VPR Forum; Documentary on the failure of small "Hill Farms" in Vermont.

Hill Farms whether fields were haid or not no longer shows each fences in the same amount of snow covers what recent summers know a bold fencepost half in white half in wind and dumb too cold has a cedar patients a purpose. Despite the snow a neighbors hope trying until his fences go but only change starts to grow. OK. And one and. Only. World. Title Hill Farms by Paul Whino Vermont poet. Describes a

segment of life in Vermont which is becoming an anachronism. Today Vermont Public Radio Forum continues the theme of men and women in transition with a look at the lives of men who subsistence feeling. Increasing specialization of farm activities and mechanisation of farming techniques has resulted in farm land being owned and worked by fewer and fewer people. And in the consequent dispossession of millions of small farmers and farm families. Those are the lands that are too steep or stony or small featured to be farmed with big equipment are increasingly not farmed at all rather abandoned to weeds and bushes and their owners if they don't sell their land are forced to abandon the old idea to let their farms can be economically self-sufficient. What exactly is a hill farm. Obviously it is a farm on a hill

with a land which was cleared for the purpose of subsistence farming. However this farm design which was suitable for diverse farming was too hilly to support modern mechanisation. It was final and for horse drawn or small tractor equipment. Further some amount of exploitation of the fields was possible as long as the balance of give and take of nutrients was maintained. This was possible when only the cream left the farm skim milk fed to the hogs returned valuable nutrients to the soil via hog manure potatoes took minerals chicken manure returned them. But with the advent of whole milk commercial plants whole milk became the product leaving the farm and the natural balance of the farm was disturbed. Soil replenishment through manufactured products became necessary and those fertilizers were costly. Consequently they were not you was done many Hill Farms

in addition they were topographic problems in spreading these materials. The result of this neglect was a slow but you never troubled decline in fertile OT and productivity. As productivity began to drop and one has only to view old town product over the records to chart this decline the demise of subsistence Hill Farms as a viable economic units became inevitable. Most of the farms were then converted to a specialized operation dairying. So the Hill Farms and the phenomenon of their decline have entered the realm of the statistician and the recognition they receive is from the threat of their disappearance. They have been written off as an outmoded unscientific way of life in the modern agricultural era. But this realisation may not be apparent in quite the midst of the people who for generations have been on their farms. This brief sketch of the

conditions that have forced the decline of Vermontville farms is the basis for a story about the effects on the individuals involved. Mary Brannaman sociologist anthropologist from Johnson state college I studied the changes of the lives of men living on marginal farms in Washington County. Her field work has taken place in her backyard. She lives on a hill farm and has been intimately involved with what has happened to hill men in restructuring their lives. Mrs. Brennaman has written a number of narratives of hill life which she plans to publish into a book called Vermont Hill a time for decision who my I became an early resettled or Vermont before the hippies came as one neighbor has said of me. I came here with my family from graduate school in Chicago and quote a

lot of you in the form of two hundred acres of starving soil with abandoned buildings. The last use of this place except for occasional pasture rental was quote They run pigs off and on. It was quite a while before I knew that that was the reason there were no lilacs tulips roses or tiger lilies growing on the place. These sturdy perennials are to be found around nearly every old cell a hole or abandoned place here abouts. But here the pigs had root up every plant. At first we planned only to camp here then to summer here. Then we spent all our money for the last 12 years repairing and building up a toy farm. Our urge to farm has continued to build momentum and when we could not find a milk producer who would drive up the hill to pick up mail we decided to sell out and move to a viable dairy farm. So we moved off the hill farm to the valley leaving Alton and Burke behind.

