You heard that there’s a for sale sign on the farm across the road?”
Sunday morning light slides in through glass, pools in my pot. Phone cradled to ear, I stir porridge.
“You’ve got your offer in, I hope.” How could Dad say anything but that?
The sign went up two days ago.
I smile, shake a bit of salt into boiling oats, a handful of ground flax, stir.
“Oh, we’d like to. 200 acres, 150 workable. But there’s no way. In these kinds of markets, we simply don’t have the money to buy another farm.”
“It’s land, Ann.”
For Dad, that makes it self-evident.
I look out the corner kitchen window. Autumn weds countryside. Maples down the lane blush, silently disrobe. Our field of corn witnesses. Fields roll east, land gold.
“How many times in your lifetime will the farm right next to yours come up for sale? Not more than once or twice.” I can see him shaking his head, him sitting there eating breakfast, looking out on his own fields of corn, land he raised me on.
“It’s an investment for your children… in your children. The banks will lend it to you. It’s land!”
Like he can shake sense into me with those two words.
Sun lays out long on the farm across the road, across its honeyed wheat stubble, and this feeling barbs, burns.
It’s land.
She’s kin. 
After Dad and I finish our early Sunday morning conversation, I hang up the phone, stand long in the kitchen, looking out across to that section of earth with the for sale sign. Across my chest, this unexpected kindling, a yearning. I want her. She’s of my lineage, a sister, kin I know and who knows me, and I want to walk her, and open her up, and spend the seasons with her, dirt, her and I, meeting and merging.
Wind rustles corn and field whispers.
Dad had always said that land, it becomes a part of you. Yet looking over at that field, I wonder if it isn’t really about me becoming part of land, returning to the land, extension of earth, outgrowth of dirt.
Wasn’t it the land calling me home?
The back door closes softly and I can hear the water running, him always washing hands first in the mudroom sink, him washing away the smell of his stock and his work.
I glance at the clock.
Farmer Husband, our six kids, they’ve made good time this morning.
Six hundred and fifty sows fed and watered, afterbirth from newborn litters collected and laid back out on the land, nearly a thousand piglets carefully tended to, the udders swollen with milk checked, the heavy sows prepared for the birthing – all while the moon still lingered. Now sun begins her arc across the lid.
They’re in for breakfast, to wash up for church.
“Dad thinks we should put an offer in.” I ladle bowls.
Farmer Husband, with hands that grew a couple hundred acres of wheat this year, he cuts bread. I ground those kernels yesterday. Weeks ago, those kernels waved, sea in the wind.
There is no commodification here, that modern progression of thought whereby the commodities sliced, cooked, taken to mouth and swallowed, are wrenched from their context, eaten without regard to origin. Farmer Husband cuts bread. I fry sausage.
Daily children gather in this kitchen to scrub potatoes, slice tomatoes, chop squash. We know the way of these commodities, the land we picked stones off of in May, the rain that came in June, hail that pelted the wheat in late July. We talk of the frost that turned the squash vines brown, the corn we raised in the field, fed to the pigs in our barn, the hens in the coop, that puts the meat, the eggs, on our plates.
When six children sit at the table and a son grins at the food, the color, the tastes, and smiles the wonder of it: “We grew everything on this plate” – no, there’s little commodification or disassociation in that moment.
Somedays we are startling aware of the no small miracle of our meals.
How we sit down to the heaped plates and eat of the earth and chew summer’s sun and swallow down the late August rains. Each forkful, the miracle of soil made sweet, of sky made manna.
Intimately, we live and know the circle, from death and a seed, to earth and a bed, to stalk and a yield, to table and a meal. When we bow heads and give thanks and children eat, they too know that eating itself is an act of agriculture.
“Yeah?” Farmer Husband nods, lays the bread in for toasting. “You think we should take out a loan and buy another 200 acres?”
We own the hundred acres we live on, raise these pigs on; we rent my mama’s four hundred, and then another hundred acres that backs our farm. Working six hundred acres is pittance in an era of industrial farms.
How many times do we sit down to eat the food we’ve grown and ask: Do we buy more land, fall deeper into debt? Do we invest in bigger equipment, more hired help? Do we grow genetically modified seeds? Do we apply fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides? Do we plant a rotation of corn, wheat, soybeans or do we grow kidney beans, flax, strawberries and cucumbers? Yet, producers by and large, we do not determine these answers; consumers do.
A farmer can only answer these questions by determining what offers a sustainable lifestyle for his or her family. What food can the farm family produce that has a market with a financial return that can keep the family on the farm? Farmers produce for the market. The consumers create the market.
The consumer’s lifestyle, nutritional interests, and ethical values, determine how a farmer produces food. And it is the consumer who puts a price on a bushel of wheat, a tonne of beans, a pound of ham, never the producer. Farmers have never set their own price for any commodity. The hunger of the consumer determines what price the middle man will pay us at the farm gate. We farmers have always been beggars of sorts, taking whatever the middle man will give us for the nights we didn’t sleep, trying to beat clouds, the holidays we worked, to bring a crop in, to feed our stock.
