The Good Earth

It was a dark and stormy night.

Well, actually, it was a dark and stormy afternoon on David Mas Masumoto’s farm in this rural outpost south of Fresno, where the air was thick with rain, wind and hail and the sky looked like something Stephen King might conjure up. It took the hail 10 minutes to wreck 90% of the peach crop, a crop that Masumoto had nurtured and nourished for months. Oh, the perils of the family farmer--perils of which city folk are blissfully unaware.

In his heartfelt but ultimately upbeat new book, “Harvest Son,” Central Valley farmer Masumoto recalls how the hail bombarded the earth that June day in 1995, the icy balls resonating like big Japanese taiko drums.

During winter months, when Masumoto isn’t tending peaches and raisin grapes, he produces a cornucopia of loosely knit essays about farming, filled with similes and pruning tips and tales of his Japanese American roots. His aim is to forge connections between long-suffering family farmers and oblivious urbanites, who tend to think that milk comes from a plastic jug and that apples are naturally coated with wax.

“I want to convey a sense of a world, a family, a profession . . . to a larger audience,” said Masumoto, author of the lyrical 1995 book “Epitaph for a Peach,” which chronicled his successful effort to find a market for a juicy, old-fashioned variety with no shelf life.

“I’m realizing a lot of people don’t know where peaches come from, who grows the food, what kind of family is involved, the rich history of farms and families on the land. All of that comes with a fairly simple story about making raisins or growing a peach.”

Masumoto is one of a trio of California farmers plowing their way into literary circles. His neighbor Victor Davis Hanson, five miles away in Selma, writes eloquently if seethingly about the demise of family farms like his own--when he isn’t teaching about Greek philosophy, art and literature at Cal State Fresno.

And just north of Santa Barbara, in Goleta, Michael Ableman relates his struggle to preserve Fairview Gardens, a 12 1/2-acre oasis of organic fruits and vegetables threatened on all sides by the inexorable march of suburbia.

They continue a tradition of rural chronicling that began with J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, a French settler in pre-revolutionary America, and continues in this century with Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson and Gene Logsdon, who decry what they call the social dislocation and ecological degradation wrought by high-tech, industrial agribusiness.

Crevecoeur’s “Letters From an American Farmer,” written between 1770 and 1781, is regarded as a milestone of early American literature. His dozen essays addressed what it meant to be an American, in particular an agrarian American:

“The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American.”

As did Thomas Jefferson, Crevecoeur maintained that self-reliant, pragmatic yeomen who worked their own small farms formed the backbone of the young egalitarian nation.

Two centuries later, that description still fits Masumoto, Hanson and Ableman. But U.S. family farming is under siege from urbanization, the high costs for equipment and upkeep, and government policies that tend to favor large-scale agribusiness involved in commodity production.

What these three California yeoman-scribes yearn to do is restore luster to small-scale, diversified farming and develop a mutually supportive relationship with local communities. Masumoto and Ableman rely on a strong dose of romanticism. Hanson seeks to shock people into awareness that family farming is essentially a goner and that the nation is worse off because of it.

Thanks to favorable reviews and strong word of mouth, their works--part rural sociology, part memoir, part plea for survival--are building a small but devoted following, even if bookstores can’t quite figure out exactly where to stash them: nature? current events? food? gardening?

These farmers’ hope: What they sow, so shall you read.

David Mas Masumoto, DEL REY, Calif.

Ask Masumoto whether he considers himself first a farmer or first a writer, and he does not hesitate.

“A farmer, absolutely,” he says.

“One of the things that distinguishes what I do from others is that others tend to come visit farms,” Masumoto adds. “They may call themselves farmers, but they don’t live on the land and live with it 24 hours a day.”

Masumoto--who plays in a taiko drum club with his 13-year-old daughter, Nikiko--starts tapping out a rhythm on the oval dining table in his century-old farmhouse. The sound of potentially damaging nighttime rain falling on raisins, he says, is something the farmer hears but does not see.

