February
17, 2005: It is not for mere etymological kicks that
Ronald Jager opens The Fate of Family Farming by
noting that in Shakespeare’s time ‘to farm’
meant ‘to lease out’ rather than ‘to work
the land’ (what we now call farmers were then called
husbandmen). The disconcerting irony is that many farmers
today—farmers in the peculiar sense that they manage
farms from their dirt-free urban headquarters—are more
properly farming in the 16th-century sense of the word. This
may be good news for the smattering of mega-farmers and their
families, but not for the more modest family farm and the
many families whose livelihood and lifestyle rely on it.
Jager’s investigation into the fate of these threatened
yet survivalist family farms focuses on New England, with
an emphasis on New Hampshire, but it spans history, biography,
science, literature, lore, practical farming and journalism.
The writing—at once eloquent, warm and playful—never
sprawls into tangential irrelevance, and makes for pleasurable
and tireless reading, even offering lyrical turns of phrase
(“…new obligations grow like weeds in farmers’
footprints”). The family farm, Jager suggests, is not
only about putting food on our tables—great as that
mission may be—but also about our national origins,
our mythic character, our political ideals.
Jager devotes the first section of the book to this history:
the farming miseries of the hapless Pilgrims; the farming
successes of the more prepared and competent Dutch settlers;
the adoption of Native American crops like the resilient sweet
corn, initially scorned as the crop of “barbarous Indians
which know no better… more fit for swine than men”;
the elevation of farming to noble calling by American figures
like Adams and Jefferson, who countered European views that
farming was a slavish and ignoble activity (this too, of course,
not without its bitter irony, considering Jefferson’s
ownership of slaves). Jager brings us to a cattle show to
hear Emerson rhapsodizing about the American farmer in an
address but does not shield us from the caustic writings of
Emerson’s friend, Thoreau, who pitied that same farmer
for what he felt was a spiritless life of backbreaking drudgery.
We also read about the 20th-century's agrarian spokesmen:
the novelist-turned-farmer Louis Bromfield, who preached and
practiced healthy agriculture on Malabar Farm in Ohio; the
writer and fruit farmer Victor Hanson, who turns his Thoreauvian
polemics not only upon the corporations that have come to
dominate daily life, but also upon the complacent citizens
who embrace the corporate world even as they resent it; and
Wendell Berry, whose less biting but no less determined vision
and zeal to, in Berry’s words, ‘make scars grow
grass’ has startled countless Americans out of their
passivity.
On this firm foundation, Jager then describes four specialized
New Hampshire family farms which, respectively, produce maple
syrup, milk, corn and eggs, and apples—all traditional
New England products. He visited the farms repeatedly over
several years, and the thoroughness of his research is evident.
It also helps that he grew up on a family farm. In the chapter
on Gould Hill Orchards, Jager reflects back on how he would
harvest apples for sauce as a child in Michigan, according
to a method he still uses: “[S]hake the tree limbs gently,
and then collect and immediately use only the prime apples
of those that fall… [S]hake a little harder, and the
falling apples will include slightly tarter ones to add summer
zing” (p.180).
He peppers the stories of these farms with proverbs (Don’t
tap a tree smaller in diameter than the bucket you put to
it), with curious facts (cows that ingest metal can be fed
a magnet pellet to draw the metal down to the bottom of their
stomachs), with etymological sex-ed lessons (the word ‘rooster’
was brought to life in 19th century America because its four-lettered
synonym had taken on an impolite connotation), and with intriguing
historical practices that may partly explain why voter turnout
is lower now than in the Republic’s earliest days (for
over a hundred years hard cider was generously passed out
on Election Day).
Jager describes the daily operations of the farms he describes:
how maple trees are tapped with tubes, how a milking parlor
is organized, how an egg-gathering machine works, how apple
trees are thinned. But he also shows how today’s agricultural
system pushes family farms to change, especially to get big
or get out. Some farmers don’t hesitate to expand; the
Bascom’s Maple Farm, with its high-tech sugarhouse,
lies somewhere between what Jager calls a factory farm (based
on profits and efficiency) and a craft farm (centered on lifestyle
and tradition). Gould Hill Orchards, on the other hand, is
more of a craft farm; the owner, Erick Leadbeater, refuses
to pasteurize his cider, which would compromise its quality,
though it enable to access larger markets.
Whether Jager is musing on imported vine-ripened tomatoes--“all
green as grass”--at the Boston Market, or on the innocent-until-proven-guilty
policy that has quietly admitted genetically modified foods
into our supermarkets, his sympathetic eye is always aimed
forward in an effort, as he says in the preface, to illuminate
the family farm's fate. It is also the fate of our food, our
land, our farmers, our health and our culture. And Jager does
illuminate this fate brilliantly, giving a rich sense of its
complexity. Of course ‘fate’ may be the wrong
word. Fate implies predestination and, as I presume Jager
would agree, the future of the family farm depends less upon
the gods than upon us.
Constantine Markides lives on Monhegan Island, Maine.
He can be reached at cons76@yahoo.com
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