The film's poster depicts the forces that have shaped John Peterson's life: a love of farming and an equal devotion to the power of art and free expression.

In the opening frames of the film The Real Dirt on Farmer John, John Peterson’72 does something shocking. The audience always laughs, but always with a squeamish undercurrent. John’s odd action gives a taste—literally—of what audiences are in for at the start of this personal and highly revealing documentary about a Midwestern original.

If you never went to a party at Peterson’s farm eight miles southeast of Beloit, or helped build buildings, raise crops, or make art at the farm, you may not know that it has been a controversial fixture of the Beloit scene since the late 1960s.

What is now a large and successful organic vegetable farm was once a conventional dairy farm. The story of the farm’s transformation—and the personal saga of loss and redemption that John underwent—are the backbone of Real Dirt.

But John’s action at the start of the film is not just for laughs. By showing him sampling the soil in the way that he does, it also establishes John’s intimate, sensual connection to his home ground. It is land, he tells us, that his family has farmed for generations.

And it is land that he almost lost during the farm crisis of the late 1970s and early ’80s.

Real Dirt is set for national distribution in theatres this winter, and a shorter version will air on the PBS Independent Lens series in May 2006. Last spring, John and producer-director Taggart Siegel’81 started taking Real Dirt to film festivals, where they have grown accustomed to standing ovations. They have also harvested top documentary honors at the popular Slamdance Festival in Utah and at festivals in San Francisco, Chicago, Nashville, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. At press time, the film had just been selected for competition by the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam, its most important recognition to date.

This film is no run-of-the-furrow bio-pic. It’s a documentary whose subject wrote the script and voiced the narration. It’s a film about a man who, incredibly, has been in front of a movie camera since age 1. It’s an outgrowth of a collaboration between two close friends who struggled for almost a decade over the infinite series of decisions necessary to make 83 minutes of film come alive on screen.

Photo by: Collective Eye, Inc.

John Peterson at Angelic Organics, his organic vegetable farm. Peterson's first book, The Real Dirt on Vegetables, will be published in 2006. A book of short stories about farming and an autobiography are forthcoming.

After John’s unappetizing opening gambit, he tells us that he’s lived his whole life on his home ground in northern Illinois. He did move once, but it wasn’t exactly to terra nova, but rather to an old stone schoolhouse that his father once attended, and where his mother once taught. The schoolhouse is a quarter-mile from the farmhouse.

When John and I entered Beloit College, John stood out, and not so much for his brawny suntan or his outgoing personality, but for his lightning trips home to milk the cows. While the rest of us were making typical college-student choices—history or sociology? Kant or Jung?—John was already making adult choices. With his father dying, he was responsible for 50 dairy cows and 200-plus acres of crops.

Beloit College must have seemed a long way from home. As he told me when I caught him in his new (and temporary) role of cinematic pitchman, he said he recalls thinking, “Wow, look at all these guys with long hair. They hadn’t been farming all summer. What were they doing if they weren’t farming?”

Photo by: Collective Eye, Inc.

From Real Dirt, I learned that he “once thought the whole world was a farm.” Characteristically, when he was curious about his new classmates, he just asked them questions. “They had these really unusual lives. They’d been off camping, sailing, overseas. It was the weirdest thing, to be in all these conversations about what happened in the summer, and it had nothing to do with farming.”

Think about that, and you get some insight into John’s considerable charisma. Many young guys who’d spent the summer broiling on a tractor seat and steaming in a dusty haymow would have felt jealous or even defensive in conversations with city-slicking classmates who had the time and money to cavort in France, say, or Glacier National Park. Not John. “I was open to it,” he says.

I was definitely one classmate who hadn’t wrestled with hay bales in the summer of 1967. I’d spent the “Summer of Love” hitchhiking from the New York suburbs to Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. But I’d already developed a Midwestern infatuation during a bicycle journey a couple of years before, and if John was interested in people who hadn’t baled hay, I was equally interested in people who had. So, one March day in the basement of North Dorm, when John told me he was a farmer, I brashly invited myself out for a visit, and John put me to work chopping cornstalks. Amid the howl of the tractor engine and the whine of its gears, as I shredded endless rows of corn and watched the “trash” take flight behind me, I was in heaven. I wrote a poem about “choppingstalks, chastingklops” for Brian Dibble’s English class, and later used my farming experience to satisfy Beloit’s great—and lamentably extinct—field semester.

