We used to know where our food came from. We grew it ourselves – in gardens, on small farms, grazed our meat across the prairies. Or, we traded for it – exchanged services for eggs, sewing for milk, metal-working for meat. Directly or by a degree of removal, we were connected to the land. Then came the railroads, refrigeration, trucks, ships, and planes. We migrated to the cities. Conglomerates purchased the land; scientists engineered the crops and livestock, and dinner came from plastic, cardboard, and Styrofoam pods. In the twenty-first century, despite the growing trend of “locovore”-ism, and the voices calling for a return to “free-range” animal husbandry and “grass-fed” beef, few Americans have ever seen dinner in its natural habitat. Few have any concept of the labor and cost involved in producing the vast quantity of cheap food that sustains our ever expanding nation and waistlines.
I have spent most of my life at the uncertain confluence of suburbia and agriculture, seeing daily the conflict of comprehension between a populace demanding cheap, plentiful food that is also environmentally sustainable and humanely produced and the farmers and ranchers who struggle to maintain land and livelihood in the face of property-bubbles, erratic weather, and shifting economic pressures. One of my clients, a third generation beef rancher hoping to hold the land that has been in his family since the mid-1800’s, once commented to me, “it’s hard to raise beef cattle on $350,000 an acre land.” For those who straddle the divide between city and country, the rift at times seems irreparable. City and country exist on separate planes.
From this perspective, I was interested to read Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, by Lisa M. Hamilton. Was this going to be yet another pop-culture treatise on the evils of modern agriculture by an eco-hippie urbanite who had never struggled to scour the dirt from the lines of her hands? Or, would it rather be a boring academic exposition crammed with dry statistics? Instead, I was delighted to find a poignant, insightful, balanced book that I had trouble putting down.
Good literature, fiction or non, captures character and place, immersing us in the lives of the subjects, making their stories ours. In Deeply Rooted, Hamilton accomplishes this from the outset.
That Sunday morning in Balfour, after I left the abandoned church but before I got back on the highway, I drove into what was left of the town. Beyond a scattering of houses, I came to a building that was newer but not new, non-descript except that its doors were wide open…It was the town’s last working church. Technically it was Lutheran, but the congregation was so small that any person was welcome…
If the closed-down face of Balfour represents the disappearing human role in agriculture, then this book is about the people in church that Sunday morning. They are the faithful, the ones who believe, despite everything society shows them, that what they are doing is worth it – that it is vital. When their nation tells them this is the way it is, and this is the way it has to be, they do not just fade away. Instead, they talk, and they pray, and they sing at the top of their lungs. To hell with what you’ve decided is convention, they say. We are unconventional farmers.
Hamilton divides Deeply Rooted into three sections, each section profiling one of these “unconventional farmers.” Profile seems an inadequate term for what Hamilton does. There are no superficial interviews here; Lisa Hamilton plunges into the lives of her subjects – listening; riding in tractors and on horses; gathering round the table; attending meetings, fairs, and high school sporting events. She interviews family and friends; she investigates the other, “conventional,” farmers in each area. She delves into the history and cultural ties of each unique region, and seats each farmer firmly within that context. She brings the reader into the land and into the heart of the challenges, rewards, and failings of each system. She knows these people and their homes. Yet, Hamilton is a journalist, an observer. Though she obviously becomes “deeply rooted” in the lives of her subjects, she does not fail to observe the details, the strengths, and the flaws.
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