, his more conventional contemporaries formed organizations like Groundswell, the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), and countless others that sought to help farmers cope with their losses and change the federal policies that had bankrupted them. In the late '70s, AAM organized thousands of farmers in a "tractorcade" that shut down Washington, D.C. In The Real Dirt, this rich history of farmers rallying to act on their own behalf is eclipsed by Peterson's personal sense, however justified, of persecution. That's too bad, because it diminishes the frame of the film's second half, which chronicles Peterson's compelling resurrection and rebirth as an organic farmer.

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