The discussion on American agriculture is evolving every day, and as a result, agribusiness has been stoking a backlash against those pushing for a change in how we grow our food. Notably, Michael Pollan has been a target at recent university speaking engagements; a few weeks ago at Cal-Poly, when a feedlot owner threatened to rescind a donation if Pollan was allowed to speak solo, the university caved, making his talk a part of a panel discussion. This is all an indication that the conversation on fixing our broken food system is gaining traction, as the discussion grows more nuanced, more solutions-oriented and more threatening to the status quo.

Last month in New York, Lisa Hamilton, author of Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, hosted just such a nuanced discussion on the current state of agriculture featuring Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times writer whose column is called “The Rural Life,” farmer Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and farmer Mary Howell Martens, who grows 1400 acres of organic corn, beans and other grains with her husband and three children in Penn Yan, New York.

The panel focused on assessing the situation farmers are now caught in, and discussed solutions, including focusing on improving the foodshed, rebuilding rural communities and strengthening “ag in the middle” through trade partnerships.

Hamilton began the talk by telling a story about an opinion piece she wrote that ended up in both rural newspapers and on various progressive outlets, including Civil Eats. She thought this was telling, because it showed that both rural and urban dwellers have an interest in redefining what it means to be a farmer, and bringing back a human scale to agriculture. Here is a quote from Hamilton’s piece from last May:

In the future, farmers’ importance will only grow. Their intimate, human-scale knowledge of the land is what will allow agriculture to adapt to climate change. And as the cheap energy that industrial agriculture depends on disappears, it is farmers, with their small-scale innovation and sheer manual labor, who will feed us. Why do we care about having more farmers? Because deep down we know they are essential to a functioning food system.

She defined a farmer as “someone who grows crops in sufficient quantity to be a true commercial entity, yet is still close enough to the ground to bring human scale and values to the process.” While the amount of small farms (1-49 acres) grew by about 100,000 between 2002-2007 according to the most recent ag census, medium-sized farms, most of which fit her description, have suffered, while the largest farms (with more than 2000 acres) have continued to grow. Martens brought this point home by talking about the crisis her medium-sized farm faced in 1993 when she realized that “500 acres of conventional crops cannot support a family financially.”

Martens also spoke about the dairy crisis as emblematic of the deeper problems facing our food system, in which the quest for slight increases in margins by numerous farmers has led to overproduction and then collapse. This happened in the dairy sector through the use of “sexed semen” which has increased dramatically the amount of female cows online to milk, and the use of rGBH, a growth hormone, which increases production (with risks to the health of the cow and the public). “We are sort of on the threshold of a major change, if we do this wisely, or a collapse if we don’t do it wisely,” she said.

Kirschenmann gave some historical perspective, describing how farming was the last place where the principles of industrialization (specialization, simplification and economies of scale) were applied, and unsuccessfully, as we are now seeing a strain on resources that cannot continue into the future. He described infrastructure as a key to getting farmers out of this broken system. Right now, they are not able to grow other crops because there is no market; elevators in Iowa are only prepared to buy corn and soy. He suggested a new model of localism, revaluing the foodshed around towns and cities, and he encouraged farmers to band together and create cooperative structures and share technology, so that they all benefit from access to new markets. We must move away from a discussion of “black hats and white hats,” he said, referring to passing judgment on farmers who choose GM seed or chemical agriculture. “Conventional farmers’ backs are against the wall,” he said, adding that they, too, are “looking for alternatives to expensive inputs.”

Klinkenborg spoke about extending the conversation to places like Iowa, stating that we should ask ourselves, “not how broad we can make local, but how personal we can make it.” He reminded us that the decrease in social and biological complexity in rural America was not the natural fulfillment of the free market operating, but instead a purposeful chain of events leading to such a consequence. As a result, he said, farmers have fewer and fewer choices about what they can grow. He cited his cousins, who grow GM corn and soy in Iowa, and saw the decision to change seeds as an attempt to increase yields, and thus margins. This comparison paralleled Martens’ dairy example, but issues of pricing with commodity crops are often masked by subsidies.

Martens and her husband, Claas, are great examples of how, beyond the land, farmers can also be stewards of the community. In reaching out to their neighbors, they have shown many of them a way out of the trap of chemical-based agriculture and helped them to transition to organic. “We need to bring back the sense that farmers have some control over [the choices they can make on their land]” she said.

