Farming: A Love Story
- On May 22, 2012
- By Meleah
- In Books, Organic Gardening, Soil, Sustainable Agriculture, Veggies
- 0
Peaceful people, I’m telling you what: By the time you get to the point in “Turn Here Sweet Corn” where Atina Diffley is fighting to defend her Eagan, Minnesota, farm against Koch Industries’ attempts to run a crude-oil pipeline through it, you’re going to want to get yourself a pitchfork and help her and her husband Martin stand their ground.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press earlier this year, Diffley’s memoir is often billed as a David vs. Goliath tale, an inside look at organic farming and a love story combined. That’s an apt description, but readers will likely gravitate to the thread that draws them in. What kept me turning pages was the love. Love between Atina and Martin, love of growing healthy food organically, love of the land and other loves more difficult to define.
“Turn Here Sweet Corn” may have been the words Diffley read on a roadside sign when first visiting Martin’s Gardens of Eagan farm. But those words could just as easily be read as a term of endearment coined by a farmer for his/her love. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Diffley thinks that too as this is no ordinary memoir, and it’s no farming primer either. Warm and lyrical, Diffley’s writing is enviably good by any standard.
Family farmers
After meeting under difficult circumstances (she is pregnant and in the process of getting out of an unhappy marriage), Atina and Martin are finally free to build a life together. Along with her infant daughter, Eliza, Atina joins Martin at Gardens of Eagan, which has been his family’s farm for four generations.
Farming is hard work everyone knows, but Diffley’s descriptions of the long hours spent laboring in the fields, wee-hour trips to deliver produce, as well as the joys and disappointments at harvest time, make real something most of us don’t know anything about. Over the years the couple build their business, becoming one of the Midwest’s first certified organic produce farms and supplying many Twin Cities’ co-ops with organic vegetables.
After a few years, their son Maize is born at home on a blazing hot day. They’re happy, and life seems almost idyllic for all of them. And then, in the ‘90s, suburban developers move in and through eminent domain they manage to take Martin Diffley’s farm. Acre by acre the bulldozers advance until the ecosystem surrounding the farm is destroyed and the Diffley family has no choice but to find a new place to call home.
It was a heartbreaking time that was even difficult to read about, particularly since most of the outward pain is Maize’s. Distraught over what’s happening, the little boy is the only one in the family able to move through the hurt as it’s happening. As Diffley has explained while talking about the book, she and Martin didn’t have heir cry until she was writing the book and they were reading drafts, forcing them in some ways to relive it all again.
Maize, though, rails against the bulldozers, throwing clods of dirt in their direction and telling them to leave.
His voice grows hoarse, his kicking lower. He keeps shouting and hitting but weaker and smaller. I pick him up. Tears swell under his eyes, and he huddles against my chest. There is no way to return to before—before no longer is. I lay my palm across his forehead and say, ‘Go ahead, let it go. I’ll hold on to you.’
Goliath comes calling
It’s nearly unfathomable that once the Diffley’s did make the move to another farm and start all over again, Koch Industries came in and announced plans to put a pipeline across their land. But it did happen and by then the Diffleys had had quite enough. They got a lawyer. It was a long fight. But with the help of the Twin Cities organic community, they won.
In 2008 the Diffley’s sold their farm and all of their equipment to the Wedge Community Co-op in Minneapolis. Together they run a consulting company called Organic Farming Works and Atina speaks frequently on organic growing and farming.
If you live nearby and you’d like to see Atina speak, here is a list of some of her upcoming engagements where she will also be signing books:
May 26 2012: 4 – 6 p.m. at Barnes and Nobles in Apple Valley, MN.
June 7, 2012: 7 – 9 p.m. at Mill City Museum in Minneapolis, MN.
June 16, 2012: 2 – 3 p.m. at Valley Bookseller in Stillwater, MN.