Deeply Rooted

WHILE DAVID DRIVES the combine, Dan’s job is to drive the harvested grain from the field to the farmyard and unload it into a storage bin, a job that takes a fraction of the time the combining does. Sometimes he does other tasks while David is harvesting; often he just sits in the truck in the middle of the field, waiting. It works this way for several reasons, not least of which is that even in his forties, Dan remains the younger brother. To this day, David calls him “Danny.”

If the farm has a single person in charge it is older brother David. That said, Dan has carved out a role for himself. He is the numbers guy, the one who does equations in his head and works out the engineering details of their on-farm experiments. He is also the “guy” guy of the farm. He likes cars. He likes sports. When Dan found out that I grew up in Boston, he dug up a videotape about the history of baseball, stuck it in the VCR and fast-forwarded to a piece on the 1986 World Series. It is the bottom of the tenth inning of the game that should have won the Red Sox the World Series for the first time since 1918, and they’re ahead five to three. With one out to go, first baseman Bill Buckner lets an easy groundball bounce through his legs. The Mets score, then win the game, then win the Series. It is perhaps the most humiliating error in baseball history, a wrenching memory for any Boston fan. Watching it I groaned out loud. Dan was tickled.

This afternoon in the triticale field, I am waiting with him in the truck. It’s a hefty ’59 Ford with a cab the color of the sky and a worn bumper sticker that reads, in barely legible letters:

EAT TURKEY
HIGH IN PROTEIN, LOW IN FAT!

Originally a gas truck, at some point it was put to work on the farm and the extra-long flatbed was fitted with a tall wooden bin for carrying grain. Every forty-five minutes David stops the combine and unloads through the spout into the back of the truck. He could go longer and fit more in the combine’s hopper, but forty-five minutes’ worth is the truck’s maximum capacity.

After David fills the truck and returns to combining, I ask Dan if there’s time for me to photograph the grain in the back. He says sure, gets out of the driver’s seat, walks around the front of the truck, and opens my door, an act I realize later is not so much chivalry as necessity—the truck’s door is prone to sticking. He suggests I climb onto the roof to get a bird’s eye view of the grain, so I hoist myself up and stand on top of the cab. It’s quite something to behold, like an aboveground swimming pool filled with more than a hundred million tiny kernels, all golden and shining. For me it’s a wonderful moment, to witness that field of plants become this deep box of food, or at least what will become food.

Dan drives us off the field and parks the truck in a grassy lane between two rows of grain bins. They’re the kind you see all over farm country: cylinders with pointed tops and bottoms, an opening in the top and a ladder running up the side. These ones are sixteen feet tall, but they can get to more than twice that. On the ground in front of the bins is a wide bucket. Running between the bucket and the top of one white grain bin is an augur, a forty-foot metal tube housing a metal spiral that’s like a giant drill bit. The spiral is flush with the inside of the tube, so as it spins whatever grain is taken in at the bottom moves up the augur and out the angled top, into the grain bin. As it starts up I can hear the metal grinding inside.

Dan backs up the truck so the rear end hangs over the bucket on the ground. Next he powers the hydraulic pump that lifts the front end of the truck’s grain box, which slides the triticale toward the rear. In the back of the truck is a door the size of a folded newspaper. He lifts it a crack and grain gushes into the bucket and is immediately sucked up by the augur. The grinding noise is drowned out by the sound of all those millions of kernels pouring out of the box, the sound of hard rain.

As we watch, I try my question again. “I’m not sure if I said it quite right before. Isn’t this time of year exciting? You know, sixty acres of triticale harvested? After all that work and time you put in, now to have the payoff in the back of the truck?”

After the box empties out, Dan cranks it back flat and looks at his watch. “I think David’s got another half round to go in the field. Come on,” he says. Suddenly his voice is excited. “Do you like raspberries?”

We drive past the bin and away from the field, to the garden. Dan parks alongside a patch of raspberries that runs almost the length of the fence, a good thirty yards. He starts picking, handing me berries and motioning for me to do the same. It’s a sort of fantasy treat for me. I love raspberries but live in a place where they are precious—available at the farmers market for about a month each year, and four dollars for a half pint. Having been here for twenty years, the patch is thick and the dark canes are loaded with so many berries that some are starting to turn bad and fall off. They’re as delicious as any raspberry I’ve ever had: sweet, fragrant, soft, warm from the sun. Unaccustomed to the abundance, I’m shy, picking carefully and curbing my greedy impulse to make a pouch in my T-shirt and load it with berries. Dan tells me not to worry—there are plenty. So we pick and eat and talk and pick. In time he feels the pull back to the field, knowing the combine has probably finished its rounds and might even be waiting for us.

