John Peterson has been known to drive his tractor wearing a close-fitting, sleeveless yellow-and-orange bodysuit with an orange boa around his neck. Filmmaker Taggart Siegel, an old friend of Peterson, thought that would make for some good footage, and early on in his engrossing documentary The Real Dirt on Farmer John the camera moves from the tractor’s big wheels and dual headlights to Peterson’s getup–a sequence that’s worth the price of admission. It captures the tension between glitter and grease that propels the film through Peterson’s life–from rural idyll to rural nightmare and back again–in a short 83 minutes.
They didn’t just work on the farm, which Peterson bought from his mother in 1975. When locals signed a petition to tear down the century-old schoolhouse across the road from the farm–where his father had gone to school and his mother later taught–Peterson bought the place, and his friends spent seven years helping him restore it and make it his home, using materials they salvaged from dozens of buildings that were being demolished as the area’s economy cratered.
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A couple years later a local TV station broadcast clips from a movie Peterson and a would-be financial partner had made on the farm, in which Peterson played a crazed farmer who traps a loan shark in a grain silo and smothers him in corn. He tells me the role was personal–he’d owed money to a real-life loan shark at one point. But, he says, “Film acting isn’t cathartic. It’s all bits and pieces, not like stage acting.”
In the early 90s two Chicagoans, Bob and Cynthia Scheffler, found the farm’s name on an organic onion at a grocery store. They’d been looking for a better source of organic food and called him up to ask if he’d be interested in making his farm part of the community-supported agriculture movement, which brings together people who want to eat food that’s free of harmful chemicals and people who want to grow it. At that time CSA was a little-known fringe notion, practiced on barely 200 farms nationwide, most of them in the northeast. Now there are said to be more than 1,000.
Though the film suggests that Peterson’s persecutors were just isolated bad apples, it hints at a darker view. The “beautiful customs of the past” in rural counties do include the old-time generosity of neighbors swapping work during threshing season. They also include a willingness to expel intruders and oddballs. The truth is, a close-knit community can be a terrible thing.
He’s also trying to pull together books out of the 1,500 pages of manuscript he’s written over the years–stories, autobiography, sketches. Soon to appear is a CSA cookbook that emphasizes how vegetables are grown on the farm. He says it’s as much work as anything he’s ever done for Angelic Organics, and he’s as constrained by deadlines for book copy and personal appearances as he was by the ripening of his cabbage patch.