That was Mary Brennaman sociologist anthropologist from Johnson State College. Bert and Alton the two main characters in Vermont feel of the time for decision. Are composite profiles of two groups of men. According to Brannaman. Getting to know these men we find the dilemma. Of vacillating desire to leave or. To stay just one more season. Now this fluctuation leads to two primary choices for remaining on the land and remain on the land they dual. Brennaman describes one type of man as a ghetto define one who sells the major portion of his land reserving a corner for a trailer a small

home within sight and hearing of his old home. The second choice is exemplified in the shotgun farmer who stays on his farm and is forced to radically LOI his standard of living to survive. When the power company shuts off his electricity for nonpayment of bills he uses kerosene. His family becomes close to progress and his refusal to plug into the system takes an extreme form when the shotgun farm a literally gets his gun and run some authority off his property. Alton the prototype of the ghetto and farmer who has sold as farm lives in a trailer. His disease called farmers along is so bad that he cannot breathe cold. He is lonely and if you go to visit you cannot get away. He talks about God and about healing people and about what is happening to the nation. The shotgun Vama burped on the other hand will come

outside to talk and his boys keep right on bucking cordwood he hedges cautiously until he finds out what you are there for. He doesn't have a good word for too many people. The narratives that follow will bring you into the world of the hill farm. The end of the circle and the line you know I always hold out. And my dad they always sold milk ever sent away come here. Then them goddamned inspectors it's a price they want theirs and I want that. Yes yes sir now that he's got on the shiny shoes and necktie when all at

fancy stuff I had to laugh at that no one when he comes to go in the bond I said what about them shiny shoes. He says that's all right and he go to the trunk of his car and he gets out he's got a lot of shit crisis and he kind of pushy Fortes down back to the Bon sausage saw Shawshank and them galoshes and he tells me just like there's Burt there would be no more pick up in milk cans truck has to pick up a book. I said Well can I dump it in the truck and you won't believe this. No he said. That truck don't have any open end for that. Now who ever heard such a crazy eight dollar no man. No sir he says Mr. case you must have a

stainless ball tank and stall all we cannot buy your milk after such and such a day just like that. Or you know something just kind of took a hold on me and I went kind of ahead you know and I told him to get the hell out on my property so I don't never come back. Good bye pleasant dream you know and the like. And then next week I sold all my cows about the one. And she's been milking ever sence I need but I'm not. Come back by Christ or I might kill that son of a. How was it. What do they want to trade a man that way for poison nobody. It was drizzling again as seemed usual early that first summer we were on the farm so we decided to clean the bond as a step

toward getting some animals of our own. We'd hardly begun when Alton and Violet stopped up for their daily two or three hour visit and it was hard for them to break their habit of summering up the hill even though they'd sold the farm to us. Alton was horrified when he saw what we were doing. Don't touch him strings. They're all poison. What I didn't understand. Them all fly as trains. What is a fly string I asked. Well yes soak them in what is that stuff. Buy some dental had DDT anyways. But more deadly for them resistant flies and you hang them up. And when this fly sits there at the cleaners whisk goes bang go ease

dizzy and falls off dead. What is that stuff I can remember. And Violet answered. Well I think the bottle is on the top shelf in the summer kitchen I can't remember it has a yellow label and later when I went to look I found a half gallon of Belgian which was not only used for fly strings but was brushed on the spine of cows. You barely touch him with it. It's a strong poison. You don't want to make the cattle sick Violet told me. And she also told me that it was good to add some to the wallpaper paste when you re paper a room as it keeps down the cluster flies. Alton gave up farming when his emphysema crippled him. He couldn't be around the Bon and the cattle. Rice says without a struggle for breath and when he left

farming he seemed to breathe easier. And there's hair which had been Snow White grew in all brown again. For years I had thought about the people nested hereabouts and how their lives would change when they had to leave him for me. How could I begin to study the hill farmers in the deep sense without doing violence to their dignity and privacy. Perhaps I might create two fictional characters in order to represent an honest and lucid document. Was it possible for me to provide the reader with enough concrete imagery which would reveal the underlying psychic structures without effacing the purity of these ways of being in the world. What emerged from this problem was for me the impossibility of an empirical study. The characters I chose to create are prototypes only for the purpose of imaging the hill farmers who do indeed demonstrate two very

distinct and very different choices for life. Alton left the farm because of his inability to breeze by attempting to keep things pure. That is fly free and sanitary in his burn. He was poisoned and developed emphysema. He was uninformed of the dangers of DDT. He doesn't read. There were no regulations on the sale or use of insecticides at that time. He maintains his physical body now by avoiding exertion. He rarely goes outside in cold weather taking in is done through the airways. The image of the world enters the trailer constantly by way of color TV. The birds symbols of the Spirit are brought close to the trailer with diverse attracting devices even though all his junk was left behind when he left the firm. He can find the plastic gizmo which will tame and direct our water source properly. The

