Food GeographiesRobbie Faselt
Film Analysis9/25/14
The Geography of Work in The Real Dirt on Farmer John
The depiction of work and workers in the food industry in Taggart Siegel’s 2005 documentary, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, is very interesting. This well-made documentary tells the story of John Peterson, a quirky, eccentric Midwestern farmer whose family has owned the same farm in the rural area outside of Chicago, Illinois since the early 1900s. The film covers the Peterson’s farm from its time of being a family farm when John was a child, through its period as a hippie art commune in the 1970s, through its decline in the 1980s, through its resurgence as an organic farm in the 1990s, to its present incarnation as Angelic Organics, a CSA (community supported agriculture) farm. Each of the chapters of the Peterson family farm’s history involved different sets of workers contributing to the large amounts of work that are necessary to keep a farm running. From a few family members doing all of the work of the farm from the early 1900s to the 1960s to over a thousand families helping out on the farm today, it is clear that the concept of work on farms has drastically changed since the days of the family farm. Looking at how farm workers are depicted in this film throughout the years is very interesting, especially if one analyzes the change in worker composition from a geographical perspective looking at the geographical terms of space and place and proximity and distance.
In the early 1900s, John Peterson’s grandfather bought the land that would eventually become the Peterson family farm. From then until the 1960s, when Peterson’s father died of diabetes, the Peterson family ran the farm and did all of the work that was required of running the small farm. In the film, Peterson describes that as a child, he remembers his father, uncle, and grandfather performing most of the work required in the fields cultivating crops like, wheat. The rest of his family would also help out around the farm, which included pigs, chickens, and dairy cows. The Peterson family farm and the many other family farms in the surrounding area were truly family affairs with no one but family members working on the farms. In Thinking Geographically, Peter Jackson talks about the geographical terms of space and place and attributes the idea that place is humanized space that is given a meaning to Yi-Fu Tuan (Jackson, 199). When thinking about this definition, it is clear that the Peterson family farm is a place in the eyes of the Peterson family because for over 50 years, members of the Peterson family had not only been working day and night to keep their farm profitable, but they also built the infrastructure of their farm and have been living on it ever since John’s grandfather bought the land in the early 1900s. Even after the death of John’s father, when John became in charge of the farm and the rest of his family moved elsewhere, the space of the Peterson farm was still a place and has remained a place in the eyes of its workers throughout its many incarnations from family farm to CSA farm.
The failure of the Peterson family farm was not a unique occurrence and in fact, the family farm was in a huge decline in the 1980s. According to Thomas Lyson, from 1950 to 1980, 175 million acres of farmland were converted to land used for other purposes, and this is due to the fact that farming in America became consolidated to a small amount oflarge-scale farms that could be more efficient in producing huge crop yields (Lyson, 20). In the film, there are many images of collapsing family farms that are being encroached upon by brand new suburbs because with farming now occurring on massive farms run by corporations, family farms could no longer stay in business.
In order to revive his farm in the early 1990s, John Petersondecided to try and start an organic farm, which he called Angelic Organics. After a year or so of trying to grow over 30 different organic crops and not having much success, John was about to give up, but instead he decided to collaborate with a CSA group from Chicago. The idea of making a farm into a CSA farm allows for consumers to help out local farmers, while at the same time becoming involved in the production of the food they consume. The way it works is that local community members become investors in the farm by paying a yearly fee and helping out with the labor involved in producing organic crops in return for three months of delivery of organic produce from the farm during the harvest season. Now, the farm workers on the Peterson farm are a combination of the over one thousand families that are investors of Angelic Organics, farm interns who help John out year round, and Mexican immigrants.
For the investors of the CSA farm, the space where their food is produced turns into a humanized place where they actually contribute to help produce food. Instead of food coming from some corporate-owned mega-farm and then being shipped across the country to a grocery store, CSA investors actually know the place where their food comes from. Also, instead of not even thinking about the laborers who are involved in the food industry, they themselves become laborers and they get to know the other laborers on the farm who work year round. CSA investors can also turn the physical distance between them and where their food comes from into imagined proximity, which Jackson argues is unrelated to physical distance (Jackson, 200).Even if the investors live hundreds of miles away from the CSA farm, they have been to the farm and know where their produce comes from, so the imagined distance is much closer.
With the transition of the Peterson farm to a CSA farm, Angelic Organics has been very successful and John Peterson has successfully saved his family’s farm from being developed on. Wendell Berry would be a fan of the idea of CSA farms because he truly believes that food is a cultural product and that one cannot have agriculture without culture (Berry, 20). CSA farms, and especially Angelic Organics, create a community that revolves around the farm and are completely devoid of corporate influence, which is something that Berry thought was harmful to agriculture.
The depiction of workers in the food industry in The Real Dirt on Farmer John is very interesting as the viewer gets to see the transition from farm work on a family farm in the middle of the 20th century to work on the same land but on a CSA farm in the present. Throughout the Peterson family farm’s history, the farm has been a geographical place to the many people who have worked on it over the years. Although, the farm has been located at the same geographical location throughout the years, its workers have given the farm many meanings throughout its many incarnations, making the same space a new place for each group of workers.
I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment.
Robbie Faselt
Bibliography
Berry, W. (2002) “How We Grow Food Reflects Our Virtues and Our Vices” In: Pence, G. (Ed) The Ethics of Food: A Reader for the 21st Century. Rowman and Littlefield: 5-25.
Jackson, P. (2006)“Thinking Geographically”Geography, 91(3), 199-204.
Lyson, T. (2004) “Chapter 2: From Subsistence to Production” Civic Agriculture. Tufts University Press: Medford.
The Real Dirt on Farmer John. Dir. Taggart Siegel. CAVU Pictures, 2005.