Land Lines: Old and New Agrarians in Quivira

Abstract

My first job after college in the 1970s must have horrified my parents. But I never actually heard them tell me that milking cows and driving tractors might not be the first step on a solid career path. I wanted to be a farmer. (We were in the Midwest, where livestock live on farms, not ranches.) Working on a farm was as much fun as I had known it would be. I was thin and tan and, with the help of a come-along and a nose leader, I could handle just about anything on the dairy farms where I lived and worked. One summer, in the drumlins of upstate New York, I slept on the porch each night and fell asleep to the frogs singing in the pasture pond.