plants in the trailer are clean dead plastic. Ultimately non bio degradable made of immortal stuff which transcends chance and decay. Symbolically the box like trailer is a container for all to the spiritual body to be in there is to live not to lose one's breath or be sucked away. Burt unlike Alton did not leave his firm when the man complained about his milking practices. Rather he became immersed in conquering his need for the outside. He set limits on his world with signs keep out and no trespassing thereby defining a symbolic circle. Bert has his farm but he cannot farm technically speaking. He has no space or land but not the means to continue. Time stands still for him. He is heavy in time he is rooted to the spot. He can only

develop downward into the soil into the center of the earth. The dowsing rod bears him down his hernia cannot be stayed his very organ sink toward Earth. He moves the stones for us. He grows giant potatoes. The life giving jars a no rest on the earthen floor of the cellar. We go to the heart of the swamp to fish with the beaver are so strong that they can defeat a settler's well to remain water comes into Bert's home freely and openly and green algae lives in the Springboks. The animal image on the wall lights up bird's car must be jacked up with the fossil fuels that feed it return to Earth. The pet Petunia has blossoms if Flora's is inside the circle. Everything is complete and so we draw our away from these transmitted lives Bert. Within the timeless mother swamp surrounding and slowly permeating the small island he has created in order to live.

And Alton contained in his tin box minding the strands which draw him toward his father in heaven. That was Mary Brown I'm a sociologist anthropologist from Johnson State College describing the life patterns emerging from two very different choices facing unsuccessful hill farmers. And before that the actual narratives of Alton and Bert. You're listening to Vermont Public Radio forum. And to the second program in a four part series on men and women in transition. The Forum is taking a look at the lives of men who have failed. This view comes from a very special vantage point. From a social scientist who

is a hero fama. Brennaman discusses the Hill Farm existence with co-hosts Nate and John Major. Initially I came back onto a hill farm I saw thinking that it was a romantic place to be and when I came back I didn't have anything. We had a sleeping bag and that a lantern and a Coleman stove in a tent. And I think that because we had no things the people that we talked to accepted us as one of them. And I think they revealed things to us that they wouldn't reveal

ordinarily to someone who was coming back you know to the land a rich hippie say. Someone who a lawyer who was making over a house and making great demands on you know reconstructing the house remodeling the house and we would just kind of camping there in this shell of a house and these people saw our need and came to us as as friends and as equals. And I think that that kind of opened my eyes to a new possibility for doing an in-depth study of the people. So when you arrived there you had no notion of studying the people you came to do something else. That's right. We came there to groove on the grass you know in the and Lee Fields and. The smells you know of the Vermont hills. Very

romantic vision of how everything would be alright would be in the Garden of Eden there and there would be no problems. Well clearly the people that you were dealing with knew better. That's right the people who knew better but they respected our vision and that I think is probably what made me most interested in trying to develop an image of their visions. They had a vicarious interest in the possibility that we might succeed where they failed. Now this is as I said this is a little different in our case because we had nothing. We had come there with things. I don't think that we would have been able to make that touch base with the ghetto farmer at all because he essentially is a very bitter person. He feels that Vermont's been taken away by the rich. But I think that the fact that we needed him we needed his advice. And he knew it and he began to have

a reason for being in helping us. We in a sense became his children. It gave him one more way of remaining in contact with the land even though it was vicarious. Did the people who have been described in the narratives view themselves as hill farmers who have failed. I wouldn't ask that question of them. We can only use the evidence that we have that they still long for what was and in that sense people who give up what they want. I think you have to look at as failures. Well rather than going into one direction that we could obviously pursue and that is how do you become a hill farmer How do you try to succeed where

others fail. I wonder if we could direct our conversation for a while specifically toward the family relations of these hill farmers and of the two different types of hill farmers that you describe. What does being a shotgun farmer do to staying together as a family what does it mean to the relationship of husband and wife and parents and children to be a ghettoized farmer. Well first of all it means that the ghetto farmer. Tells his children to go downtown to get an education to get clean to dress up to work for the man that that is how you can avoid the hardships and the heartaches that he has endured. This is one of the really interesting places where you see a division of

