The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2006)

A film about the life of John Peterson of Illinois, written and narrated by John Peterson

The Real Dirt on Farmer John is an astounding film that documents the curious and interesting life of a unique man. It is by turns funny, warm, optimistic, and heartbreaking.

I must first note that I’m a city boy through and through. But this movie gave me a much clearer and deeper understanding and sympathy for those whose living lies on the land.

The film is a documentary, which fills in with sights and sounds the thoughts and experiences of a man who grew up on a farm that his father worked, and his father before him. Peterson makes clear in his commentary his deep and abiding love for everything on the farm; the smell and taste of the soil, the roar of a tractor engine, and the feel of pulling steel through the earth in order to make crops burst forth from it.

There are family home movies skillfully woven into the film. They give us a closer feeling for John’s family and their life together working the land. Basically, it appears that farming is a lot of hard work, punctuated by some joys but weighed down by lots of challenges and problems and worries.

John’s family goes through them all. He loses his father early, and suddenly finds himself with the responsibility of running the farm while he goes to school.

We also witness a playful, curious part of John’s personality. We see him throw himself into the 1960s with some wild and experimental friends who come back to his farm in order to “get close to the land.” They dance; they paint; they make movies. (Meanwhile, John is working 80 hours a week to keep the crops planted, tended, and harvested.)

Then John runs head-on into the 1980s farm crisis, wherein the expenses kept on rising, and the farmers kept on borrowing money from their banks to stay in business, until finally the banks pulled the plug and started foreclosing on insolvent farms. John loses 95% of his land, and all of his farm equipment, to debt. For a proud man who loves farming and takes pride in carrying on with the farm that his grandfather bought in the depression, and that his father carried on, it’s almost more than John can bear to think that he brought it all to a sad end.

Interestingly, though, even though he lost almost all of his farm, you see in the film that John keeps on returning again and again to the land to farm. It’s in his blood, and nothing’s going to pull him away from it permanently.

John takes up organic farming. He finds it’s an awful lot of work, requiring a lot of people to keep it going. Not for the first time, he finds himself wondering if he should quit. He stays on in part because of his wonderful mother. We see a woman approaching old age. She doesn’t regret anything she did, and she loves keeping busy. She runs the farm stand that sells all the organic produce John is growing. She says to John, “If you quit farming, what will I do if I don’t have the farm stand to run?” She’s a key central part of this movie; we see her as a young wife all the way through the rest of her life. John dedicates the movie to her.

John gets in on the leading edge of something called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), in which families who want fresh produce from a farm make a deal with the farmer to buy shares in his crops, which are then distributed to the families throughout the growing season. It’s a way of more closely connecting the people who grow the food with the people who eat it.

Altogether, this is an amazing, moving, and fascinating look into the farming life. Who should see it? Farmers will see parts of themselves in this (though they may not feel totally comfortable with some of the wild and unique parts of John’s personality). People who grew up on farms should see it to be reminded of their roots. Non-farmers should see it in order to have a rare opportunity to understand some of the passion and dedication that farmers bestow upon their beloved land.