My Family's History of Farming

Me and my grandpa in Kentucky

My grandfather grew up on a family farm in rural Kentucky where his parents and siblings produced what they needed for their subsistence. They grew corn, peanuts, tobacco, sugar cane, beans, grapes, apples, peaches, strawberries, and a huge variety of vegetables in the garden. They canned and dried food for the winter, made their own clothing, and even made their own soap from animal fat. I've been reading my great-grandmother's memoire, and I'm amazed by how many things they knew how to do.

Pages from my great-grandmother's memoire

In her memoire, my great-grandmother talks about "Our way of life." She says,

"We raised or made what we used or needed. My daddy hauled wheat to mill for our flour. We did buy lamp oil, salt, and sugar by the barrel. We canned or dried beans, canned tomatoes, black berries, and made jam and preservatives by the half gallon.... We even made our own soap. We cut skins off our bacon and other meat scraps, put them in an old lard can until we got enough to make a kettle of soap... we treasured our meat scraps as we had to make enough for all our laundry and sometimes our toilets and shampoo soap."

I've become more curious about my grandparents' lives and upbringings. This Christmas while I'm visiting home, we went to see my great aunt (my grandfather's sister). Since my grandparents passed away, now she is the person we are closest to from my dad's side of the family. Recently my dad helped my aunt write her own memoire of stories and life experiences. She seems to have an infinite supply of stories. Today she told us that she and my grandpa would find rabbit tobacco growing wild on the farm, and when they were teenagers they would crush it and roll their cigarettes. She smiled and said, "Momma and daddy never found out"

Out to eat with in Kentucky with my great aunt Eloise and my brother

My great aunt has many fond memories of the farm but when she was an adolescent, she was ready to leave the farm and move to town. She is a lively, social person and was excited to be around more people and make her own money. Living on the farm was hard work and little pay. My grandfather eventually became a dentist and moved to town too. However, he also had a farm and after his days in the office, he would grow corn, tobacco, okra, tomatoes, strawberries, etc. My grandfather said that if he could've earned enough money from farming, he would've just farmed.

I don't want to romanticize their life as farmers. I know that my grandparents also experienced a lot of hardship and poverty growing up as subsistence farmers. I'm grateful for the life I've been able to live, but I also wish that so much hadn't been lost. In just two generations we became so disconnected from knowing anything about agriculture and our natural environment. My dad says that my great-grandmother was like a self-learned botanist. She knew so much about plants, trees and gardening. Meanwhile, my brothers and I don't have any of the knowledge or skills my grandparents and great-grandparents did. We grew up in a time of abundance and never knew what it was like to experience scarcity. I didn't learn to grow or make my own things.

It's difficult to overstate how different our upbringings were and how much the world changed from their generation to mine. I was encouraged to focus on my education, which I appreciate. We had leisure time and joined lots of extracurricular school activities. I know my grandparents were happy that we had more opportunities and were able to get good educations, but I think we missed out on learning more from them.

My grandfather holding my dad when he was a baby

This change in generations reflects changes in the world-- globalization, changes in modes of production, the expansion of global markets, etc. While my grandparents ate mostly what was in season or what they canned and preserved, we had access to almost whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. However, the current global food system that allows us to eat ultra-processed and out of season foods shipped from across the world is based on fossil fuels, and these fossil fuels are contributing significantly to climate change, biodiversity loss, health and environmental problems, etc.

I'm not a proponent of turning back time and returning to everyone being small farmers again, but I do think it's important to learn and recover some of these subsistence practices. Not only because they are good for the environment, but because they are good for us as human beings. As my great-grandmother planted her garden, seeded cotton, and canned blackberries with her in-laws and husband, I'm sure they bonded by teaching, learning, talking, and just doing the same activity side by side.

Now we have less knowledge of how to do things and less practices shared from one generation to the next. I think that too much consumption of media changes us as we engage less with our environment, our senses, and each other. Connecting by watching a movie or tv show together just isn't the same as doing and learning things together in our environment. I don't think that leisure and media are always bad, but we do need a different kind of connection (to the places we live and the people around us) at times. Many of us long for more meaning and maybe this is what we are missing.

Lots of corn and soy bean fields in Russellville, Kentucky, December 2024

While some of my cousins stayed in rural Kentucky, no one is a farmer today. Generational small-scale farming is very rare in the U.S. now. U.S. agricultural and trade policies have changed rural ways of life not just in the U.S. but around the world.

I don't think it's a question of returning to a "better" time in the past. Romanticizing the past overlooks problems that people have fought to change like racism, colonialism, gender inequality and poverty. Instead of moving backward, it's about constructing alternatives for a more just world for the next generations around the world. The organizations and projects I work and volunteer for continue to give different ideas of what these alternatives might look like.

My brother and I on my grandpa's farm in Kentucky