really strong division of you because you're a ghetto and Farmer is saying get out get out join up with the economic structures the economic forces of the state. At the same time the good old farmer himself is psychologically unable to get out that is. Thanks around assuring time of everything right. He's unable to get out that's why I feel that he's almost he's really trapped in a kind of a spatial dimension there isn't a training his children to repudiate him. Yes he is and he'll say that often. Don't be like me. At the same time he's encouraging us and that's an interesting thing because he will encourage us to do it but he won't encourage his own children to go on with it. The shotgun farmer on the other hand tells his children that the school is no good that the place to be is away from the evils of the

system. His children are really socially deprived in terms of what we consider a modern social structure. They don't have the social skills because they haven't been through the school system more than you know maybe the fourth grade this grade. They're dropouts in the widest sense of the word. Is there a family structure that acts to compensate for that. It's a very tight knit family structure very close to the children a very dependent. What worries me is what happens to the the children I call them children even though a lot of them are in their late teens or their early twenties. I don't know what will happen to them when the patriarch of the family dies. Where will they go. What will they do. What will they become. They've been under that ruling force

in such a structured way and so isolated from other people that one wonders whether they can take over the firm whether the firm will become a distortion more of a distortion than it is. And I have seen some cases where that has happened. Where it becomes almost a living ghost situation. Is there any identification within the ghetto farm family unit that it is somehow the male of the family who has failed as a farmer. I mean after all he is doing a lot of the external work of the farm the the wife stays and does the housework. Is there any sense that he has failed Does that make the wife now living in the trailer more of a central figure in the household that she more of a matriarch.

No no that's an interesting question and I hadn't thought about that before but I could definitely say that there's no sense at least in the in the families that I've studied there is no sense within the family structure that the man has failed and no takeover by the women. It seems to me that. The place where you find that sense of failure is in the transition firm situation where the man is still under stress once he's made this adaptation. Things seem to fall into place. This is something I hadn't really thought about before but I'm pretty sure that you find a very wonderful relationship developing there. In every case that I can think of where the decision has been made. The man and the woman regardless of what role models they choose to develop are seen to be quite comparable and quite close.

Is it actually a decision or is it a change in lifestyle by default. Well it has happened as a definite decision in almost every case because you can hang on and hang on it in firming that's one of the things about farming. You can go one more season when things are falling down. You can always get one more part time job and you can you know just break your neck for one more season so finally something has to snap. And that's what I see as as the decision. I'm not saying it's a conscious decision but there's a decision that's made that's it forget it I'm not doing it anymore I'm done. Stay off my land or I'm going to sell my way and those are the two decisions that are arrived at. You mentioned to me at one point that you consider yourself to be a hill farm lady in transition. Now how would you compare your transition to the transition or the change in the lives of the the men that you've been studying or the families that

you've been studying. Well we began on a ghost farm and moved our way from the ghost to the summer place. Up to the subsistence firm and through the process of failure I have decided to go to the valley. And it's interesting how that process is almost reversed. We're moving in the opposite direction of the people that I've been writing about in the sense that we're now going to plug in to the economy by moving into the valley getting cow instead of pigs and chickens and goats and things like that and start doing what's required to plug into the economic structures that are available to us and for me.

Do you think that there is then a sort of inevitable sorting out process here that people will either cave into the system and go into large scale market farming or else quit the farms altogether. I'm afraid that's true but I don't know that we can afford to have that happen especially in Vermont because I think that we're going to find cheap produce is not going to be available to us. We're going to have to eat things that are grown. You know our own state and one of the things that may save some of these firms is the fact that there are things that can be grown by people in Vermont even though we've been brainwashed to believe that Vermont is a lousy place to farm. When you came up as a back to the land type 10 years or so ago and now you're going down to the valley and going to be a dairy farmer.