“Once I hear it, I can never go to sleep again,” he says. “I sit on the porch listening to this rain pound away on the raisins. You only get that if you’re living on the farm.”

There is blue sky overhead on this afternoon when Masumoto welcomes a visitor to his 80-acre organic farm outside Del Rey, 15 miles southeast of Fresno. Yet he describes in vivid detail the 1995 hailstorm that ruined his Sun Crest peaches, ironically on the day his “Epitaph for a Peach” (Harper San Francisco) hit bookstore shelves.

Even then, his friendly face crinkles into a smile and his brown eyes sparkle. He recalls a special feeling of solidarity with his father that day as they coped with the odd weather; the patriarch had never before seen hail in June. In Masumoto’s effervescent view, even devastation can be cause for celebration if it produces a poignant tale to be recorded and passed on.

Hanson, who is often paired with Masumoto on panels and at readings these days, accuses him and his ilk of being “pastoral romantics” and of glossing over the economic woes afflicting family farmers today. Masumoto begs to differ.

“I don’t think it’s a romantic view, but it’s the classic cup half full versus cup half empty,” he says. “If anyone asks, I could rattle off the dark side [of farming] with the best of them, and I could probably one-up almost anyone out there with a tragic story about work and the meaning of it and life in general. But why?”

Through family lore and visits with struggling farmer relatives in Japan, Masumoto, 44, knows of deprivation, suffering and tragedy.

As he recounts in “Harvest Son” (W.W. Norton), his uncle George Masumoto died fighting in Italy during World War II, while the rest of the family was behind barbed wire at the Gila River Relocation Center, an Arizona internment camp. Masumoto’s grandfather died of a stroke on the family’s farm. Likewise, his 76-year-old father suffered a stroke two years ago and has not regained his speech.

More recently, the El Nino season just passed held some “ugly, terrifying moments,” he says, when the bottom dropped out of the peach market and much of the Masumotos’ fruit rotted.

“I had to go pick up fruit from the cold storage because they didn’t want it,” he says, “and I’d been paying to have it in cold storage and they told me to go dump it. I felt like saying: ‘Don’t make me do this. It’s like having to bury your own child.’

“I picked it up on a truck and there I am dumping this fruit out onto the ground, two pallets--about 200 boxes. Just to pick and pack it was probably $7 to $8 a box.”

On the other hand, the relentlessly cheerful Masumoto says, “I got very, very, very, very lucky. I did not have fruit in June [when the price for peaches tanked], so I missed the worst market.” (Luckily, too, his wife, Marcy, subsidizes the farm by working as a health professional.)

Having napped under peach trees and vines as a toddler, Masumoto still relishes the muscle- and joint-taxing labor of pruning and picking. He says he listens to his farm, his shears guided by the ghosts of Japanese farmers who worked the land before him.

He might consider himself first a farmer, but writing is never far from his mind. In summer, as he picks peaches or plucks raisin grapes and places them on brown paper trays to dry, he jots notes about how the sweat soaks through his clothes, leaving dry only the belt loops on his pants. Such details are grist for his winter pastime, when he rises at 4 a.m. to write in his basement office as bone-chilling tule fog engulfs his vines and trees.

Family farming dead? Not here, where Nikiko talks earnestly, if perhaps naively, of wanting to continue in the tradition. “All [family farmers] would agree there are easier ways of making a living,” Masumoto says. “But they still choose to do it. That spirit is just wonderfully alive.”

Victor Davis Hanson; SELMA, Calif.

It makes sense to Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley that farmer-writer-professor Hanson took to classic Greek tragedians like a fish to water. He is “pursued by Furies,” says Smiley, who has written about Hanson’s books for the New Yorker and Civilization magazines.

If Masumoto represents the upbeat “yang” of family farming, then Hanson is the dour “yin.” Little wonder, steeped as he was during childhood in the solemn worldview of his forebears.

