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A third factor came into play with the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act in 1996. In its first action under the law, the epa banned the use of two chemicals widely used in the fruit and vegetable industry. Afraid that other chemicals would follow, many farmers turned to organics for alternative methods of pest management.
Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic Farm
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In a relatively short time organic farming had taken a dramatic shift, from back-to-the-land hippies of Northern California to the thousand-acre farmers of the Salina valley. Both were technically organic according to the certifying agencies, but the fundamental vision behind organic farming had changed. "Organic" was no longer an ethic—it was a set of regulated practices and a niche market.
This shift left many of the original organic farmers reeling. They could not compete with thousand-acre farms. A small-scale organic vegetable grower told me about the day that he sent a crate of bell peppers to his distributor. "These are the best bell peppers we have ever seen," the distributor told him, "but California is producing organic bell peppers for less than half the price we paid you last year." My friend took the check and started selling his vegetables directly at the local farmers market. "It's the only way for small farms to survive," my friend said.
But why should we help small farms survive? Julie Guthman thinks that's a question that too often goes unasked. "There are some significant problems with the small-scale family farm ideal," she writes. After all, such farms are refuges of "Christian fundamentalism," "patriarchal exploitation of women's and children's labor," and a dogged commitment to the ideal of "private property."
And what does Guthman offer instead? More government subsidies for organics, a movement away from the ideal of private property, stronger regulation—proposals largely disconnected from the realities on the ground. Guthman provides a useful telling of the story of organic farming's current crisis, but she offers no vision for a real solution. For this we must turn, not to the ivory tower, but to the dirt and work of real farmers.
In Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic Farm Nicola Smith and her photographer husband Geoff Hansen have rendered a beautiful look at the life of the very sort of locally focused small farm that Guthman dismisses. In 2003, Smith and Hansen spent a year with Jennifer Megyesi and Kyle Jones on Fat Rooster Farm in Vermont. Like many farms of its size it is diverse, with a mix of livestock, vegetables, and herbs—just the sort of variety that attracts customers at the local farmers market.
When visiting this kind of farm, Smith admits, it is difficult to keep from "lapsing into the kind of phony, amber-waves-of-grain lyricism that could only be written by someone who doesn't have to do it for a living." But, she goes on, "there is an attachment to the land, an attachment to the animals on the land . . . the satisfaction of providing the food that people eat and the gratification of self-sustenance, despite all the attendant financial anxiety and familial strain farming can produce."
It is this understanding of both the rewards and difficulties involved in farming that makes Harvest the best book I have seen on the real work of a small farm. It shows the marital stress that comes from thin margins and the joy of selling something that one raised from its beginning, neither glossing over the trials nor missing the deep satisfactions of this way of life.
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