Then I have my reasons for wanting to do that told I should tell you with a reason to live. I want to now experience that demise I'm a glutton for punishment I want to go through the punishment and torture that I have seen the family farmers go through as they begin to get cut out of their future. Scuse me I didn't mean to interrupt but. No that's quite all right I think that's that's fascinating. Thanks. So there's a yes there is another part of the offing I'm sure but there certainly seems to be no shortage of back to the landers following in your footsteps and I wonder if there is any possibility of a second wave of people heading for the Hill Farms trying to make it. Is there any way they might. And what would they have to know how to do it. I don't see how they can do it given the tax situation and this you're talking about working out and doing

subsistence farming for yourself. There's no economic possibility at this time to be on the Hill and make a living. We have books to prove it. We've written down every bag of grain and every. Bottle that we've bought and every amount of gas that's gone in the tractor and every repair bill and you can't even get people to come to the farms to the small farms to do repair work say on Baylor just laughing you know. So there are you know a lot of things going and I think that are going away going into the circle going into the shotgun existence is the way that the that the landers can do it. But in order to do that they have to lower their standard of living to such an extent that they're really going to be hard put to to maintain

any kind of someone's of sanity. And I see these shotgun farmers as even the seeds you know. Who will remain when cities all collapse and I guess we should get out of there. Are they your own isn't it. No they're heroes they really are heroes and there they have become role models in many cases for a neophyte back to the landers because they know everything they know how to do things and decide that we need to see if you describe them they're not untidy per se. There's a certain tightness to that it's a very earthy frightening. Natural tightness when you patch things you use what's there to patch with.

So the patches really show but they're sturdy and they hold things together and they're clever. The patches are clever patches. What I took to be a study of just a special case of the culture of poverty in general now begins to sound like something very different at least with regard to the shotgun farm it sounds like a culture of survivors rather than a culture of poverty. Yeah I don't see. This is something I think I should be clear about. I don't see in this failure in either case a culture of poverty. The shotgun farmer has plenty of money. He's got money under his bed and he knows how to get money. He can work with his hands in many ways that people can't do. And he's having a field day with the newcomers in providing them with a stone or a core cord wood or whatever it is that they need and he

can if he wants to he can really take them for a ride because they don't understand those values although it's beginning to get a little more clear to them. Why did I say that. Well you're saying that you don't regard either case as a culture of poverty. Oh OK. That I see it the culture of poverty having a mindset that is a defeated mindset. I don't see either of these people all are deprived culturally and spiritually neither of them are deprived in terms of finances. The ghetto farmer has plenty of money because he sold his land at inflated values and he's got color TV and he's got a new washing machine and he's got a blender and he's got an ice maker and he's got anything he needs but he hasn't that relationship to the land and she gave up for that. And the shotgun farmer.

Has closed himself off from the economic structures in that the money won't do him any good. It's under his spell so what it can must and mold under there for all he care. So it isn't really a financial problem in his either case and that's an interesting part of it too. If you can accept that that's. Oh I certainly are headed no way that's true you know. I find it very surprising. But again that wasn't always a good idea in this one get why I say it's a decision because it wasn't it wasn't. Even though the farming was a failure the lifestyle was a creative reconstruction psychic reconstruction out of the failure. I guess the historians might even call it a creative Herman noted. Do you think that you've romanticized what's happening to these people.

People ask me that and I don't think so. No I know. I have the stories to prove it. If you if you read the stories the stories tell the way it is. I am I am getting more and more puzzled. That's good I think by the contrast between. Between these these two families because in a sense they're starting from the same place. They're both still farmers. The whole farm goes down hill and oh sorry for that bad pun. Yeah and if it goes down hill it becomes a success if you're in the valley it's ok do it down there. But one run the city agricultural agent off the land with his gun and builds a psychological fence. Yeah the other sells out not only his land but in a sense his spirituality to the wider society. Why the break. You come to a fork in the road is what makes

one group go one way and one the other. John if I could answer that I'd be famous. That's the question that that really puzzles me. The schooling is the same. The early background is the same the disappointments within their world. Up to that point I'm pretty much the same reasons that their firms fail. We're the same even though as I described they they were opposites they were still the same. That's kind of hard to take but to be too dirty is the same as to be too clean it brings about your failure. But somewhere there there are underlying psychic structures that made these different kinds of restructuring happen. One you know toward the sky and one toward the earth if you want to really

reduce it to such a simplistic conclusion. But why. I don't know. So essentially I haven't said anything except that I am describing some dynamics I'm not sure anyone has really looked at before. And it's for somebody else I guess at this point to the side what to do with it. That was sociologist anthropologist Mary Brannaman talking with co-host and John Major. One of Mary Brennaman self-imposed restraints. Is the protection of the privacy of the people she so aptly described. Therefore the

