slow food nations 169dardbred horse- drawn buggy limits the distances we travel. This is
basically what we need. This is what keeps our communities healthy.” It
makes perfect sense, of course, that limiting territory size can yield divi-
dends in appreciation for what one already has, and the ability to manage
it without debt. The surprise is to find whole communities gracefully ac-
cepting such boundaries, inside a nation that seems allergic to limita-
tions, priding itself instead on the freedom to go as far as we want, as fast
as we can, and buy until we run out of money—or longer, if we have
credit cards.
Farmers like Elsie and David are a link between the past and fu-
ture. They’ve declined to participate in the modern century’s paradigm of
agriculture—and of family life, for that matter, as they place high value
on nonmaterial things like intergenerational family bonds, natural aes-
thetics, and the pleasures of shared work. By restraining their consump-
tion and retaining skills from earlier generations of farmers, they are
succeeding. When the present paradigm of extractive farming has run its
course, I don’t foresee crowds of people signing up for the plain wardrobe.
But I do foresee them needing guidance on sustainable agriculture.
I realized this several years ago when David and Elsie came to our
county to give an organic dairy workshop, at the request of dairy farmers
here who were looking for new answers. It was a discouraged lot who at-
tended the meeting, most of them nearly bankrupt, who’d spent their ca-
reers following modern dairy methods to the letter: growth hormones,
antibiotics, mechanization. David is a deeply modest man, but the irony
of the situation could not have been lost on him. There sat a group of
hardworking farmers who’d watched their animals, land, and accounts
slide into ruin during the half- century since the USDA declared as its of-
ficial policy, “Get big or get out.”
And there sat their teacher, a farmer who’d stayed small. Small enough,
anyway, he would never have to move through his cornfield too quickly to
study the soil, or hear the birds answer daylight with their song.