Harvest
A Year in the Life of an Organic Farm
BY NICOLA SMITH, PHOTOGRAPHS BY GEOFF HANSEN
The Lyons Press, 2004. $26.95, 288 pages.

HOW MIGHT WE ADDRESS our profound disconnection from food and the land? What is truly best for our families? What are our definitions of wealth and security? What might we do to defeat the extinction of our own human experience?

Acting out of the growing recognition of what might nourish their family most, Jennifer Megyesi and Kyle Jones, with their son Brad, created Fat Rooster Farm to answer these questions and create a different life for themselves. They went there to engage, to serve differently, to trust and be trusted, to be firmly rooted, independent and self-willed, and to create a sense of security that is as deep as the list of people they call when things go wrong. They wanted to get close to people by growing food for them.

They might have drawn their inspiration from Helen and Scott Nearing, but this is no back-to-the-land story. And while they are guided by the writings of Wendell Berry, they're irreverent enough to have named their fat rooster after him.

Americans still have a strong attachment to the small family-farm icon in Vermont, where Harvest is set, but few realistic stories about what that life is like. Sure, there are Berry's beautiful and heart-wrenching descriptions of Port William's citizens, and Gene Logsdon's good advice on how to grow more food on less land, but little that shows the reality of small family farming today. Harvest offers the gift of an honest, unsentimental view of the passion, turmoil, complexity, and satisfaction of being a small-scale farmer. We desperately need this story today to help us consider important questions about ourselves.

Harvest is about the type of farming that loses its charm when you're stooped over after hours of picking tomatoes. It's about pigs that sound like "a 747 as it touches down on a runway, its engines thrown into reverse." Sentimentality is for people who don't farm and who aren't confronted, as farmers are daily, with inescapable, messy realities of life like forty-one ewes giving birth to sixty-seven lambs, of which thirteen will die. We tend to think of farmers in a dreamy, nostalgic haze that threatens to declare them extinct, part of our past but not our future. In Harvest, there's no "phony, amber-waves-of-grain lyricism that could only be written by someone who doesn't have to do it for a living." Harvest is about a life well earned.

Wearing his layers of old shirts and pants and sweaters and heavy wool socks, Kyle indentifies the "nine-to-five drones" as people whose senses have been dulled. He intends to be a counterpoint to the "well-pressed, groomed, 'country-look' affected by well-scrubbed models in Eddie Bauer or the L.L. Bean catalogue."

This book is real, and therefore really important. Nicola Smith writes beautifully and poignantly. Harvest describes the Vermont piedmont that is more than Howard Dean, more than bucolic church steeples. It's down-and-out trailers set back in the woods, the decoy deer standing in the front yard, people trying to make a life and a living in many different ways. It's about places and people whose value comes not from being quaint but from being reliable. It's an honest assessment of what it means to live in a community where people aren't saints, where we struggle to live out our relationships. --Peter Forbes

Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic Farm
is published by The Lyons Press

Copyright © 2005 by Nicola Smith and Geoff Hansen
All Rights Reserved