Non-Fiction

Soon after I purchased land in southwestern Wisconsin, a stranger from Missouri called me. “I’m your farm’s manager,” he said with a drawl. He had helped the widow who’d owned my property before me. Would I like to keep him on? He would arrange to rent my fields and sign me up for programs. What programs? I wondered. Why would I need a manager? He wasn’t a farmer. He didn’t even live in Wisconsin. It sounded like a scam, so I told him I wasn’t interested.

The land where my partner, David, and I planned to make our home was a giant rectangle, partly wooded, partly tillable, bisected by a spring-fed river. On eighty of its acres, for one hundred years, farmers had raised corn, hay, or soybeans. I hadn’t meant to purchase such a big parcel, much less a former farm. But David and I fell in love with the place while visiting one snowy January morning. We braved the river’s rough ice to reach a flat expanse in the valley surrounded by hills. We hiked up a steep, narrow road through a forest that led to another, more secluded expanse on a ridgetop.

We had been looking for somewhere to start over. We weren’t young, but we were more than a decade younger than the average American farmer, who was fifty-five then, in 2004. We wanted to live more healthily than we had been in our city offices, staring at computers. We hoped to spend our days outdoors, breathing fresh air. We wanted space and freedom to experiment with natural building techniques and renewable energy. I planned to trade writing for farming as a way to make a living.

Farming was hard, messy work, I knew. But I liked hard work, and I figured farming would come naturally to me. For as far back as family stories and municipal records indicated, my forebears were farmers. But I hadn’t decided what crops to grow or how. During the next four years, while David and I built a yurt, a straw-bale woodshop, and then a house on the property, I would research possibilities. I would practice by raising a large garden.