For a taste of the discussion, check out this short video produced by Wicked Delicate co-conspirator and Civil Eats contributor Curt Ellis:

In her new book, “Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness,” journalist and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton takes your hand and leads you down the life path of three unique characters who share one commonality: a passion for stewardship of the land. Hamilton spent two years profiling three families in rural America who are fighting against the groundswell swallowing up farms that are forced to get big, or get out. Her eye for detail of place and people at odds with industrial agriculture is astute and compelling, and she draws the reader into the quiet lives of Americans slowly changing the system. With advanced praise from the incomparable Wendell Berry, this is a must-read book for those who care about the future of farming in America.

In Sulphur Springs, Texas, Hamilton spends times with Harry Lewis, an African-American dairyman who plays David to the Goliath of agribusiness corporations. The loquacious Lewis, who had forsaken his family farm as a young man, is now an unlikely outspoken advocate of organic milk production. Lewis tells Hamilton, “Imagine if people saw where their milk normally comes from. Imagine if people visited a big, concrete dairy. You know what I call that kind of dairy. I call it a penitentiary.” Lewis knows his dairy is different and the difference is pasture. “The word pasture must be practiced,” he says. “And if it’s not practiced, it’s not pasture. And it’s not Godly created.” Lewis, firm in his belief that God and green pasture are one in the same, knows this will put “farming back like it’s supposed to be.”

Hamilton travels from Lewis’s godly pasture to bare dirt and concrete in New Mexico, where dairy has become that state’s top agricultural commodity, but not before reminding us of how we got here. Southern California, once the nation’s top dairy-producing area, “changed the scale of dairy farming by building a system that had no natural limits,” writes Hamilton. “The new ‘Los Angeles-style’ dairies were being built on the very philosophy of capitalization…The dairy industry never looked back.”

Hamilton explains how the spike in production from industrial-scale operations unavoidably changed the dairy economy; plunging milk prices are making business tough for dairy farmers everywhere. Her profile sheds light on how farmers like Lewis, with his commitment to organic farming, as well as support of a cooperative of family farmers, might be able to fix this broken system.

From Texas, Hamilton travels to Abiquiu, New Mexico where we meet Virgil Trujillio, a rancher whose roots there go back 10 generations. His ancestors once owned 40,000 acres, but land changed hands, and it now houses a retreat called Ghost Ranch. In an ironic twist of fate, Trujillo is now “Ranchlands Manager” at Ghost Ranch, but in his heart, he refers to himself as a “stockman,” raising livestock which graze on other people’s land.

“It’s a common story among people in agriculture, that the life they watched their parents and grandparents live is simply unavailable to them,” Hamilton writes, chronicling the odds facing Trujillo and his dream to become a full-time rancher. She deftly describes his efforts which put him at odds with his neighbors, environmentalists (“he has an allergic reaction to the Sierra club”) and his fellow ranchers: “[H]is vision is to trust in the experience of people who have live on and worked with the land for their whole lives, and invest in the creativity that can come from their knowledge.”

“What we have to do is invest in the people on the land, expose them to alternatives, new management ideas—give them tools,” Trujillo tells Hamilton. “The people on the land, they’re the ones who are gonna turn it around.”

Hamilton’s last stop is LaMoure, North Dakota, where she introduces us to David Podoll, who in 1974 set out to prove organic agriculture wrong, but whose own research convinced him to convert his family farm to organic. The Podolls had raised turkeys for four decades, but economies of scale had ended that operation, and they began to grow and save vegetable seeds.

Podoll’s agricultural system is “enduring” rather than “organic” or “sustainable.” “It’s a matter of morality—artfulness and care rather than forceful imposition of will,” Hamilton writes of Podoll. “He believes that this approach to breeding is the basis of an agriculture that will endure past the oil age. This, in fact, is what will feed the world.”

While their neighbors were embracing a sort of “personal Manifest Destiny” to grow big, the Podolls designed their business so it could stay small and they can grow food for themselves in their garden, “the root of the farm.” Podoll says, “Gardening has taught me how to farm.”

“The whole of agriculture has evolved from just gardeners selecting seed that they liked,” Podall tells Hamilton. “It’s only within the last hundred years that farmers have been left out. Every farmer or gardener previous to this time did so just as a matter of survival—they needed it to eat. And it’s not long before we’re going to return to doing things that way.”

Hamilton’s detailed description of the changing American landscape and the people who are championing a new way through their love of the land is deeply enduring itself. For more of the book, read the introduction and see a slideshow.