forum was not allowed to visit any of the hill farmers described during the previous minutes. Cohost case the ass name did visit a gentleman in Orange County who had lost a farm. Philip Simoneau does not fit the exact description of the hill farmer. Though he was not born into a farm family his ambition was to become a farmer. He tried to buy a farm in Thetford Vermont but he was unable to finish paying the mortgage and he now lives in a trailer which looks out over the last and he used to own. He still owns 17 horses but makes his living as a janitor in Hanover New Hampshire. He talked with Kate about some of the same feelings Mary Brennaman has observed and described further north in Washington County Vermont. The joy of being on the land. Failure and the loss of his farm were broken and

one of them didn't die. I just love that place. Why does it feel like now to be living on that front here looking over at the land that you used. You can answer that. Swirls aren't you. Well I'm not so sure that I can because I have never been in a situation where I want to cross no Hager the highway agent here in Hanover got a new house up there then. Way out. Oh she raises white some more issues come in daylight and realize she's a writer. Way up back she has a house there's another big house on the right it you can see my place there when I bought that place. I said Vera. We're going to put in the next 15 years here and we're going to

work our plan. I'm going to build up a herd of Cal 100 mil cars then I'm going to sell every damn car we've got one bunch because that's only one Heidi. I CAN SOMEONE the time that I get the whole thing out of my mind. Then across the road as a 58 appease a bill bonnet bought the joint I went to the family that's down there. You've got nothing lumber to build yourself a beautiful home I said mine. I'll keep that 50 acres. In the middle it was quite a bit of cleared land I said you've got the best soil. Not only has it that's on that for the hill because it's been washing Danine you know for the last hundred years. So I'll have a nice feel where I can put in a half mile training track. I can raise

eight or 10 cults every year and raise some. They show up going I'm a lot I can do just what I want just the way I want. We're going to be away from everybody. You know it's a funny thing I got dang it might cause sometimes that when you come down and I'd be so tired. I just couldn't keep born. And I'd sit there and you could see where you were Waldron across a Connecticut man way over and I don't know if your car meditational watch but you could sit there and it was the most beautiful sight that you ever set your eyes on. And if you can stay there for 15 20 minutes and there was something about it you know I can back down I could work until maybe I don't know what I was about.

What do you think that it takes to be successful as a farmer. Well our guts just sounds to me like you have a lot of guts though. I've been doing terminations. Why did you decide to stay on the land. Oh you mean a point that was you know I want to know. Well I can't get home fast enough. I got all my animals and then right by the kitchen window and a post up and a big bird feeder. My wife loves birds we've got four squirrels and always chickadees not hatch years and I would pick a Blue Jays. Everybody bitches about Blue Jays and I you know what after all are a big bird Negredo. But you don't buy those things down town things you can buy

and you said oh you got the best day kind of a day for me and I said Do you know why I want to get outdoors and grow here all the birds singing and. You look out and see the trees are kind of damp you know. I don't know what it is it's you know there's a God somebody's much to me you know. There was no damn politician. Do you blame yourself then or do you blame other people for not having run a successful far. I blame other people. If somebody offered you a farm today you would have to buy it. But they offered you good loan terms and good mortgage terms would you take it. Not at my age for I was younger I didn't grab it in America.

What could I do with it and some New Year's Oh I don't know if I'm going to be here tomorrow. I'm leaving today. I'm given you know how I got today. Tomorrow you got here. I can't do anything about yesterday. Tomorrow you got here. I'm living just for today. You can't chase three rabbits at once can you. Not that I know of. Wow. I think people I know. Sure I look ahead. Was there a period after you lost your farm that you you weren't sure that you wanted to keep going. No.

I know. But I didn't want to go away and your I wanted to make a comeback and I wanted to get up right where I stumbled and the only few years my mother always told me when I was growing up and in my teens. If you stop Helen run nights a different dance hall every night and different girl every night and that drinking you're going to and push you know. Mom I went to where it was I just up and do you know library and I kept that place spotless. And you know there was not a day go by when I was mopping that name floor I could almost hear her telling me that I was where I ended up. My high flying him ideas. That was Philip's talking with Kate.