He tips his big palm over, carefully transferring every last berry into the bowl of my hands. We drive back to the field and park in the middle. As David comes around the last bend, we sit in the truck and eat. Our hands are stained pink. Dan can’t help but smile.

This is a primary reason why their farm plan runs perfectly counter to those of their neighbors. Rather than continually grow, they have designed the business so that the farm can stay small. If it got too big, they wouldn’t have time for the garden. They’ve seen it happen to more or less every farm around: The husband focuses only on cash crops and the garden is left to the wife. In time the wife is needed elsewhere, whether hauling grain, going to town for parts, or taking a job to help pay the bills. Inevitably, the garden is abandoned and the job of feeding the family is outsourced to the people at Super-Valu Grocery in LaMoure.

Here, though, the garden is the root of the farm. With a laugh, Theresa says that when it comes to the garden she is actually an interloper; tending it is David and Dan’s work. I asked them what they grow, and Dan chuckled—turns out it’s a big answer. Tomatoes, sweet corn, cucumbers. Muskmelon, watermelon, summer squash, winter squash, pumpkins, parsley, peas, and celery. Dry beans, pole beans, carrots, onions, beets, and potatoes—that’s off the top of Dan’s head. They store long-lasting foods like potatoes and carrots in the basement, and freeze and can as much as possible. They also grow strawberries, raspberries, and grapes, which they turn into jam and jelly. Apples from the orchard become apple juice and applesauce. Theresa has four goats and at the farm there are scores of chickens for eggs and meat. Some years they have a flock of turkeys in the old turkey barn, some years Dan raises hogs or beef cattle. The only thing missing is a milk cow, and they’re working on that.

It’s not as if they are affecting some nineteenth-century pioneer fantasy. They have DSL and television, they have cars and a grocery store less than twenty minutes away. And they do buy food: oil, butter, nutmeg, ice cream—that sort of thing. It’s just that, given the choice, they would always rather produce it themselves. Likewise, they would rather cook food themselves than eat out. Everyone in the family participates. David and Ginger cook nightly at their house, the rule being that whoever comes home first makes supper. The brothers annually make a batch of sauerkraut and grind flour on a hand mill. Theresa prepares three meals a day for their side of the family, often with Dan’s help.

In the kitchen, Theresa is natural and unpretentious. She makes bread without measurements or timers, instead judging the dough with her eyes and her fingers. There are no cookbooks on her shelves, and I suspect the food she makes is strikingly similar to what her mother made, and what her grandmother made before that. Perhaps she gets elaborate on holidays, but for everyday meals there are few sauces and nearly everything is served as a single ingredient. Most things end up only one step away from how they were harvested: corn is boiled, beans are steamed, turkey is roasted. The food is so flavorful it doesn’t need much help.

Meals are composed of whatever looks good in the garden that day, plus whatever is left over from previous meals. Corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes, turkey refried with onions and garlic, and bread and butter—always bread and butter. Whole, steamed beets, raw cabbage with a simple dressing, Dutch meatballs, mashed potatoes, beet greens in a bowl. Winter squash, spinach, chicken, salsa, sliced tomatoes, chopped cilantro. Cornbread made from sweet corn that was left to mature in the field, then ground into meal and mixed with eggs, butter, milk, and honey. For dessert there are raspberries or winter squash mixed with milk and sugar. Over and over I was amazed to look at their dinner table and think that nearly everything aside from the salt and pepper came from this farm. I think back to California, where some people I know started the “locavore” challenge, aka the hundred-mile diet: for a whole month, eat only food grown within one hundred miles of your home. With some exceptions, Theresa and Dan have been on a one-mile diet since they were married. Neil has been on it since he was born.

Three meals a day, Theresa and Dan sit down to eat together. Neil is there, too, whenever he is not at school or a friend’s house. For every mealtime when I was at their farm, the family simply assumed I would join them too. At times when I resisted out of modesty, they insisted—to them it seemed absurd that I would leave and eat somewhere else.