John was interested in people who hadn't baled hay. I was interested in people who had.

That was how things were at John’s: He gave you room to grow. Even if your mechanical experience was limited to fixing bikes, he might give you a chance to drive his prized tractor. If you raised only weeds, so to speak, John would give you his trademark half-smile and salve your feelings with his all-purpose farm wisdom (“They’ll do that”). But if your project thrived, you’d gain authority, skills, self-confidence. You might, for example, find yourself welding a cracked plow beam in a funky garage at three in the morning, trying to get a field worked up before the next rain.

This kind of experience would make you part of something larger and older than yourself, and that would give you purpose. It would help you grow up.

The Real Dirt shows glimpses of many other Beloit College students who caught this same fascination. The artists, farmers, hippies, seekers, and future monks who hung out at the farm included Lisa Stone’77, Bill Quarton’71, and Shannon Province’87.

For years after I left the farm in 1973, John stayed afloat by stacking one loan atop another. In collaboration with Isa Jacoby’78, he also tried a more creative but equally doomed scheme to market “Pig Newton” cookies. Then a haughty Nabisco lawyer stepped in to defend the company’s Fig Newton trademark.

By the end of the ’70s, Siegel was dragging a camera out to film a farmer he considered unusually artistic and wound up filming the farm-equipment auction John held to repay some debts. The auction was emblematic of failure, and it became the backdrop for Siegel’s 1982 mini-documentary Bitter Harvest—excerpts of Bitter Harvest appear in Real Dirt. On what a Variety reviewer called “wintry” black-and-white film, a grim-faced John parks the tractor I had used to chop stalks. With a clang, he closes the lids on his corn planter, and then we realize he’s lining up the equipment for auction. As neighboring farmers pick over his machines like a squad of vultures, John talks about failure, about the spiritual death-knell of selling most of the 200-odd acres he’d acquired from his parents. Family land, maybe, but home ground no more.

Bitter Harvest was powerful stuff for a college-student project, but even before Taggart Siegel reached Beloit, he had studied film and literature at the New School for Social Research in New York. Determined to pursue his passion for film, even at Beloit, which had no department of film, he asked Art Robson, who continues to teach classics at Beloit, to supervise him in an independent major in film. Siegel says Robson “got very inspired, he started teaching, and that kept me there because I had the structure I needed to pick up a camera.”

Robson says few students chose independent majors because they took a lot of work, but that Siegel skillfully crafted the education he wanted from the resources at hand: “He chose good teachers, good courses, and bent the courses to his will. He said, ‘I know you want me to write about a dating couple in Manhattan. Could I do a film script about a farmer in Illinois?’ Every time, people thought, this kid really seems to know what he’s doing, and he did.”

As Siegel filmed an angst-stricken farmer-without-a-farm, his clips show a goulash of pathos, goofiness, and wisdom. John admits his “marriage” to the farm starves his relationships with women, and Shannon Fountain Gordon’97 gripes on screen that Friday night dates seem to wind up at the lumber yard. In Mexican villages and back in Illinois, we watch John lick his wounds and search for his calling. We see CNN’s coverage of a 1987 farm-loss play that John wrote and performed across Illinois during the apex of the farm crisis; the autobiographical psychodrama was intended to heal the psychic wounds of fellow failed-farmers. The play made grown farmers cry.

Then we see Anna Peterson, John’s mom. She’s got a farm stand on the roadside. She wonders if John would grow some veggies for her to sell.

It seems a lowly start for a thriving organic farm, but then in the Midwest, farming was traditionally a family business. John’s organic effort was rocky at first—as the crops suffocated under the weeds and insects that he had once slaughtered with agrichemicals. Eventually, through a combination of brains and intense work, John figured out organic agriculture and created a thriving new kind of farm on the same acres where he’d gone bust so many years before.