These portraits of failure in farming lead to a logical question of. What does it take to be successful in small scale farming. Perhaps there is an irony in the fact that the very people who are being forced to leave farming are serving as role models who are a new breed of small scale farmers commonly labeled as the back to the landers. In a talk to Rick Sloan of the wooden shoe farm in Canaan New Hampshire the wooden shoe farm is a small scale diversified Mocket farm and the four men who work it derive about two thirds of their income from the vegetables and meat they sell. The other third comes from odd jobs such

as running the town dump and working in restaurants. I guess one of the things that interests me is it seems that there are a lot of family farms or homesteads that have been failing in the last over the last 10 20 years. And I'm curious as to why you're involved in in starting up really a homestead a diversified farm. Well. It seems to me the lifestyle is an attractive one for me and the people who I live with decided after living in another type of lifestyle most of us come from a middle class background and we decided that we'd like to try something else which may have started out as a romantic and romantic idea at first an ideal

and after living that for a while we decided that it works for us in a practical sense and we enjoy the lifestyle and we have a we. My condition is such that we can have a foot in both doors take and glean the best of both lifestyles so we can adapt to whatever situations we need to and we can be successful in that way. If we need to get a job in town I can make some money. We can do that because we were geared that way. But we also chose to have our lifestyle be. But what we would call crude or simple. It's so voluntary simplicity. One of the things that I'm looking at in this series of programs the whole

issue of people whose lives are in transition both men and women. And we've heard during this program about men who are in a transition which seems quite opposite to yours and in one case one of the types of farmers that marry Brennaman does the scribe's sells his farm and may stay on the land in a trailer but by virtue of selling his land he starts he and his family start to sort of buy into the consumer culture a middle class buy into some middle class values. And clearly that's something that you in making a decision to work at the wouldn't you fire of rejected. And I just wondered whether you would detail for me that that process of transition in your life in a sense going the opposite direction from what we've been hearing during the hour previously. Yeah that's a long story. That's I took a number of years too. It wasn't like I woke up one morning so I got to get out of this

and just split and went through the wind you for it. It took me a long time to make that choice. I mean the process is. I mean I can sometimes i think back and try to remember when I first never seed of thought came in my head of you know when I wanted to to change from what I was doing to this and I can remember I can remember that a moment a particular moment and it seemed to be part of me since I was a small child. And since I was somewhere before the age of 10 I remember looking at we took a trip to a farm a class I was in and there a farm house just loved it loved it. This was really turned on by the cows and the dirt in there.

And that whole environment loved it. Now they get you going. He stinks. You know she's sound. I love that when I finally got to high school I started checking into what they call at that time alternative lifestyles. So I was highly political When I first started looking for a place and I think that the police as it was mellowed out quite a bit because of the energy that need to be put into a farm just for myself. I decided that if there is any kind of big movement that's going to take place within my lifetime I would rather look grow food for it or something in that order then organize. And I mean even if a revolution does come people are still going to want to eat. And I'd rather be part of that growing food process. And

I decided that that would be if if I want to take a conscious role and make a conscious choice to be part of a movement a revolution. I'd rather take that role. I just I just always viewed myself as more of a peasant than then. In a half hour. That was Rick Sloan of the wooden shoe fall in Canaan New Hampshire. A story with a successful ending. It seems that the values of a society and a technology which have discouraged the use of land where subsistence farming. Have also motivated some people to sustain viable farming operations. Today in the forum has looked at two

opposite transitions. On the one hand at the farm who no longer works the land because he has was to abandon his farm and in the process adopt the values of a consumer oriented society. And on the other hand the back to the land who repudiates these values and lowers his standard of living so that he can fall. One cannot conclude from these lies that only the second type of transition leads to success in small scale farming. The very personal nature of the stories told today defies empirical findings and definite answers. Furthermore the way in which we view the transition depends upon the cultural context which itself is rapidly changing and New England will lead back to the Land of people take over or is the line finished. This question and a series of others have the beginnings of yet another issue another story. The engineer for today's program was Fred Wasser from on Public Radio 4 is produced by cakes the

Ossining. Until next week I'm your announcer. PAUL Hi good. Evening was. The AS. Long as. Go home care. Where I'm Going To The Best to see.

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