“Plato seemed to me, and Sophocles, the same thing I’d heard from my grandfathers,” Hanson says. “The world is a tragic place. The successful are not always rewarded. You’re in a constant state of war or anxiety from nature or [crop] brokers. You have to be constantly aware of your reputation. You don’t want to shame your family. You work and work and then you die and it’s not fair.”

Overcoming his Scandinavian stoicism, Hanson vents his spleen publicly every couple of years. In 1996, it took just six weeks for the bile to spill out, resulting in “Fields Without Dreams” (Free Press). It was a bleak look at what Hanson considers the evils of agribusiness, the dangers of vertical monopolization of farmland, the crookedness of brokers and the corruption of a federal farm policy that pays lip service to saving family farms but funnels money to corporate owners instead. The book brashly suggested abolishing the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which Hanson maintains has more employees than there are true family farmers.

Inspired by Crevecoeur, his latest foray into farming is “The Land Was Everything: Letters From an American Farmer.” The completed draft of 10 “essay-letters” awaits publication late next year. His publishers at Free Press insisted that he first finish a tome about great campaigns against apartheid, led by the likes of Gens. William Tecumseh Sherman and George C. Patton. War, it appears, is an easier sell.

Hanson, whose callused fingers tug at his faded T-shirt as he slouches on a couch in the house where he grew up, still harbors plenty of scorching anger. He is upset that Americans say they want to preserve U.S. family farms but vote with their pocketbooks for Chilean-grown grapes in January from global agribusiness concerns.

In his view, the cup is not half empty--it’s empty. Every farmer, he says, realizes that his land has more value as a McDonald’s parking lot. And the nation, as a result, is losing something even more potent than productive farmland: the virtues, work ethic and wisdom of the countryside, a link to our past.

“Just as our food becomes cheaper, prettier, more abundant and more tasteless, our culture more distraught . . . so too we shall come to rue the disappearance of a cantankerous counter-voice from the agrarian middle,” he writes.

He also notes wistfully that he, his twin brother, Alfred, and his cousins had a falling out after “Fields Without Dreams” was published. The book criticized the very people with whom the family must do business. The residual rifts mean that they are unlikely ever again to farm together as a harmonious team, he says.

“We were very close until then,” Hanson, 45, says quietly. Now, he adds, “[we’re] as close as can be when you realize that . . . the person who’s continuing to farm is not making money and the person who went off the farm is making money.”

Hanson, armed with a PhD from Stanford University, is the one with the off-farm income. The money from teaching and writing provides a cushion against what he says have been years of losses in raisins. It has also bought such luxuries as a swimming pool and new windows for the house built by his great-great-grandmother in the 1870s, where he lives with his wife, Cara, and three children.

Four years ago, in an action fraught with symbolism, Hanson erected a 6-foot-tall, 550-foot-long cinder-block fence around his house. He had tired of picking up the detritus of uninvited guests out for a day or evening in the country: beer bottles, condoms, syringes, marijuana cigarettes, hamburger wrappers, diapers. To quote Smiley: “There is a hint of madness in this wall, but Hanson leaves it unclear whether the madness lies without or within.”

Family farmers are vanishing even as Hanson expects--needs--to remain one. For this fifth-generation grower, there is little choice but to stay on the land. Hanson will soon be borrowing $150,000 to buy 35 acres from family members. He plans to farm on weekends and teach full time during the week, despite the futility of it.

“It’s very stupid for me to go up there five days a week to teach and write to make money to buy land from my brother that’s going to lose money, when I could just sell it and put the money in a T-bill account and go to the lake every week,” he says.

“When my mother died, she said: ‘Don’t sell the ranch.’ Lives can be ruined trying to respect the wishes of the dead.”

He swears that this will be his last book on farming. Enough of serving as an antidote to the “syrupy, romantic, drippy little stories . . . from the eco-utopian natural farm writers.”

