Farming
Story Stream
How It Feels to Work Hard August 27, 2024
When we, the WWOOFers, went in for lunch at noon, I’d always bring two wheelbarrows full of carrots with me, pushing the carts with my dirt-caked hands. A lot of the carrots were misshapen, covered in soil, or sprouting roots, but I had pulled each o...
The Wound and the Show August 16, 2024
Kat Tang’s debut, Five-Star Stranger, has a very bright and colorful dustjacket, but its less than effusive narrator, if not exactly unreliable, is not given to telling us what he’s feeling, and we sense that if we ever find out, somber tones will re...
How to Respond to Tradwife Envy August 15, 2024
Recently a number of hit pieces and critiques of the cultural phenomenon known as “tradwives” seem to suggest that progressive feminists are beginning to have a change of heart. Although their stated intention is to detract from the phenomenon, the ...
Questions of the Spirit August 14, 2024
One of the most powerful things Cesar Chavez is credited with saying wasn’t authored by him alone but alongside playwright Luis Valdez. It comes from “El Plan de Delano,” the manifesto written and read on the occasion of the United Farm Workers pereg...
What City Kids Learn on My Farm June 17, 2024
Here are some things I have taught the kids who visit my farm: animals don’t care about your feelings, and sometimes we kill them to eat them. It doesn’t matter how desperately you want to find more eggs, the hens don’t lay on demand. Tomatoes aren’t...
Red Meat June 13, 2024
Readers escape and go someplace else, and some of them, when they return, bring things back and use them to become writers. Apparently, judging from their fictions, young British readers have been going to America. In different ways, their novels are...
Jeremy Clarkson Touches Grass June 11, 2024
The last truly poignant thing I watched on television was a show about a grumpy farmer raising piglets. He’s a city gentleman new to farming, but what may have started out as a gimmick has, over three growing seasons, transformed into a real calling....
The Complicated Legacy of ‘Super Size Me’ June 10, 2024
There’s an awkward scene toward the beginning of Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! — the unheralded sequel to the Oscar-nominated Super Size Me documentary — where Morgan Spurlock calls to inquire about procuring a bank loan to buy his own chicken farm....
Mike Rowe’s Irresistible Patriotism June 10, 2024
Mike Rowe has made a living from telling stories. And not just in Dirty Jobs, the TV show that made him famous. He has a podcast, The Way I Heard It, a book with the same title, and a TV show called The Story Behind the Story, all dedicated to tellin...
Rural America Has Lost Its Soul November 27, 2023
Pity the poor American farmer. Since the 18th century, he has been freighted not simply with growing crops or raising animals, but with carrying the virtue of the American republic. Thomas Jefferson said so himself, writing that: “Those who labor in ...
Making the Most of Our “One Wild and Precious Life” November 15, 2023
In her tell-all memoir, “Lost and Found: Coming of Age in the Washington Press Corps,” media analyst and ex-journalist Ellen Hume takes readers on a wild ride through the halls of power in Washington and to the major events she covered around the wor...
A Year of Honest Work November 08, 2023
In June 2022, after finishing my junior year, I dropped out of high school and flew to a ranch in California. I passed over the green cattle guard—bars laid over a trench to trip up escaping cows—and walked onto the campus of Deep Springs College. Th...