Grace is said before meals, but after that there is no more formality. The meal has no courses, neither entrees nor side dishes, just the moment’s array of different foods in bowls and on plates and in pots and jars. You eat what you want, you don’t eat what you don’t want. At the end of each meal, every plate is clean.

It’s especially striking to see eleven-year-old Neil at this table. Theresa does not tell him that he must eat something because it’s good for him, and rarely must she nag him to finish something on his plate. He likes ice cream as much as any kid, but at dinner he’ll help himself to green beans and eat them with his fingers. What he does not like is the food at school. Once the subject of Theresa’s grape jelly came up, and he told us that the grape jelly at school tastes . . . funny.

This reminded Theresa of how when their oldest son, Nic, left the farm to go to college, the dining hall burned down days after he arrived. For his whole freshman year he ate food cooked in a trailer and served in a makeshift mess hall.

I was first introduced to the Podolls’ garden on a snowy winter day, while eating lunch at Dan and Theresa’s house. David was there and our meal lasted for hours, the three telling me how the garden is the hub of their farm and about all the things that radiate out from it. As they spoke of the garden I was struck by the tenderness in their voices and the words they chose. When Theresa referred to a time the grapes had been infested with flea beetles, it sounded as if she were recalling a time one of their kids was ill. The love was especially apparent in David. The world weighs on his mind like lead, but as he talks about the garden his spirit is untied and left to rise in the wind. Hope returns to his face. “The world’s salvation is in the garden,” he said over lunch that day. “All the world’s good is there.”

At some point in the conversation I admitted that my gut response to their emphasis on gardening was the same as, I guessed, many Americans’ would be: that gardening is nice, but it feels dramatically less important than farming—less legitimate. David looked at me solemnly in response. “Gardening,” he said, “has taught me how to farm.”

The garden allows for intimacy, he explained. It is food production brought back to a human scale. “In there you’re close-up.” His voice was warm, almost giddy with the topic. “You crawl around on your hands and knees, picking weeds, and you see things, little things, and you smell things. All your senses are used. Being a careful observer like that gives you a better sense of where to plant what, how to rotate things. With that level of awareness you have an infinite ability to finesse the production of your food.”

The garden is the gold standard against which everything on the farm is measured. For instance soil. In the garden it is light, rich, and moist, and never feels weight greater than what’s borne by a pair of boot heels. When David rides some big piece of equipment into the fields, scrutinizing as he goes, he compares that ground to the garden. “Because of the garden I know what the best soil looks like, feels like, smells like. As long as I’m sitting on a tractor it will never meet that standard, but the standard is always present in my mind. It’s something I’ll always strive for, even agonize over.”

The experience of the work is different, too, because it’s done together in the dirt, not solo under the roar of an engine. In the garden, David and Dan spend hours weeding and talking about “religion and the world and things of meaning.” They have accepted the reality that they must create surplus values in the crop fields, laboring in order to pay for phone bills and doctor’s visits. As much as they try to make their work there thoughtful and careful, they recognize the need for compromises and flexibility—thirty-thousand-pound combines and the like. But the garden gate is a boundary between worlds. Inside is a place where a sort of moral economy presides.

“Both Danny and I are not businessmen,” David said. “We are running the farm as a business, but we don’t like to sell stuff—we think money perverts everything. So we decided that the garden is a sacred place, and we would not let the money economy intrude upon that space.”

They do not calculate the hours spent in the garden versus the pounds of food produced there. They choose the vegetables they plant by what tastes best, not by what will have the highest yields. If there is excess beyond what they can eat and store themselves, they give it away. In the garden they make all their decisions and apply their work according to an equation of values—generosity, fulfillment, health, ecology, diversity—rather than numbers. As much as any technique of land management, this is what was learned when David says that the garden taught him how to farm.

That afternoon at the dining table he recalled an epiphany that came to him after he had been growing his own food for some time. By nature he made the food in his garden as good as possible, believing that by giving it the utmost care it would be healthy for the land and nutritious for his own body. How could he then turn around and apply a lesser standard when growing food for other people? To him that would be more than a contradiction. It would be morally indefensible.