Many of Hanson’s neighbors suggest that he lighten up, that the changes he rails against are part of the inevitable progress of man. He acknowledges that most people would rather listen to Masumoto, who plays taiko drums and hands out tiny jars of peach jam to misty-eyed fans at his readings.

Yet Hanson persists, feeling like a Cassandra cursed to tell the truth even when no one believes any longer. “I have enormous admiration for farmers,” he says. “Farming’s a wonderful life, but it’s a brutal life. It does not pay.”

Michael Ableman; GOLETA, Calif.

At the start of Ableman’s book “On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm” are two aerial photos. One shows Fairview Gardens in this bucolic Santa Barbara suburb circa 1954, surrounded by orchards and fields, safely buffered from a small subdivision springing up across a highway.

The second features Fairview Gardens in 1998, all but engulfed by a sea of tract houses with swimming pools, shopping centers, schools, parking lots and a dizzying jumble of roads.

The pictures say quite a lot. But Ableman, who first came to Fairview in 1981 to graft orange trees and stayed on to manage the farm for its affluent owner, felt compelled to put some context to them. And he did with this humorous, instructive tale, illustrated with his photos. “If Henry David Thoreau had been a farmer, he would have written a book very much like [this],” gushed the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“On Good Land,” which on the surface appears to be a story about Fairview Gardens, is actually a story about every small farm and every community and what’s happening all over the country, Ableman says.

“Culturally, we have an obligation as good farmers and as artists and writers to tell a story and to provide a connection with the land,” Ableman says. “We are the conduit.”

The book is approachable and down to earth, surprisingly so given that Ableman is not the humblest of men. At the moment, in fact, he is having an identity crisis because of “having been given several gifts”--as a photographer, writer, farmer, musician, lecturer. At 44, he is struggling because he realizes that he does not have time to do everything well.

One thing he excelled at was the activism needed to save Fairview and the organic bounty of motley crops he grew there: asparagus, nectarines, mandarin oranges, leeks, lettuce, avocados, berries, peppers, cherimoyas, pomegranates, sugar snap peas.

When the owner threatened to sell to developers, Ableman raised $800,000, formed a nonprofit organization and put the land under a conservation easement that protects it in perpetuity.

He had seen the crisis coming and for years had done everything in his power to raise the farm’s profile. He invited schoolchildren to visit to see what farming is all about. He peddled his wares at farmers markets. He attended community meetings. He battled or cajoled neighbors who complained that the dust from his plowing blew into their pools. He toured as a speaker on food and agricultural issues. He opened a farm stand where the community could buy food at its freshest, in season. And he wrote and illustrated with his photos “From the Good Earth” (Harry N. Abrams), a 1993 book celebrating farmers around the world.

In the end, the community lent support.

“I’m not sure if it’s because they’ve come to believe in and understand and accept what we’re doing or if it’s because they’ve decided we’re a formidable foe,” he says. Some neighbors, he adds, “really have come to love who we are. That’s very satisfying.” A few others, he admits, would rather look over the fence at condos than at a compost pile.

To get to Fairview, one must first drive into the parking lot of the town’s public library. At the back is the farm’s driveway, which ascends to a knoll. The fields and orchards drop gradually like a well-worn apron.

Ableman’s favorite spot is the avocado grove, which he learned a while ago was planted in August 1954, the month and year of his birth. He kneels and cups some soil in his hands, inhaling its loamy odor. The moment seems vaguely hokey, but Ableman’s love of the land is sincere.

“We live in a time and a place where there is an onslaught of information about how to improve our relationships with each other, with our families, our husbands, our wives, our children,” he says. “But we no longer have the knowledge about how to have an intimate relationship with the places where we live. This book is about my struggles over 17 years to learn how to have a very intimate relationship with a piece of land.

“If somebody were to ask me am I optimistic about the future [of family farming], I’d say I’m not optimistic,” he adds. “But I’m extremely hopeful.”