An Urban's Rural View

The romantic notion of "going back to the land" and starting a farm appeals to many people, but few try it and fewer succeed. Jim and Moie Crawford are among those who've done it and made it. They left the city 40 years ago and built a farm that earns them, by one account, a decent though hardly luxurious living.

In that account, the recently published book "A Farm Dies Once a Year," the Crawfords' son Arlo describes his ambivalence with the life on the land his parents so enthusiastically embraced. He left as a teenager and after college came back only for short visits until, at age 31, he quit his job at an art museum in Cambridge, Mass., and spent a season working on the farm.

The Crawfords grow 100 kinds of vegetables on 95 acres at "the end of Anderson Hollow Road" in Hustontown, Pa., between Harrisburg and Altoona. The website for their New Morning Farm (http://tiny.cc/…) trumpets "Homegrown, Organic Produce since 1972." The book (http://tiny.cc/…) describes how they did it, the toll it's taken on them and the son's struggle to come to terms with it all.

Though the farm is organic, the book is not a polemic for any particular kind of agriculture. The word "organic" makes only a few appearances. No aspersions are cast on conventional farming.

If anything, "A Farm Dies Once a Year" attests to the precariousness of organic agriculture. The reader witnesses Jim Crawford's agony as a tomato blight wipes out all four fields of his tomatoes, snubbing his best efforts to protect them.

"If we were a conventional farm, the blight would be a distraction," the son writes. "It would be easy to carpet-bomb the infection with chemicals -- but there were no special organic techniques and no way to stop the rain that would let it thrive."

The book also attests to the labor-intensiveness of growing 100 crops on a 95-acre farm organically. During the season the Crawfords employ nine full-time "apprentices," many of them young college graduates who hope to start their own farms. They accept modest wages and primitive living conditions as the price of learning the tricks of the trade.

At the height of the summer the employee count rises to 25. In January it falls to two or three. But "there were always people to be paid." The book says the farm grosses a bit more than $500,000 a year, but after paying all the bills "my parents only saw about 10% of the farm's vegetables in profit."

Too small to afford crop insurance, New Morning's finances swing wildly with the weather. The farm was buffeted by a hurricane in 1987 and floods in the mid-90s.

Only as an adult did Arlo Crawford stumble across an essay his mother had written describing the family's brushes with losing everything. Even in good years they lived frugally, though "there had always been money for new shoes, regular dentist visits and food on the table."

A romantic existence it isn't, the book makes clear. It virtually screams, "Farming is hard. Farming is a business." To succeed Jim Crawford has had to become monomaniacal about his work. He talks only of green beans and tomatoes and okra. He grinds away in his office, dealing with suppliers and apprentices and arranging marketing opportunities.

And worrying. He does a lot of worrying.

The book is subtitled "A Memoir," and in the end it is as much about the author as the farm. He comes away from his agricultural interlude admiring and loving his parents more than ever, but no more interested in taking over from them. "I still hadn't solved the problem of what I wanted to do with my life," he admits. But he knows it's not farming.

For city dwellers pining to go back to the land and commune with nature, this book will serve as a well-written, convincingly anecdotal warning label. For grocery shoppers wondering why the price of organic food is so high, the book will be an eye-opener.

For farmers, even conventional farmers, it will hold no surprises. But they may enjoy empathizing with the Crawfords' travails.

When my wife finished the book she wondered aloud why it had gotten published. For all its many virtues and despite some sympathetic reviews it doesn't seem likely to sell a lot of copies or age gracefully into a literary classic. So what tempted the folks at Henry Holt & Company to take a chance on it?

I can't answer that question, other than to say: I'm sure glad they did.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

© Copyright 2014 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.