the Barefoot Farmer

My father was born in 1906 on a Dutch settlement in Kansas. He left the farm, earned a PhD, and became a mathematics professor teaching teachers at Peabody College in Nashville. A lucrative offer enticed him to the leading Math University at the time, North Western in Chicago, which is why I am from Illinois. His last five years of public work were spent as a psychologist, and then he chucked it all, bought a farm and developed a homestead.

Mom's parents were from Lithuania and also didn't speak English, making my brother Mark and I first generation crosses of two very different nationalities. Both mom and dad had previous families, so we have five half- brothers and sisters about 10 to 20 years older. Mark and I grew up on 40 acres of gardens, pastures, orchards and the rows of nursery stock dad grew for his landscaping business.

Focusing his intellectual abilities on horticulture instead of numbers, Dad made beautiful plantings around the farm and in the growing suburbs around Chicago. Mom canned all our food and took care of the steady stream of friends, family and neighbors who came by the farm. Eventually we were the only farm around as the suburbs engulfed the area. We went to a very good Catholic grade school. Although my folks were not religious, they had high moral standards and respected education, and this school was the best around. I loved school until junior high, which is when our farm got subdivided and we moved across the state line to a 300-acre farm in Indiana.

Dad retired and spent full time in his organic gardens and landscaping our new home. He leased the fields to neighbors who used all the modern techniques for raising corn and soybeans. We witnessed the decline in soil health, wildlife and even forest health from the overdose of chemicals during the early 1970's. He worked with the Farmers Union to try and bring in an alfalfa mill so the farmers could raise a legume hay crop. John and Sue, my half-brother and his girlfriend, came back from San Francisco in 1969 to start a commune on our farm. They built a cabin and hosted a bunch of hippies out in our woods. I'd been playing guitar and listening to the Beatles for a few years, and was in trouble at school for hair touching my ears. By 1972 they bought a 100 acres in Red Boiling Springs and headed for the hills. I soon brought down the girl I'd been going with during school, and we lived together on that farm for the next 25 years.

We had no electricity and cooked every meal on a wood stove. I learned to work a horse, milk a cow and grow a garden. We set up some solar panels for lighting and I grafted fruit trees to sell. The organic vegetables we grew became hot items in Nashville, and we started making our living selling them.

Dad thought my education on this farm was better than what college would have given me. I studied old farming textbooks and all I could find about organic agriculture. I helped form the Tennessee Alternation Growers Association in 1982 to organize conferences on organics. In 1986 I found my Dad's copy of Agriculture by Rudolf Steiner and started making and using biodynamic preparations. We tried to grow everything we could and lived from our gardens.

In 1993 I started writing a weekly newspaper column called Small Farm Journal, and haven't missed a week since then. My editor renamed it Barefoot Farmer. A few years later in Nashville Public Television started coming out and shooting segments for Volunteer Gardener. It's ironic as I wasn't into TV as a kid and haven't ever owned one.

Mary is my sweetheart now and she delivers the produce we raise. With her eight children and five grandchildren, life never gets dull. Our hired hand, Phil, has three kids, and we enjoy developing our organic family farm. I believe organic and biodynamic agriculture offer solutions to many pressing environmental, social and economic problems facing the world today.