Getting Dirty With John Peterson

John Peterson is a man who doesn’t just farm the land—he eats it. In the opening scenes of his upcoming movie, “The Real Dirt on Farmer John,” Peterson ruminates over a patch of farmland like a wine connoisseur sampling a rare vintage.

Farmer John says that the gesture pays respect to farming tradition, but adds that he is not fully qualified as an inspector.

“I’ve never been trained to taste the dirt; it’s an old tradition I was paying deference to,” he said during a phone interview last month from Los Angeles. “I’m sure there are more nuances that can be discerned.”

Farmer John says that his life story, as displayed in director Taggart Siegel’s documentary, captures his farm’s “coming back to life” after going bankrupt in the 1980s. With help from Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) investors, the family farm was rechristened Angelic Organics, which now specializes in providing organic products to its roughly 6,000 community shareholders.

“[Director Siegel] and I were standing in fields of organic peppers on my farm...that’s when we realized we were standing in the midst of a miracle,” Peterson says. “That’s because farms never come back to life...it was a resurrection story that we had to share with the rest of the world.”

Despite the success of his organic farm, however, Farmer John remains cautiously optimistic about the future of the organics movement.

“When something is in its beginning stages, it’s impossible to really detect what the trajectory is,” he says. “With the organic movement, there’s quite a shift in world consciousness, concern for the survival of the planet, and people are changing their lifestyle...this bodes well for organics.”

He says that “agribusiness” has been building a greater presence in the organic foods market recently, but dismissed the idea that natural food chains such as Whole Foods could supplant the authenticity of the CSA farm or its emphasis on sustainability.

“Whole Foods can’t emulate a CSA model,” he says. “With the CSA model, people join a farm, they have a very direct, personal relationship with the farm. It’s great that there’s a corporate trend towards organics because anything that poisons the earth less, that’s a good thing. As far as building a relationship to the earth, the weather, and the land and the farmer, that’s not going to happen with Whole Foods.”

When he finishes with the film’s promotion tour, Farmer John says that he plans to expand the breadth of the farm’s agricultural enterprises, including the addition of livestock and grain components that stress sustainability and biodiversity.

Peterson also says that, while Angelic Organics works to make organics affordable for the environmentally conscious of all socioeconomic levels, saving the earth has a price, too.

“I’m not a fan of cheap organic food,” Farmer John says. “What happens is that people with a special relationship to the earth start to get squeezed out...this is about building a relationship with the land. If all you have is something cheap from the grocery store, that’s not necessarily going to transform the planet...it’s going to require some economic resources to make it happen.”

—Staff writer Andrew E. Lai can be reached at lai@fas.harvard.edu.