John Peterson says the rising demand for organic produce in the US is pushing farms, like his Angelic Organics, to their limits.
ON SCREEN
Who: Taggart Siegel and John Peterson, director and documentary subject
What: The Real Dirt on Farmer John
Screening: Academy cinema, Auckland
Also: Siegel and Peterson will introduce and answer questions after screenings of the film at the Academy today and Saturday at 6.30pm.
Taggart Siegel's first brushes with movie stars took place before he could walk. The Idaho native, now 40, grew up in Sun Valley, the winter playground of the likes of Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne.
But the film star he knows best is one we would have never
heard of if it were not for Siegel's film: John Peterson, the title character of the small, sweet and occasionally heartrending documentary The Real Dirt on Farmer John.
In making the film, which opened in Auckland yesterday, Siegel was able to draw on a reliable archive of footage - his own: he'd shot a short, black-and-white film called Bitter Harvest, which documented the 1980s collapse of Peterson's Illinois farm under the weight of impossible debt caused by rising interest rates.
Some of that footage, of an equipment auction, makes for one of the present film's gloomier scenes, but The Real Dirt forages further back - into home movies shot by Peterson's mother - and brings the story into a hopeful present: having sold 90 per cent of his acreage to pay the banks, Peterson reinvented his place as Angelic Organics, one of 2000 farms across the US which operate under a scheme called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) by which city folks buy shares in a farm's produce and enjoy the whole-food summer and autumn harvests.
"Bitter Harvest opened my heart to the drama of real-life stories," says Siegel, who, with Peterson, is touring New Zealand to talk to the film's audiences.
"But in 1996 I came back and saw this miraculous recovery and realised it was such a story of loss and redemption."
Those redemption sequences are impressive, even if they feel faintly like an ad for Angelic Organics rather than a social document, but Peterson can understand the sceptical view that organic farming is never going to prise the iron grasp of pesticide-happy big business from the tiller of US agriculture.
"I feel that way sometimes," he says. "But revolutions happen out of bleakness and hopelessness. My situation was so desolate that anyone looking would have said it would never turn around. So we don't know.
"Probably more than three quarters of a million people get their food from CSA farms. It is growing so fast that the farms are maxed out and the demand is there, so you need more and more farms to spring up to keep the system going."
Peterson has been away from the farm for almost three years now, publicising the film - a process that will end in the northern summer.
"I'm really tired of it and I really miss the farming. It's been a lot of work. But the part I really enjoy ... is going to farms and meeting farmers. That's what makes it worthwhile."
Siegel, who, as it happens, lives half the year in Pigeon Bay on Banks Peninsula, is working on a new film, entitled Queen of the Sun, about the so-called colony collapse disorder, the little-understood phenomenon noted in northern-hemisphere hives and colonies where bees abruptly and mysteriously disappear.
Given the role of the bee's industrious pollination in plant reproduction, it addresses another important ecological imponderable.
"It's kind of scary," says Siegel. "This film is about having reverence for the bees and the beekeepers, so I'm following beekeepers in New Zealand and Australia and the US ... who are really tuned in to what the bees need.
"For instance there are a lot of beekeepers who truck the bees across the country and feed then genetically engineered corn syrup and that's pretty hard on them."