Do our children want to live at the whim of markets and middle men?
We make prayerful, considered decision for our farm individually, but there is only so much that farmers, less than three percent of the North American population, can to do effect real change in the way food is produced, the way agriculture and the land, shapes itself. How can handfuls of farmers alter monolithic agricultural infrastructures, change the way whole nations of consumers eat?
“When farmers are going broke, it’s wrong to expect them to reform the system,” asserts Wendell Berry, “In fact, there are too few actual farmers left to reform anything… Reform is going to have to come from consumers. Industrial agriculture is an urban invention, and if agriculture is going to be reinvented, it’s going to have to be reinvented by urban people.”
Our decisions are micro, for this family, this farm.
“Oh. I didn’t say I wanted another loan.” I pour milk. Children and chatter stream in from the barn.
A million dollars for two hundred acres of crop dirt, a lifetime of toiling under sun, of praying to heavens to favorably wield skies, and we’d never see the end of the payments. These kids, ones piling in for breakfast, hair wet from showering out of barn and the aroma of pigs, they’d inherit the dirt and the debt --- and in their lifetime, after a lifetime of our work, they might tear up the mortgage.
But does financial burden, a lifestyle of moon-working, three-hundred and sixty five days of the year, does it matter if it’s a calling? If land’s calling?
Farmer Husband carries toast to the table. Children talk, stir their bowls while they wait for us to pray, and he and I we butter toast, and say nothing. We’re thinking of the value of land. Wasn’t it Thoreau who said that,
“You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake… You must have so good an appetite as this, else you will live in vain.”
Either have an appetite for the crust of earth that produces the crust of food... or live barren.
We bow our heads over bowls and bread.
It’s after the Sunday services, when we leave our little country church surrounded by hay fields, pasturing cattle, fields of corn, leave the other farm families we worshiped with, kids all washed up from their under-moon barn chores, that we drive past the land for sale, that we see how she lies, listen for her to speak our names.
“What do you think?” I ask Farmer Husband, his eyes scanning the gentle rolls, the acres laid out. The children are quiet, surveying too. They know this is about them.
“She sure needs some tender love and care.” The fences are overgrown, the ditch neglected.
“Could we clean her up, Dad?” Oldest son asks from the back seat. He must feel it too, in the veins like a pulse, hear her calling.
“We could…” He’s driving slow, scrutinizing, figuring. Clover’s growing up through the wheat stubble. “You’d need to drain her right away so you wouldn’t have compaction getting the crop off in the fall.” He’s talking more to himself than me, already making a list. He’s listening to her.
“I think you could make a real farm of that piece of property.” He’s smiling. Grandchildren with that same glint could work this dirt.
Two crows cackle on hydro wires. I read the sign on the hydro pole in the field’s far corner, and he misses it and I wish I had, but that wouldn’t have helped, changed anything. The words leave my mouth involuntary, punched from the gut.
“She’s sold.”
Oldest son grabs the back of my seat. “Sold? Really? It only went up last week!”
I can only manage to point to the sign. Crows take wing. Who can speak?
Silence falls, a sadness, like watching kin drive down the lane and away. But it’s us who are turning away.
We turn around, turn down our gravel road, turn up our lane.
Farmer Husband cuts the engine. “We don’t need to buy anymore work anyways.” No one moves for a door. All eight of us sit still, looking out at our land, our corn.
“More land would just be for the kids.” His voice is soft, wistful. “And who says any of the kids want to farm?”
“I do!” A voice waves, adamant. We watch corn.
She’s so gold.
Now I’m the one speaking more to myself, words nearly soundless in quiet, us all quiet.
“I guess I had thought I wanted them to go on. For the kids to go and get degrees, be pastors, doctors, engineers. That’s how I’ve made all their priorities, their education, their plans. About them all going, to be power changers, culture makers, in marbled halls somewhere else.”
That barb, that burn again, she’s in my throat.
“But the way that land was calling to me… to us… like a voice calling from The Garden. ‘Where are you?’ ... 'Where are you?' ”
I turn to face Farmer Husband. He was born on a farm; was smart enough to go but wise enough to stay.
“Why have I thought a good education was about sending our children away? Why do we teach that dirt doesn’t matter and growing food is menial? Why do we think success is measured in the distance we travel away from the land and its crops that our very stomachs crave three times a day?”
Farmer Husband nods.
I'm finally realizing the answers he's been living.
I look out to that poem of wind and light and food from a farmer’s gritty hands and his praying knees.
Chin’s trembling now, the corn blurring in a rain of emotions, and the words fall softly.
“Who will stay and dwell in the land?”
A child takes my hand.
They will live in the land I gave to my servant Jacob, the land where your fathers lived. They and their children and their children's children will live there..."
Related from the archives: Why We Should Love Dirt
Farming and Being Poetry
Photos: A storm sky over our fields here last week... and us tending our pigs
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