The Land Was Everything

Letters from an American Farmer
A firsthand perspective on the modern farmer’s struggle against drought, disease, insects, rodents, government bureaucracy, financial overload—and how those challenges promote qualities like independence, stoicism, and resolution.

Before storms that can destroy his crops in an instant, the farmer stands implacable. To fluctuations in temperature that can deprive his children of their future, the farmer pays no heed. Every day the elements remind him that his future is secure only through constant effort. Like the creepers and crawlers he seeks to eradicate, the farmer toils away in the lush anonymity of his grid of vines, his tradition one of impervious resolve.

Today that tradition of muscular, self-effacing labor is quietly disappearing, as the last of America’s independent farmers slowly fade away. When they have gone, what will we have lost? In The Land Was Everything, Victor Davis Hanson, an embattled fifth-generation California grape farmer and passionate, eloquent writer, answers this question by offering a final snapshot of the yeoman, his work, and his wisdom. He shows that there is worth in the farmer beyond the best price of raisins or apples per pound, beyond his ability to provide fruit out of season, hard, shiny, and round. Why is it, then, that the farmer is so at odds with global culture at the millennium? What makes the farmer so special?

To find the answer Hanson digs deeply within himself. The farmer’s value is not to be found in pastoral stereotypes—myths that farmers are simple and farming serene. It is something more fundamental. The independent farmer, in his lonely, do-or-die struggle, is tangible proof that there is still a place for heroism in America. In the farmer’s unflinching, remorseless realities—rain and sun, hail and early frost—lie the best of humanity tested: stoicism, surprising intelligence, and the determination that comes from fighting battles, tractor against vine, that must be replicated a thousand or a hundred thousand times if a farmer is to have even a chance of success.

The land was everything that once made America great and democracy strong. Will we still like what we are—and can we survive as we are—when the land is nothing?

Contributor: Jane Smiley (Foreword by)

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