Why I Farm
By John Peterson

It’s hard to explain just what keeps a person farming. I think about when I suddenly went from a fleet of cars and trucks and an arsenal of machinery down to nothing in the early ‘80s.

My boots were worn out, and I didn’t have the money for another pair. My mother bought me boots. I will forever remember the exquisite sensation of walking what was left of this farm, secure in my shiny rubber boots, feeling somehow that those boots had restored me to the land. The land has a feel underfoot that melds me to it.

And then there’s the smell—our machine shed has a smell of eternity, a musty ancient fragrance from before my birth and into the hereafter. There’s the rhythm—the barn door opens and closes; the swallows return; the brome grass swishes.

On NPR [one time], a Mayan girl in the Yucatan Peninsula was interviewed (through a translator). She wanted to know why the girl weaved all day long. The girl didn’t answer to the interviewer’s satisfaction, so the interviewer persisted.

"Is it because you can sell your weavings for money?”

"No.”

"Do you weave because your ancestors weaved and it’s a way to stay connected to your people?”

Huh?”

"Do you weave because you love the rhythm and the patterns of weaving?”

"No.”

"Why do you weave, then?”

"I just weave.”

I don’t stay on this farm because brome grass swishes; that’s a fringe benefit. The closest I can describe my bond to farming is a shudder I get, an irrepressible vibration when it’s time to work the fields. I can be eating, sleeping or having a great conversation, and when the time is right to plow or plant, my body registers some mysterious sensation, an irresistible beckoning. My legs take me to the work, put me on the tractor; I am all surrender. And the joy of pushing dirt around, the ecstasy of spraying potentized silica, the thrill of organizing little dots of green into straight lines on bare soil—these invoke in me a subtle delirium.

For two years I toured rural Illinois with a play I wrote about a farm family losing its land. Audiences wept and laughed. Once an old man caught up to me backstage. He said, “Let me tell you how to farm. There’s only one way. You farm‘til you’re down to your last nickel. And then you keep farming until the nickel’s gone.”

Like a drug, the land can lure a person into destitution. It can overshadow one’s love for others. The land can embolden, exhaust, ennoble. It can nurture, destroy, sustain.

I don’t know why I farm.

I just farm.

February 2006 | Whole Life Review

The Real Dirt on Farmer John

by Andrea Blum

The first time I encountered John Peterson, a third-generation farmer from Caledonia, Ill., was in the Castro district of San Francisco. Former Vice President Al Gore was there, too. Beaming and beardless, Gore stood behind a podium on the Castro Theater stage, looking rather jolly with his pear-like girth. Only hours before, I’d heard Gore deliver a commanding speech on the perils of global warming as part of the UN’s World Environmental Day. Now he was introducing and praising Taggart Siegel’s latest documentary film, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, with the same loquaciousness he’d practiced in the 2000 election. Only in this speech, I sensed the passion for his own childhood farm flowing through his veins.

Not a moment too soon, the curtain opened, the organist disappeared and I was introduced to a curious man who, like many farmers, is passionate about dirt, metal and tractors.

But when I saw John Peterson wearing a dress with an orange boa and sitting sidesaddle on an old red Farmall tractor in one of the opening scenes, I feared I was in for a slapstick, gay-farming flick.

I was wrong. It’s not a film about a gay farmer. To anyone reading this, I apologize for my preconceived judgments. It seems it was the intention of the director and Peterson to challenge a stereotype by accentuating the flamboyant side of this distinctive farmer. As Peterson asks early in the film, what are you supposed to do when you live “in a rural community where you aren’t welcome because you are kind of different?”

Peterson, a Midwest farm boy who was thrilled to discover art and theatre in college, wrote the script and stars in this odyssey. He shares himself with complete candor as he plots the shelf life of an average American farm. In a chronological storyline, we see the rise, fall and resurrection of both our hero and his farm. Through footage of his idyllic childhood starting in the 1950s (captured by his endearing mother, Anna, who plainly adored her son) to grainy images (from Siegel’s own archives) of the painful farm auction and sale in the ‘80s, the two filmmakers create a time capsule that captures an unsung epic of American history.

Siegel transforms his archival material with sound and weaves film, video and stills together in a seamless edit. The ensemble serves as homage to Farmer John’s mother and father, who worked their entire lives to maintain the farm. Sadly, through a series of misadventures, John Peterson, the last in the family line, loses all but 22 acres when the bank forecloses—one of the first of many casualties in the American farm community.

Later, Peterson gets much of the farm back. Woven among the years and film frames in between is footage of lively gatherings and various friends and ex-girlfriends—one who debuts as a “Bumble Bee” and another who invents a Pig Newton cookie to sell to pay off the farm’s debts. We get to know his aunts, uncles and 83-year-old mom, and we travel with him to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico on a life-affirming journey inspired by writer Henry Miller. We even meet narrow-minded neighbors who plot his downfall by spreading rumors of satanic worship and ritual killings.

We also see the traditional social fabric of the Midwest unravel. And, as history plays itself out, we witness other farmers lose or sell their farms and subdivisions grow to replace them. We see grown men cry over lost dirt.

Farmer John confronts his fears and the prejudices of neighbors and, in the end, he prevails. “It’s a film that cuts through all boundaries, Peterson told me in a phone call from Amsterdam. “There are so many themes that feel universal. No one feels alienated. The mission was not to tell people how to think or feel. It was just to tell a story.”

The real dirt is this: Peterson prevails by changing direction from chemical-dependent monoculture farming—based on set government prices and subsidies—to an organic, biodynamic model with direct links to the customer.

He wins by gaining the respect of most of his neighbors by showing them a way to resurrect their lost connection to the land. Peterson’s Angelic Organics is now one of the largest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs in the US, with more than 1250 shareholders who support his work and eat his produce.

When the lights of the Castro Theater slowly came up, John walked to the stage to answer questions. In a manifestation of “community-supported filmmaking,” members of Farmer John’s human harvest sprouted from the velvet seats: friends, ex-girlfriends, former employees and interns rose to say hello. Even the ex-Bumble Bee.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John opens March 10 at LA Sunset, Santa Monica and Pasadena Laemmle theatres, as well as the Orange County University Regal. For more info, go to therealdirt.net.