That new farm, called Angelic Organics, has mushroomed into a 100-acre community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm. CSAs apportion their production among shareholders, who buy their shares in advance, and no CSA has as many shareholders as Angelic, which, in summer and fall, ships 1,200 boxes of veggies each week to the Chicago area.

Photo by: Collective Eye, Inc.

Filmmaker Taggart Siegel at work on the film with producer Teri Lang.

Angelic Organics wasn’t that big in 1996, but by then, Siegel had been shooting farm film for more than 15 years, and he and John decided it was time to finish the movie. As the two friends gazed at lush rows of healthy vegetables, they realized they had been smart enough and lucky enough to have filmed a classic drama. “The basic story was the rise of the American family farm, its collapse, and resurrection,” Siegel says. It’s a redemption saga of a farmer who went broke, suffered in the wilderness, and returned triumphant with an utterly different form of farming.

The drama makes the film work, says former mentor Robson. “I liked the dramatic art they put into this thing, without too much falsification. I hate documentaries; this is a nominal documentary, but it has the force, power, and structure of dramatic art, of a really strong feature. In dramatic terms, it is very well wrought.”

If the audiences and jurors at a succession of film festivals have found meaning in Real Dirt, Siegel concedes he may never make another movie like it. “This is the quintessential film for me. It combines a lot of my own history with a history of family farming and my friend John Peterson’s life.”

Siegel also plowed some prior films into the mix. We see clips of Affliction, a film based on Tess of the d’Urbervilles that he shot at John’s farm. We see a scene showing John, as a debt-crazed farmer, burying a loan shark under a Niagara of corn. We don’t see Siegel’s other documentaries, which include Blue Collar and Buddha, a story of Laotian refugees who were pipe-bombed in Rockford, Ill.

During 25 years of production, Siegel says he learned something. “If you are too close to your subject matter, which I was, you are taught to think about objectivity, subjectivity—what’s the core, what’s the story really about.”

Director Taggart Siegel'81 drew from a rich archive of old photos and family movies of the Peterson farm, Farmer John (above), and his family that he combined with film he captured over nearly 25 years.

One thing that Real Dirt is about is the transformation of Midwestern rural culture. Anna Peterson’s footage from the 1950s shows a bucolic, self-reliant farm community, where neighbors and relatives help each other as a matter of course. Just 50 years later, most of those farms have been swallowed by larger agribusinesses.

Real Dirt is a movie that must live or die on the personality of its protagonist, and although John might have grown up in a conformist world of family farms, he seems blessedly free of concern about what people think of him.

But who thought John could write such a decent script? If you’ve read John’s essays from his years in the wilderness, as farmer-without-a-farm, you’ll hear parts emerge from the script. So John’s evocative writing is one of many talents: When we met, he already knew cows, crops, and machinery. He’s since learned to orchestrate outrageous events, manage crews of rank individualists, and operate a farm so complex that he’s actually grown crops he couldn’t yet identify.

Most enviable of all John’s many talents is that knack for striking up long conversations with perfect strangers. Real Dirt shows one fruit of that: John’s long friendship with Don José Canuto Muñoz Espinoza, a street vendor in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, John’s winter home. Before Don José died this year, he got to see the completed movie, sitting at John’s side in a packed, ancient theatre in San Miguel.

Those winter retreats make farming look pretty glamorous. And who wouldn’t want to till the fields, as John does in the film, followed by a naked lady who’s smeared in clay and gyrating in some weirdo oriental dance?

But behind it all, of course, is this small matter of hard work. Eighty hours a week was standard, both when John and I farmed together, and while Angelic Organics was getting organized. But John doesn’t work any harder than his mother, Anna, once did. In Real Dirt, she first appears as a young mother; film from her movie camera shows her trim, happy, and constantly on the go, much as I remember from 1969. When I lived on the farm, she woke John and me before dawn—an hour I thought better suited to falling asleep—and fed us breakfast while excitedly inquiring about the harvest.

