The Real Dirt On Farmer John

 Interview by Arty Mangan

AM:    In 1950 the Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Benson said to farmers, “Get big or get out.” His 1970s successor, Earl Butts said, “Adapt or die.” How has the farming community around you changed over the decades that you’ve been farming?

John:    Well there’s hardly a farm left that’s on the same scale that it was in the ‘50s. People did get big or got out. Some people got big and then they had to get out anyway. Almost everything that you see in the countryside today is just an echo of the past. You see the barns that are falling apart. You see those little cozy farmsteads. They’ve either been gentrified, which has kept them together, or they’re falling apart. So you have a completely different kind of agriculture, which is on such a massive scale, so capital and chemical intensive for the most part. The other thing you have is a community that has barely held together, and that’s by memories, because the cohesiveness of the people up and down the roads farming side by side is gone. So they have memories.

 AM:    You’re in your fifties. How many of your peers are still farming?

 John:    You saw the movie. Do those people consider me their peer? Most of the people who grew up farming like I did were actually more nose-to-the-grindstone than I was. I have the cultural impulse, the creative impulse, but the people who grew up farming—there are very, very few left.

 Those operations used to be 100 to 300 acres in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Now they are 3,000 to 10,000 acres. How many farmers have gotten displaced? Here’s a really interesting thing. If you go to the county fair, which I don’t really like to do because I just don’t feel comfortable in the community because of all the things that have happened, but occasionally in the last 15 or 20 years I would go hoping I wouldn’t be recognized, and show cattle and chickens.

 The weird thing is that if you go to the fair you see it’s the kids of the people who I was in school with and maybe even their grandkids who are farming, but hardly any of them farm full time. In the ‘50s farming is what people did, and now it’s like something people are hanging on to, but it’s not their livelihood anymore. They somehow fit it in, make it happen, have some cows, have some chickens, have some rabbits, but its not coming out of a real farm anymore. It’s just coming out of a memory, a cultural memory or maybe a yearning, but they’re not making a living that way, which makes me sad. I would like it if people could make a living off the land because it’s a very powerful, informative way to live. I mean, in a lot of ways there’s a lot of heartache in it and a lot of work, but it sure would be great if more people could somehow figure out how to make their livelihoods from the land.

AM:    In spite of all the challenges, how have you made it?

John:    Well, probably by poetic relationship. Though I’m pretty hardcore about work and making stuff happen, I have a romantic feeling for farming, even though  it certainly has a hard edge. I think it probably shaped me in a couple of ways. One, it let me be in farming in an imaginative way that other people weren’t. I think for a lot of people who farm, who are drawn to the land, there is a quality or an aspect of poetry or romance in that. I don’t think it’s so conscious. I think there’s a yearning and aching people have but I don’t think it’s conscious. I was able to be imaginative about how to farm. My draw to the farm, and to that kind of lifestyle had more tenacity, because I have a very clear, conscious romantic relationship to farming. I think romance is powerful. We know what it’s like in our relationships. As a result, I’m going to figure out how to make it happen because I have this incredible love and I’m aware of it.  I have an incredible, deep, rich affinity for the land that becomes conscious. I think that it somehow strengthens the will.

 AM:    The relationship between culture and agriculture is a big part of your story.

 John:    I didn’t really notice it until I was in my late teens or early twenties. As my sister points out in the movie, I didn’t know diddly about art. At some point, I realized that the farm was an extremely creative place and that life that expresses itself on the farm is, in a way, the ultimate in creativity. These seeds unfold, and they become something; they express themselves and I’m going a new way day after day.

 So there’s this panorama of life that for me informed the creative sphere, the creative curiosities. It just seemed like of course this is where the sculptures and the fiber artists and the performers are going to converge and do their work because a farm is an extremely creative place. The farm informs me in that way, and it makes me feel much more lavish in my expressiveness. So that’s what happened. That’s why we created what we called the Midwest Coast, [for] which the tag line was art and agriculture. I take it for granted that art and agriculture go hand in hand. Historically I’m sure a case can be made that the farm was sort of the foundation for culture, for the unfolding of culture. Certainly it was a center for many festivals that go with agriculture. The agriculture made culture possible but it became more and more separate and maybe alienated because it got more and more entrenched in the urban world. I think there is a possibility for the renewal of culture by renewing peoples’ relationship to the land.

AM:    Why did you get into biodynamics and what has it done for your farm?

 John:    My life was certainly turned around by my encounter with classical homeopathy. Single dose homeopathy works on a constitutional level. Two hundred years ago Hahnemann popularized homeopathy. The system that Hahnemann popularized was one that to a large degree was based on single dose homeopathy, which works on a very deep emotional level.  When I lost most of my land, I could not reconstruct myself out of my own will forces, out of my intention. I couldn’t do it. My will forces were shot. I just felt ruined. It was hard to get up.

 I finally went to a homeopath who recommended very high doses of aurum and it really helped to bring my life back together and make me functional again. It affected me on a deep emotional level. It somehow makes the body itself, the immune system capable of generating a very different kind of metabolic and emotional state. I had a very profound experience over a couple of years of reconstructing myself emotionally out of my relationship with homeopathy.

So then I said, “Hey, there must be something like this for the land.” And my homeopath said, “Yeah, there’s biodynamics and Rudolf Steiner.” Eventually I encountered Steiner from a different direction, but I already had this personal experience from working with myself. So I felt like this method of potentizing and working with the subtle energies was going to be powerful. I’d been trying so hard to put myself back together and I had been very unsuccessful. I’d been to all kinds of healers and shamans. Then with homeopathy, I finally started to reconstruct myself. I felt this was a model I wanted to apply to the land.

