Letters from a Family Farm
My family bought a farm in 1965. My parents came of age in the Great Depression and served in World War 2. Both saw combat. They did well enough through the 1950s, but found themselves wondering if The Great American Dream of WW2 veterans — the tidy home in the suburbs — was really what they had fought for. A moment of reckoning occurred in 1964: they discovered that the developer of the subdivision where they had purchased a lot and contracted with a builder refused to sell a nearby lot to a colleague of my father’s, because he was black. They had often talked about how, in the middle of a war with the bullets flying and the shells exploding, they learned that they could trust the farmkids to find a way out of whatever mess they were in. “We need to raise farmkids,” they decided. They cancelled the building contract and started looking for a farm. With no farming experience, they purchased a bankrupt dairy in June 1965. I was five-going-on-six; my older brother was nine and my younger brother was three.
My family was not alone. Many military families retiring from military careers joined my parents in this exodus to the country. Some had grown up on farms and were returning to their roots if not their farm of birth. Others were trying something new.
I lived on that farm, helping my parents farm, until I started college in 1976. We learned quickly and adapted to major changes in the farm economy and food systems. At the time, at sixteen, I could hardly put Madison and the farm in the rearview mirror fast enough. I did help during vacations and from afar, but I built a life as an aerospace and systems engineer completely separate from the farm — all the while joking to my colleagues that “everything I know about systems engineering, I learned on the farm.”
I returned to the farm full time in 2004, when a combination of career burnout and my family’s needs brought me back. My father had been dead for 13 years by then. A devasting flood and my mother’s declining health had left the farm a mess, physically and financially. My younger brother helped Mom, but his young family dictated that he keep a fulltime job. My older brother had no interest in the farm other than the farm shop for his own projects. I was going to help put the ‘family’ back in the farm.
Not long after I returned, I found myself facing cancer and health insurance problems. I soon figured out that emails that dwelt only on a surgical outcome, hospitalizations from chemotherapy and surgical complications, and the insurance battle had my friends envisioning me on my deathbed and rushing to send flowers. I decided to distract them with news of life on the farm and the challenges of getting a farm back in the black. I sent photos that I mostly shot with a zoom lens from the front porch where my chemo weakness trapped me and explained them. Fortunately, I had been keeping something of a diary, so I had stories. It worked. My friends’ responses were more optimistic. And then I started getting letters from people I had never met. Friends were forwarding these letters to friends, to Sunday School classes, to foodies, to charities involved with solving rural healthcare and insurance problems.
After I got back on my feet after the first round of cancer, the letters continued only sporadically, but I’ve had many requests to compile these letters and continue them.
I restarted my farm letters as of December 2022. Some are just stories about farm life while others trace the path farming has taken from the past to the present, with a lot of policy commentary and data (See SomeoneGrewThat.Farm for the full set). I am working on a book entitled “Letters From a Family Farm” about this journey. It’s currently scheduled for publication in 2026, but you can enjoy some of the letters here.
What we were doing while you were opening presents
Yellow Ghosts of a Time Best Not Forgotten
My journey to understanding the struggle for civil rights:
Summer Olympics at Excalibur Farms
Some adventures in growing food
Capital Punishment in Farm Country
A very sad day on the farm
Finding joy in snow…. maybe
