“My ancestors have farmed this land generation after generation; and I just about ended the whole thing.” So begins the documentary film “The Real Dirt on Farmer John,” part of the ongoing PBS series Independent Lens. The title character John Peterson, known to many simply as Farmer John, was raised on a farm in the Midwest before being ostracized by his community for his unconventional lifestyle.
Real Dirt traces the cycle of his farm’s life from 360-acre family operation to a counterculture hangout that dwindled to 22 acres and then grew again as a community-supported farm. In the end, Peterson is able to declare: “What once was a single-family farm is now a farm for over 1,200 families.”
In the opening shots, Peterson looks like any other overall-clad Midwestern farmer, but a few frames later the director focuses on Farmer John’s more unusual side with clips of the man decked out in feather boas, leopard print suits and Seussian hats.
If you keep watching until the wacky costumes have been put back into the closet, what you will discover is, if not a good documentary, then at least a decent performance. But this may also be the film’s biggest problem. For a documentary, it feels a bit stilted. It seems that Peterson, also a playwright and actor, could not resist scripting his scenes.
The few scenes and bits of dialogue that were not scripted are notably the most compelling: old family movies that are effective as a sort of collective memory for early 21st-century Americans, conjuring up images of a lost agrarian past.
Most resonant, though, are the interviews with neighbors and friends who are only peripheral to the central story. It is in these moments that the film becomes larger than one man and his struggles.
In spite of its shortcomings, the film does manage to expose a wider audience to progressive ideas such as community-supported agriculture and biodynamics. Unfortunately, it also perpetuates the stereotypes of the organic, small-farm movement as the realm of hippies and New Agers, easily dismissed by anyone serious. But when all is said and done, The Real Dirt is a decent film about a no doubt decent man.
This article orginally appeared in the September/ October 2006 edition of World Ark, the magazine of Heifer International. Reviewed By Jaman Matthews, Heifer Staff Writer Used by permission.