Influences of the Farm Crisis and Its Recovery

Like many mid-westerners, I visited a farmer relative as a child. The farm was about ten miles from our small city and the relative was Norwegian, not a bachelor. One never forgets the barn, the tree swing with long ropes, the roomy breezy house, and the fields spread around. 

An early 1900's photo of the farmhouse I visited

Our relative and his wife used to visit us in town, and there, they were obviously relaxing on the couch, observing us on their day off. Then, there was joking about farmers coming in, their stalwart, contracted speech, and their clothing styles. Some drove in on tractors, slowing traffic. Yet everyone loved visiting the farm. People drove to outdoor markets and to dairies for eggs and butter because the quality and prices were better.

We went to college, to the city, and heard in the 1980's how the farms were foreclosing. About that time, I learned with sadness that my elderly cousin sold his farm. I'd frequented my first food co-op near the “farm” campus of the University of Minnesota, in St. Paul. After that, I found the closest co-op in other neighborhoods. They were like corner stores when the corner stores were closing. Farmers markets in downtown Minneapolis were festive. But things were changing.

The farming losses had an effect on me. My children's novel, Josiah's Apple Orchard, was revised from a fantasy into a realistic story. (I liked one reviewer saying that it had a “surrealistic feel.”) At the time, I couldn't see the answer to an orchard of specialty apples when in the 1960's, Delicious apples reigned at the supermarket. The foreclosures, though, were fueling an environmental movement that I would be watching. It would have dramatic success.

While I wrote Tug of the Wishbone two decades later, foods free from pesticides and unnatural treatment of animals expanded from farmers' markets and co-ops into the supermarkets. A supermarket began with a corner in the produce section marked “Organic.” The section widened and new organic brands began to fill the aisles. 

 

Image by tawatchai @ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Mainstream shoppers are now given choice as information reaches them. In the 1990's, the conditions of corporate farms were suppressed. Driving in the countryside, one had to wonder at the animal warehouses appearing while facts about the lack of pasture time leaked out. Humane farming costs more, especially for the farmer, but the demand for it has resulted in a quiet revolution. Mealtimes now retain traditional organic farm foods and are also transformed with new menus. Just as products are advertised in a graded system of their own, the grading of farming methods and animal treatment streams into consumer awareness.

Image by Simon Howden @ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When some news seems to stultify, this seemingly grassroots movement had swept the nation. Even today with the challenges of flooding and tariffs, it shows how courage and persistence can result in a successful environmental story. Writing in the midst of that inspired my fiction and poetry.

Looking for used books for my eBay store, I know that readers still visit the farm in novels as I did with favorite authors - Thomas Hardy (Far From the Madding Crowd), D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow), Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm), Willa Cather's novels, Katherine Anne Porter's short stories about Texas, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, to name a few. Collectible editions of books with farm settings catch my eye and they don't stay long on my used book shelves. It's another warning that farmers and their stories shouldn't be taken for granted.