The Real Dirt on Farmer John

The first time we meet John Peterson he is physically indistinguishable from the other million-plus Americans who, despite numerous obstacles and incentives to the contrary, cultivate the land as family farmers. He wears a conservative button-up shirt, sleeves rolled past his forearms, tortoise shell glasses, and a blue baseball cap. Peterson walks through his fields, his rubber boots sinking into the mud with a suck. He squats down now and picks up a handful of dark northern Illinois loam. He weighs the soil in his hands like a scale and then takes a bite. He looks up. We see that Peterson is graying at the temples. Squinting against the sun, he is an updated picture of the yeoman farmer Thomas Jefferson envisioned as the bedrock of society. "Mm," Peterson says. "The soil tastes good today."

Two minutes later we see a very different side of John Peterson - or Farmer John, as he is referred to in this documentary, as well as on the cover of his cookbook (subtitle: "The Real Dirt on Vegtables"). He is driving his tractor wearing a feather boa and a dress; a naked woman dances in the field behind him. In another scene, Peterson sits astride his tractor sporting a bowler hat and smoking a cigar. Still later, he gambols about the fields with a lover and a vintage VW beetle, all three dressed as bumblebees. The yeoman farmer is not gone, just obscured by his love for "glitz, glitter, and glamour."

John Peterson runs Angelic Organics, a community-supported farm in Caledonia, in Boone County, 80 miles northwest of Chicago. Under the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, investors buy "shares" of the harvest, in exchange for which they receive regular shipments (usually once a week) of fresh-picked fruits and vegetables. According to Local Harvest, an organization that connects consumers to local producers, the CSA model can be traced back thirty years to Japan where it was called "teikei," which translates into "putting the farmers' face on food." The first CSA in the United States was probably Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts. But even if Community Supported Agriculture didn't originate in Caledonia, its growing popularity owes much to the success of Angelic Organics and the charisma and surpassing eccentricity of its founder.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John is a fascinating portrait on this unlikely champion for rural America. John is the last in a line of Peterson men who have been tending this land since before the Great Depression. John inherited the farm while he was still in high school, after his father died from diabetes. He attended tiny Beloit College, just eight miles from the farm (he often rushed home between classes to milk the cows). In school, he attracted to himself creative types, who were no doubt drawn to John's easy synthesis of artistic sensibility and country charm. This was the late 1960s and John's farm soon became a kind of commune for hippies, philosophers, painters, writers, and filmmakers. What they all seemed to have in common was a dream of an agrarian idyll, worthy of the Romantics, where they could simultaneously pursue art and agriculture.

The neighbors were suspicious of John and his friends. When the farm crisis of the early 1980s hit the Peterson farm early, suddenly, and hard, many, including some family members, blamed John. (More than a few of these farmers would lose their own land in the years to come - an unwelcome irony.) After a decade of industriousness and growth, he was on the brink of bankruptcy. He owed half a million dollars to friends, banks, and a loan shark. "Debt financed my dreams, then my nightmare," Peterson says in the documentary, which he wrote and narrates. In 1982, John was forced to sell nearly everything he owned. In poignant footage from the auction, which Real Dirt director Taggart Siegel earlier turned into a black-and-white short film called "Bitter Harvest" (1984), Peterson looks on as his neighbors try to outbid each other for his land and equipment. By auction's end, the Peterson farm, which had once stretched across 360 acres, was reduced to just twenty-two. His friends scattered. For several years, deeply depressed, John did not farm. He slept and sorted through the remains of his life. He traveled to Mexico, reading and writing through his pain.

John returned to his farm and then so did some of his friends. Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate - whispers of orgies, drugs, murder, and Satan-worship. Local kids called the Peterson place "Devil Farm." John Edwards, the local sheriff, encouraged the talk of Satanism. He never had proof but he could read livestock like tea leaves. "If it is devil worship, so be it," he says in the film. Just so long as it doesn't "mess with the cattle." (Peterson and Siegel later asked Edwards what he considered "devil worship." In a moment not included in this film - I'm holding out for the DVD special features - Edwards answered, "Reading the Bible backwards.") When one of the buildings on John's property, a meditation lodge he built in his college days, burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances, John left once again for Mexico. This time he was gone for only a year. "My quest was coming to an end," he says. "My farm was calling me home."

Back in Illinois, he started Angelic Organics. When the farm had been 360 acres, the Petersons had planted just four crops; now, at less than five percent of its original size, John planted thirty crops. Spurning chemicals, he weeded the fields by hand. The farm was hit by plagues and pests. ("We had every kind of scourge the Bible mentioned, and then some.") More than once, John wanted to quit, but he kept farming because his eighty-year old mother, who ran the farm's roadside stand, needed something to do. In time, the farm turned a corner. It became sustainable. As the number of shareholders grew, so did the farm. John was able to lease back some of the old spread that had been sold at auction. Angelic Organics started a Learning Center to provide programming for inner-city and low-income youth. The Learning Center also features a rotation of classes on urban beekeeping, cheesemaking, soapmaking, gardening, and vegetarian cooking. The farm now has an army of interns and staff - many of whom are drawn by the same ideals as the hippies of the 1970s.

Angelic Organics operates under the principles of "biodynamics." First developed by the German-Austrian esoteric Rudolf Steiner (the founder of Waldorf education), biodynamics sees a farm as a unified "living organism" made up of billions of individual organisms. Soil health is given the highest priority. When deciding what and when to plant, John takes into consideration the unique "personalities and rhythms" of each crop. The method, which is controversial and sometimes derided as "New Agey" or akin to alchemy, has proven successful on John's farm. At the height of the season, Angelic Organics daily harvests about two tons of vegetables that are delivered to more than 1,200 shareholders. Subscribers, many from Chicago, commonly refer to Angelic Organics as "our farm" - a remarkable statement in an age in which Americans are increasingly reliant on large and impersonal corporations for their food.

At the center of Angelic Organics - and at the center of the film - is the farmer-artist whose life has become a performance piece. Peterson draws the spotlight to himself, and in so doing he calls attention to the thousands of anonymous farmers who lose their land every year - to banks, "Big Ag", and urban sprawl. The Real Dirt on Farmer John is a strange and lovely documentary, equal parts sad and hopeful, hilarious one minute and heartbreaking the next. Boas and bumblebee costumes notwithstanding, Real Dirt never devolves into a vanity exercise. It is the story of the downfall of the family farm and, perhaps, the collapse of civil society. It is also about one possible solution (in my opinion, a quite good one): the community-supported farm. It is an American story and the ending is unknown. Maybe Farmer John is on to something. Maybe now is the time for dramatic displays.