Biodynamics goes so far beyond the exotic methods, the preparations and the compost pile. It’s a way of perceiving and integrating. It resonates so well with my relationship to farms. I’ve always thought of farms as individualities. They’ve always had their own individual characters from farm to farm. I’ve always felt that. So when Steiner comes along and says, “The individuality of the farm needs to be enhanced and strengthened.” I said, “Wow this is great” because for me driving down the road each farm would emanate something that would be specific to that farm. Steiner was really speaking to my own feelings. All the diversity and integration of the human realm and the physical and the plant and the animal, brings all these realms together into a kind of organism, a unit. A farm has to be self-sustaining. He said we should just keep moving farms more and more towards self-sustaining. If you look at my farm, we have machinery; we have inputs from the outside. We’re certainly not there, but we always visit that as an ideal. How can we move more and more in that direction?

AM:     In the opening scene in the film you’re seen eating dirt, like a connoisseur of fine soil. Can you actually taste fertility?

 John:    Oh, I’m not really trained in that. I think that there was a time when people were really trained in that, but I’m not.  It’s just more a daily routine of mine. It’s just something I recognized as an old custom that preceded soil testing and apparently was a way that people evaluated their soil. I couldn’t taste the soil and say… it’s a little short on phosphorus. The aroma that makes fertile soil really distinctive is a result of bacteria. It must go way beyond what happens in a bottle of wine. Yeah, the smell of soil. I know I smell the compost. It’s easy to make certain crude distinctions. If it’s not finished, it’s going to be sour. When it’s finished it’s very sweet and it’s kind of an intoxicating smell.

AM:    Speaking of a visceral response to fertility, I read somewhere about a woman who hadn’t had a period for three years and then saw your movie and her period returned. What do you attribute that to?

 John:    Isn’t that interesting?

 AM:    It obviously stimulated some kind of pheromone in her.

 John:    Oh yeah, this woman saw the movie while in bed and she was crying, and crying. You know, I was wondering if she was menopausal, but I don’t think she was.

 AM:    You lost your father and your uncle early on. Your mother has a very powerful presence in the movie, and I assume in your life, as well. Looking at your individual story and the universality of it, the question I have is, why should people be concerned about the loss of family farms?

 John:    Well I think there’s an intimate relationship where people live off the land, when they’re right where humanity meets wilderness. In between that space where there’s refined urbanite society and then there’s wilderness. In between is where humans meet the wilds and where they have cultivated the land. We have weather and seeds and weeds and dogs and pestilence and bounty.

 There’s something about being in that relationship with the elements and food that goes very deeply into humans. Not that the people who do that are necessarily better or become upstanding or more civil. Even so there’s something about that—growing up with that, being in that, knowing that the rains mean bounty and survival. Being in the windstorms and having to bring the cows in from the rain. There’s just something about that that informs people’s relationship to the whole world, their whole lives. Everything outside of them is going to be informed by what happens in an ongoing process of being with the elements in that way. You know these old farmers who didn’t use chemicals to mediate that relationship, those old farmers have lived most of their lives in a more authentic to-the-bones kind of relationship with nature and with the land. You see it in their behavior. You hear it in their voices. You see it in how they walk, the way they express themselves. They’re not really that conscious of what it is. That’s why I say a lot of people don’t develop a conscious poetic or romantic relationship to the land, but they still emanate it. They become it. They become the poem or the song. So that’s something that’s missing from our culture. I mean very few kids today are being brought up in that kind of relationship with the land.

I was with Al Gore for a lot of one weekend, and I said to him, “Who’s in Congress now that’s got a relationship to a farm?”

 He said, “When my Dad was in Congress and I was in grade school and high school we all piled into the station wagon when Congress got out and we made a bee line for the farm because we had cattle and all this haying to do. We had managers taking care of the place when Congress was in session, but as soon as we were out of session we came back and farmed. We worked very hard and I loved it.”

 I said, “Your father was bumped from office because he was against the Vietnam War. When he left, was he the last one in Congress who really had this deep relationship to the land? “

 Gore said, “Yeah, the Congressional schedule used to be designed around farming because so many people were involved in agriculture.”

 So here you had people who worked and lived in relationship to the land, who were making the laws and who were forming the country. Now you don’t have it. Now there are people in Congress whose connections to the land is probably more through their relationship with Monsanto, and to the agrochemical companies. There’s a whole kind of perspective on life that’s being shaped, it’s so many layers away from the Earth itself. And how does that affect people’s decisions and their relationships to one another? You can always find exceptions and you can say that it doesn’t really make people nobler, or more honorable, but it does something. You know, the way people live their lives, especially when they are young and they’re growing up, has some effect on their perspective.

AM:    In the big picture what’s the good news in agriculture today?

 John:    You’ve got two types of agriculture, two approaches that are strengthening. One is the agribusiness model, or the chemical model, and it’s very, very dominated by capital. The other model is powered by something that may not be inexhaustible, but it’s more inexhaustible than capital. It’s powered by what I call a moral principle. You have people who are inspired by a moral impulse in relating to the soil and relating to the food, to the farmers and to the planet. The whole organic movement was never started out of capital.

 There was no community supported agriculture farm in this country 20 years ago.Now there are maybe as many as a million people being fed from about 3,000 CSA farms—from zero to a million. This came out of human beings just deciding how to spend their money. It’s an incredible thing. Now there’s this whole CSA thing that came about because people just decided they wer going to do something new and powerful and extraordinary. Their money followed their passion and their commitment, and look what happened.