Real Dirt catches Anna looking through old photos and reminiscing about her life, and of course, the farm she cherished. She shows off her roadside vegetable stand, the humble enterprise that played such a key role in John’s rebirth as an organic vegetable farmer. Toward the end, after she and John do something rarely seen on film, John explains quietly that there wouldn’t be a farm without her.

Anna died in 1996.

Photo by: Slava Doval

Lesley Freeman Littlefield'01 performs in her music video, which is featured in the film.

The foil to Anna’s gravitas and history comes from Lesley Freeman Littlefield’01. John’s former girlfriend and ongoing partner-in-agro-art provides levitas and a view of tomorrow. “I came in during the end of filming and got to help with sound,” Littlefield says. “I helped with story ideas, editing, script-writing, and was there for every bit of narration.” Not bad for a college graduate with a degree in Russian. Do you hear an echo of the same “give them a chance, see what they can do” attitude I got from John in the ’60s?

Littlefield shows again how life-changing it is to be trusted for your talents, not your credentials. “It made me interested in film, helped get me excited to make the music video,” and indeed, we see parts of “Bug Song,” a zany, yet oddly touching video of Littlefield and John, dressed as bumblebees, in a performance that is less “Dance of the Bumblebees” and more, “Attack of the Killer Agro-Industrial Machine.”

The Beloit College connections persist: Peterson family friend Rosemary Palmer’64 appears in the film to talk about the death of John’s father and its impact on him as a young man. And now that Real Dirt is complete, Lev Anderson’98 is doing promotion work for Collective Eye, Inc., the non-profit media organization that Siegel leads and that produced the movie.

In the ’60s and ’70s, when we played at the farm, we used tractors, hayrides, a homemade strobe light, and massive bonfires. Crude speakers boomed out the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and the Doors (a Peterson favorite). As the Grateful Dead once sang, in lyrics that crystallize this saga of the life, death, and rebirth of a Midwestern family farm: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Strange, but also inspiring. Although the movie has made John a somewhat unlikely hero of organic farming (I still remember him telling me his father sneered at salad as “silage”), the real power of Real Dirt goes way beyond farming. It’s a timeless tale of resurrection based on passion, persistence, and hard work.

Recently, I asked John what made him the proudest about the film, and he answered in less time than he takes to turn a tractor around at the end of a row. “A lot of people have said it gives them the strength to pursue their dreams. It gives them the courage, and space to go on with what they believe in, to revive what they believed in.”

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David Tenenbaum’71 is staff writer at The Why Files (whyfiles.org), a science magazine published by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A former employee of—and partner with—John Peterson, he appears in the film, The Real Dirt on Farmer John and can be found on the Web at http://www.nasw.org/users/davidt. More on Angelic Organics is at http://angelicorganics.com; more on The Real Dirt on Farmer John is at http://www.therealdirt.net. Music and videos by Lesley Freeman Littlefield are online at LesleyLittlefield.com

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Photo by: Dan Lassiter

The first indication that the Real Dirt film screenings on campus would be wildly popular came when the movie posters kept disappearing. Then a rush of students filed into Wilson Theatre, alongside alumni, faculty, staff, and local people, to see two showings of the documentary during 2005 Homecoming, just prior to the film’s theatrical release.

Audiences, who heartily applauded at the end of both showings, were also treated to a question-and-answer session with screenwriter, narrator, and subject of the film John Peterson’72 (left), director Taggart Siegel’81, and editor and composer Lesley Freeman Littlefield’01. The discussions were moderated by Professor of Classics Art Robson, and later included Rosemary Palmer’64 and David Tenenbaum’71, who both make appearances in the film. Lev Anderson’98, who is helping to promote The Real Dirt, was also on hand at Beloit for the screenings.

Many a Beloit student has felt the magnetic pull of Peterson’s farm since the late 1960s, when it was a conventional farm peopled by a lively arts community, to its current incarnation as Angelic Organics, a successful organic vegetable farm, which Peterson started in 1990.

— S.K.

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RELATED LINKS:

Angelic Organics home page

Collective Eye, Inc. home page

The Music and Videos of Lesley Littlefield home page


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Susan Kasten - Editor, Beloit College Magazine