The Real Dirt on Farmer John

Film Review

By Barth Anderson

Is John Peterson a farmer trapped in the body of an artist, or is he an artist desperately trying to climb down from his tractor? It's hard to say which, and as a result, Peterson is the compelling subject of a new documentary called The Real Dirt on Farmer John.

Though young John Peterson inherited the staid and stoic farming life from his father at an early age, he also found himself riding the counterculture wave in the early 1970s, which teased out his natural artistic bent. Peterson's story winds its way from his normal 1950s childhood, to inheriting the farm and transforming it into a hippie art commune, to the farm's near collapse in the eighties (along with most family farms in the U.S.), and then its phoenix-like rise in the 1990s.

Director Taggart Siegel, a friend of Peterson's since 1979, employs both old home-movies and footage that he shot himself to a tell a story that's both a fanfare for an uncommon man and a grand, cultural epic. In 1980, banks started calling in farm loans across the nation, and Peterson's extravagant avant-garde commune went belly up, taking a slice of the young man's freedom and panache with it. Watching him at the auction with his father and grandfather's tools and machinery on the block, is absolutely devastating.

Peterson suffers years of guilt and depression after his farm is pared down to almost nothing, but he comes back again and again to what's left of it, building it up a bit more with each return, and searching for who he's supposed to be. He may have managed to keep the family farm, but he was also an artist without an audience during this time, and therein lies the real drama of The Real Dirt.

"There's something dramatic, theatrical," Peterson says of farming early on in the documentary, and while he's maybe thinking of his avant-garde days writing and painting on his back-to-the-land experiment, these words are especially resonant in 1992, when Peterson embraces community-supported agriculture (CSA), where urban dwellers buy a "share" in the farm before the season begins, and the farm provides them with a weekly box of seasonal fruits and vegetables over the course of the season.

Though he'd already gone organic and biodynamic by this time, Peterson resists the CSA concept ("Do I want people involved in the farm like that?"). But when the number of shareholders quadruples from 4 families to 25 in the first year, then from 75 shareholders to 400 the next, and as CSA volunteers engage themselves in the dirt and drama of his farm (now called "Angel Organics"), Peterson realizes he's found more than financial stability for his family farm. "I realized that my whole life had been about community- enabling people, bringing them to the farm, working and playing together, sharing the farm experience. This is what farming should be," John says of CSA, an artist who has at last found his audience.

The most refreshing thing about The Real Dirt on Farmer John is that it doesn't resort to "save the family farm" clichés. We do see old farmers talking about their neighbors' farms getting purchased for development, and their outrage and tears are powerful, real. But those are counterpoints to what beguiles and engages about this movie: watching a maverick drag his family farm back from that same, terrifying brink - and doing it with style, audacity, and soul.