Review: A Year and a Day On Just a Few Acres Farm by Peter Larson

I have been addicted to a YouTube channel (Just a Few Acres Farm) created by Peter Larson that documents his return to the farm of his childhood. He left his successful architectural firm after twenty some years to do what he always wanted, make a living in a sustainable way from farming.  He had several advantages.  They owned the farm, had already remodeled the house, and had a nest egg to get started.  Another advantage, most such aspirants do not have, and that's a thriving farmer's market and large college educated community that loves the concept of buying locally.  I have a friend doing something similar in about 10 miles away, but they have to sell their organic chickens, eggs, and livestock in Rockford, a 15 miles drive for them.

A little background.  When I was growing up, I would work for one of my uncles in either Missouri  (when I was younger) and then in Wisconsin (as I got older) during the summers through college.  They both had dairy farms, the first more of a hobby farm, the second a real working dairy farm where we milked about 50 cows along with field work. I loved it. While in college I devoured the Malabar Farm books by Louis Bromfield who was promoting sustainable agriculture and organic farming. His farm still exists as a historic landmark in Ohio. They were wonderful books and fueled my nostalgic and Jeffersonian (he had slaves to do his work, though) mythic view of farming. It didn't hurt that Bromfield had a substantial income from the novels he had written in the twenties and thirties.

After I got married, and graduated from college, my wife and I bought a 200 acre farm in northern Minnesota with the idea of dairying full-time.  She taught, and I worked as an EMT in a local hospital while we got started. I then worked a couple of years as a herdsman on a dairy farm milking about 100 cows twice a day. Realizing we would need health insurance for her impending heart surgery and realizing to get started on my own would require mountains of debt (and in the seventies interest rates approached 17%), I went back to grad school, a decision I never regretted, but I still have fond memories of farm life -- well perhaps not the ticks, heat, dust, long hours, and mosquitoes (the Minnesota state bird.)

Back to the book.  Larson suffered from similar nostalgic anamnesis and, realizing that not all of the partners and staff at his architectural firm, were buying into his vision for sustainable building, he took a six-month leave and gradually decided (the book is part philosophical meditation on his gradual self-awareness) to build a self-sustaining farm on his forty acres. He had several advantages most don't.  He's very smart, has a good business sense, is mechanically talented (he restored several old tractors during the winter) and has a wife who is incredibly supportive and willing to do back-breaking manual labor (read how they collected, husked, and sold black walnuts.)

It's important to remember that small farms and others like Joel Salatin's, whom Larson quotes, and whom I've read, too, rely on the infrastructure created by others: the roads, suppliers, manufacturers, buyers, and utilities supplied by others who can't afford or have no ability to follow their dreams. It's a dream that few but the privileged can achieve.

As an example of the nostalgia and its synchronistic impact on the community, Larson discusses the wonderful trips he had to the feed mill with his grandfather.  I had similar experiences with my uncle loading up the truck with ear corn from the corn crib (usually finding a nest of rattlers,) driving to Zenda, and returning with bagged feed (which we would reuse) for the cows. It was great; we'd always stop at the local store for a Popsicle, visit at the local IH dealership -- to this day I love tractors and get several tractor magazines -- and chat to and from the town. That's all gone; victim to urbanization and larger farms. The same thing happened to Larson's local mill.  Yet ironically, it's the urbanization, that makes his small farm a viable enterprise by creating a ready market for his products. Without those buyers he couldn't survive. Farmers don't buy at farmers' markets; they don't need to.

I admire and respect what Larson has accomplished and hope he and his family will achieve what they desire.  It's a wonderful book, although I found some of the philosophical musings bordering on narcissistic. I hope he tells his wife what a saint she is on a regular basis.