THE REAL DIRT ON FARMER JOHN
Director: Taggart Siegel
Running time: 82 mins
Rating: PG (adult themes)
Screening: Academy
Herald Rating: * * * *
Verdict: A touching and entertaining portrait of a slightly oddball farmer is a record of many social changes in America
Reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, as I
was when I sat down to watch this touching and telling little doco, I was primed for a polemic about the sins ("the real dirt") of American agriculture.
Those sins - the systemic failures that ensure farming works to the advantage of multinational seed companies and banks at the expense of farmers, consumers and taxpayers - are alluded to glancingly here.
But the film is first and foremost a portrait of a mildly eccentric and utterly charming Illinois farmer named John Peterson, whom we meet as he chomps into a mouthful of his dirt and comments, deadpan, that "the soil tastes good today".
Peterson's stewardship of the family land, which he took over after his father's death in the 1960s, is a neat record of many social changes in America: the dairy and pig farm was home to the performance art of party-mad hippies; became mired in debt that drove it to the edge of extinction; and emerged from long years of crisis to become a thriving organic (later bio-dynamic) operation, co-operatively owned by city folks who grow vegetables, some of which, Peterson admits, he doesn't know the names of.
Along the way he becomes the target of community suspicion - a hazard, one supposes, for any farmer given to driving a combine harvester while clad in nothing but a pink feather boa - which is by turns toxic and hilariously credulous.
Drawing on footage shot by Peterson's mum (a feisty Jim Morrison fan), his erstwhile hippie mates and, over two decades, by longtime friend Siegel, the film compiles a sometimes heartbreaking portrait of one farmer's problematic but ultimately unbreakable connection to his land.
It also, not incidentally, an inspiring vision of the way forward for food production, a portrait of what Peterson calls "a dead farm coming back to life". After reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, it may be just the antidote you need.
