Food...

Recently, Wayne State University Press published “Trespassing: Dirt Stories and Field Notes” by Janet Kaufman, a professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. It’s a combination of short stories and essays inspired by Kaufman’s experience living on an 80 acre farm in Hudson, MI (near Ann Arbor) that’s three miles away from a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation).  

I was intrigued to see how Kaufman incorporated the southeast Michigan food system into fiction, and to learn more about the region’s farm country, so I hurried out to buy the book. The stories—a woman who loses it when the 24/7 neon pink and orange glow from a nearby CAFO overtakes her home, a child’s relationship with a drain near her house during an EPA clean up, and more—give a glimpse into what it’s like to live near one of the CAFOs that have moved into much of the Midwest, taking over what used to be viable farmland.

But, I enjoyed the essay section much more than the fiction. In her essays, Kaufman discusses the myth of the farm and, though today’s farms look little like the “farm” that we learn about in kindergarten (red barn, silo, windmill), the myth still permeates public thinking and policy. Rather than those Old MacDonald farms, today’s farms, Kaufman writes, are “long, low steel [buildings], some of them a quarter-mile long” with manmade ponds filled with “gallons of untreated animal waste” in the back. Instead of idyllic country communities, what used to be farm towns are now polluted and desolate around the CAFOs (who would want to live next door to a huge cesspool filled with waste from thousands of cows, after all).

She explains how Michigan’s first farmers turned the swampland into viable ground by running underground drains that collected groundwater and moved it into streams and how these drains are now helping agricultural pollutants and wastes run into streams that are now too polluted for kids to wade in.

Kaufman ends the book by writing about the “skinhead agriculture” that has changed the landscape. For nine months out of the year, fields lie unnaturally bare across the Corn Belt. Instead of rotating crops to maintain soil quality, “even in midsummer, with row crops growing, between the rows and rows of corn lie rows and rows of bare earth.” And those barren fields are not without consequence: “From these bare fields each year flow and blow more than a billion tons of sediment and the pollutants bound to it, a degradation of America’s soils, air, and water.”

For southeast Michigan, a region hard hit by the current economic downturn and rising food prices, this book couldn’t have come at a better time. For southeast Michigan readers, it begs questions about where we put our resources and what effect it has on our economy and quality of life. For non-Michigan readers, unfortunately, Kaufman’s experiences living near a CAFO and on land that’s changed for the worse in the decades since she moved there, as well as the way farms have changed will ring true and raise questions that we should all be asking ourselves: what should a farm look like? And, when will we stop buying into the myth, challenge industrial agriculture and stop leaving land fallow when people are hungry and kids are splashing through polluted streams? After all, one of the takeaways from Kaufman’s book: it doesn’t have to be this way, and until recently, it wasn’t.

Image credit: Wayne State University Press.