Buying the Farm: Reinvesting in the Roots of Good Food

It's always bugged me that the phrase "buy the farm" carries negative connotation.

My grandparents were self-sufficient Midwestern farm folk who taught me the joys of reading the weather, borrowing from neighbors, eating turnips raw from the garden, counting every blessing, and a myriad of other quiet habits that help me calibrate the health of my environment, my community and—perhaps most importantly—my food.

Last year my husband and I bought the farm (literally) and moved to Iowa to raise healthy meats and a family. Our dreams of grass-finishing beef, pork, and poultry using organic methods and diversified land management raised eyebrows (we'd been living the outdoorsperson's life in a ski town) and, I think, were dismissed by many people as wishful thinking. Who moves to Iowa, anyway? (Or Illinois or Ohio, or one of those vowel states in the middle there. People couldn't wrap their minds around it....) And farming? That's how we get ethanol, right?

Well, yes, Iowa does produce, in a good year, more than 10 billion bushels of corn, and at recent record-high prices that monoculture will gobble up vaster tracts of the nation's most naturally fertile farmland in the coming years than American agriculture has ever seen.The sheer biomass of it is staggering: in September and October, the grain elevators can't keep up and three-story mountains of the grain are piled on the ground, waiting to be transformed into animal feed (whole-kernel and mash ration), human food (high-fructose corn syrup), fuel (ethanol), components of plastics, preservatives (monosodium glutamate or MSG), and many more mind-boggling derivatives.

Furthermore, even as federal subsidies grossly estrange farm commodity supply from demand, Iowa farmers sustain a rate of profit loss comparable to that experienced in the Depression, according to economist Ken Meter.

But Iowa also nurtures smaller and more diversified ventures, not quite by the bushel, but very much in the spirit of family farming. We're not just back-to-the-landers, either. My neighbor, for example, supports his family by milking 45 Jersey cows (just as his parents did), and, if the benefits really start breaking the bank, he just might go organic.