The Agrarian Impulse

Some people just have it. Sometimes it comes with the culture.

I come from a long line of kulaks/yeoman farmers. In fact, the last ancestor in my direct lineage to not be a farmer was a hunter-gatherer. The last full-time farmers were my two grandfathers, both of whom farmed in Illinois and retired in the 1950s. I have the agrarian impulse from both sides. Even my younger children, Ethiopian adoptees, have it, only their birth family were subsistence farmers. Unlike most Americans, we have frequent direct contact with both dirt and manure. We’re now a four-species farm: cattle, horses, chickens and dogs. I’m resisting pressure from my wife to raise a couple of hogs, my reluctance due to aesthetic concerns. I think ducks will be the next addition. I don’t know how many kinds of vegetables, grains, beans, and fruits we raise, but I’d like to expand into more grains. We’re doing wheat, buckwheat, and corn now, but I’ll probably plant oats this spring, if I can get enough Substack posts done in time. Having been a warm and dry winter, I might be able to get into the field early, and if the drought continues, I’ll want to. 

The ancestor we point to as the founder of my Dad’s side of the family, one Mathias Anderson, my great-grandfather, was born in Sweden and lived in Norway. He came to the US as a young man in the 1850’s. As a logger in Wisconsin, he floated a log raft down the Mississippi River. Once in New Orleans, he saw a slave auction, selling people over the block, and became an abolitionist. A few years later, he joined the Union army at Lincoln’s first call for volunteers, seeing action at Shiloh, the Hatchie River, and Vicksburg. 

The house Mathias Anderson built

After the war, he settled in central Illinois, where he built the house my father grew up in. He was a farmer and brickmason, building the towns of Neoga and Teutopolis. He died an old man, as a result of being kicked by a horse. We’re pretty proud of him.

I grew up about 50 miles from there, in the heart of Abraham Lincoln country. The Lincoln family’s first homestead was a couple of miles from my cousin’s farm. As school children, we were steeped in everything Lincoln. Every spring, we did a school trip to some Lincoln site. The house where Lincoln and Douglas agreed to debate was near the Tastee-Freez where we went for ice cream. We studied the Civil War, and I memorized the Gettysburg Address. Abolition and emancipation were top of mind to us, only a hundred years after the war ended. 

My grandfathers, on both sides, were lifelong farmers. My parents were Depression children, going to college in the early 30’s. My Dad was able to go because his uncle delivered milk in a horse drawn wagon, saving and investing his pennies. And about those days, we literally meant pennies. But he was able to save enough to put my Dad and all his cousins through college with a loan. My Dad lived on canned beans and white bread. 

Any Depression baby learned the value of money, and, if they came from a farm, the value of land. My Dad’s letters home from college talk about having to borrow two or three cents.  But there were no food shortages on the farm. My Dad would say, “we may not have had two cents to rub together, but we had plenty to eat.” They were pretty self-sufficient until it came time for tuition. 

As soon as they got out of school and started working, they started saving. They never bought anything until they had saved up for it. When my Mom was in her 90’s, she had a credit fraud scare, and I had to look up her credit record. It turned out she didn’t have one. She had never taken out a loan or a credit card in her entire life. 

The thing my parents saved for was farmland. They first bought the 40 acres I grew up on and we farmed. Then they bought more land to rent out and to just have, because that’s what you did. Farmland was security. I believe they paid $400 an acre for their first land, boasting prized Drummer and Flanagan soils, the most productive corn ground in the world. That land, if we still had it today, would be worth upwards of $20,000 an acre. 

As I said, I adopted my younger daughters, twins, from Ethiopia. The girls had been given up for adoption because their mother had died, and hence had been raised by their father and his other six children, on some of the roughest looking farmland I’ve ever seen. It’s no wonder he couldn’t feed them. He told me that if they’d stayed with him, they would have died. I believe him. 

When we met, we talked farming, through an interpreter, who we kind of wore out. I’d ask a question. I’d get a long, clearly nuanced, answer, which came through the translator as a couple of sentences. I felt like I missed a lot. Ethiopia has fairly rich soils, though with unreliable weather, and the most advanced traditional agriculture in Africa. 

Part of my wife’s family comes from Ukraine, where they were kulaks during the Austro-Hungarian empire. By great good fortune, they left right after the first World War, barely missing the first rounds of Soviet famine in the early 1920’s. Her grandparents settled in Michigan and ran a small business while canning and freezing huge quantities of vegetables from their garden. It’s a tough habit to break when you come from a land of famine. 

All this is to say, my kids have it from every direction, birth family and adoptive family. Though at this point, as high school seniors, they’re mostly interested in animal husbandry, particularly horses, the cost of which negates the savings of growing your own food. But it keeps them focused on the right things, like responsible animal care, learning to handle animals, and developing authentic skills. They consider themselves country girls, and they have a pretty good claim to it.

The agrarian tradition comes with the culture. The neighbors I grew up with farmed, not because they had to, but because they could. It’s as much a part of the culture as Fourth of July fireworks or Thanksgiving turkey, only it goes back further. You get to do hard things, and hard work gets rewarded. You work in the heat, the cold, and the rain, in dirt, manure, and bugs, at 100 degrees above, and 40 degrees below. But you get fresh eggs, tomatoes off the vine, ripe strawberries, and beef from your backyard. You eat like royalty. And get a healthy dose of independence, free to think and act as you see fit, answerable only to “Nature and Nature’s God,” as Jefferson put.