When I chose the name for this blog, it was partly a play on the name of our farm--Shady Side Farm. It was also partly a statement on the decline of farming in America--that somehow a cloud has passed over the sun, and we work on while worrying what is to come. I just finished reading a novel by Wendell Berry. In his Jayber Crow , he traces the lifetime of a small town barber in Kentucky. In the excerpt I've included here, the barber speaks of the state of farming in his small town probably somewhere around the 1970s. I found much that spoke to me: And the farmers, some of them at least, were worrying. They knew that farming was in decline, losing diversity, losing self-sufficiency, losing production capacity. A sort of communal self-confidence, which must always have existed, had begun to die away. You could hear it in the talk. Elton Penn, say, would come in on a Saturday night for a haircut, and then another good farmer, Nathan Coulter maybe or Luther Swain, would come in, and t...
A look at life on a small family farm