Vol. 2, Number 1	Spring 1999 issue

 

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Finally! The family farmer that city folk can understand. In On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm, farmer Michael Ableman gives us a look at life past, present, and future on Fairview Gardens, his twelve-and-one-quarter-acre organic farm surrounded by the subdivisions of urban Goleta, California, near Santa Barbara. The first-person account of one small farm's flourishing, and the persuasive case for saving other family farms, has been brought to us by a hip yet down home, farmer-cum-photographer who knows how to reach everyone from at-risk youths to upper middle class Sierra Club sympathizers and their pager-toting children. Ableman's storytelling is like organic produce: wholesome if a bit imperfect, honest if not always graceful, but good for everyone deep down.

The "autobiography" begins with the comic mishaps one might expect when a young, overambitious East Coast orchardist gets hired to graft some trees on a California organic farm, and then decides to take over the entire farm upon the manager's retirement. In his first few weeks, Ableman uncovers-and mows down-a marijuana patch hidden in the fields, then accidentally breaks all the underground pipes with his old machinery. He is soon carried away by the charms of peaches, replacing the farm's old vegetables with rows of peach trees, only to discover that the variety he chose is not red and yellow, but green, when ripe. Faced with truckloads of unwanted peaches, Ableman contracts a specialty jam company to turn his fruit into peach butter. But there's a catch: he has to puree the peaches himself before the company will cook them up. The entire crop is blended in the farmhouse garbage disposal, and the resulting peach butter is sold across the country.

Ableman learns from his experiences, and decides Fairview's mission is to make agriculture a cooperative venture between nature, farmer, and consumer. He tries selling his produce locally, but it's not an easy task. As the farmland surrounding Fairview gives way to suburban Santa Barbara homes, the farm becomes increasingly isolated. The new residents provide a potential market for Ableman's produce, but most of them are more interested in making Ableman get rid of his compost pile, machinery, and rooster than in eating healthy food. Fairview earns their respect and is permitted to thrive in the midst of urban life only after a long, embattled process of legal cases and comunity rallies. Ableman's goal of the farm as a community and educational resource comes true with the development of farm festivals, a student garden in the local junior high, and overnight "on the farm" programs for schools and disadvantaged children's groups. Eventually, Fairview secures the unprecedented legal right to remain a working organic farm forever.

While the story of Fairview Gardens is the high light of On Good Land, Ableman also offers insight into his environmental ethic. We hear his feelings on vegetarianism and some surprising ethical compromises of organic farming. And we learn not just the incredible story of one farm's survival, but also quite a lot about how an organic farm works. The text is packaged in a slick 144-page book with big, double-spaced type, leaving some question as to where it belongs--on the reference shelf or the coffee table? Eleven cream-colored pages interspersed throughout the book offer flat, pseudo-zen advice on "How to Pick a Peach" and other topics. Some of these pages come off as Martha Stewartesque, while others offer hardcore information more suited to people starting their own farms than to those I suspect form most of the book's readers.

The one exception to this superficial quality is the heartfelt description of the value of teaching kids about food and farming, written by Ableman's son Aaron. Mostly, I sensed that there wasn't quite enough material to fill a book, and these pages were added to bulk up the text. More worthwhile are the valuable resource pages at the end, which list organizations and publications related to land conservation, community action, and education about food, gardening, and agriculture.

Photographs and sleek graphic design make the book lean toward sexy, glitzy farming-but Ableman has a more educational purpose. The story of Fairview Gardens could easily be a pamphlet, a long magazine article, or even a chapter in a larger volume. However, Ableman is not only a farmer and author. He is also a photographer and public speaker, and he knows something about publicity. A fancy hardcover book may indeed be the most effective way today to raise awareness of the crisis in small farming, the importance of environmental education, and the deliciousness of organic produce.