20
Sustaining Cultivation
M. Bell
‘You’re missing something.’
Dick Thompson and I were sitting at his kitchen table, a well-thumbed copy
of the first draft of this book in a stack between us. Dick noted the flash of alarm
that passed across my face.
‘I like the book. Don’t get me wrong. I like it a lot. But at least when you’re
talking about me, there’s something you’re missing.’
‘What’s – ’ I started to ask.
‘Get along but don’t go along.’
This is a phrase that Dick says he heard one day when cleaning a hog waterer
on his farm, when no one else was around.^1 It’s long been his motto, and he repeats
it at almost every event he speaks at. I had clean forgotten about it, I suppose
because I had never really underlined it in my mind. It seemed to me an interesting
but quirky turn of phrase.
‘Get along but don’t go along. It’s what your book’s about.’
He blazed those clear blue eyes at me. I met them for a moment, and then
turned away. Then, suddenly, I got it. Finally. Dick saw his meaning land, and his
face spread with a three-hundred-acre grin.
He was right. Get along but don’t go along is Dick’s way of saying, in just six
words, something that has taken me nearer to a hundred thousand to say. The
phrase neatly captures the tensions between modernism and postmodernism, dif-
ference and engagement, stability and change, that the Practical Farmers of Iowa
(PFI) farmers seek to resolve. Get along: Here Dick means both getting along with
others and getting along in the world. He means to emphasize the importance of
community and dialogue as well as the importance of achieving one’s practical
needs, and how these are interconnected.^2 Don’t go along: Dick’s point here is not
that one should never do what others do, nor that one should, solipsistically, disre-
gard what others have to say. Rather, his point is that one shouldn’t do it just for the
sake of getting along. In the terms I have been using in the book, just going along
would lead to monologue and monologic power, to the suppression of difference and
Reprinted from Farming for US All by Michael Mayerfeld Bell. Copyright © 2004 The Pennsylvania
State University. Reprinted by permission of Penn State Press.