PREFACE: 

I grew up in a suburb twenty minutes north of Salt Lake City, Utah. My hometown of Fruit Heights was squished between two other suburbs, which were stuck between a few other suburbs, and so on. This landscape of micro-metros conflated into one large jumble of houses, grocery stores, and shopping malls and my conception of “wide open space” was the two-acre backyard that stretched out behind my home. We filled it, of course—filled it with a swimming pool and pool house, a cement basketball court, a picnic bowery.

But we never had a garden. I’d never even seen a garden until I visited a friend at her grandmother’s house in eighth grade. I remember looking at the strawberry’s she plucked from the vine and wondering why they looked so much better than the store-bought ones sitting in my fridge at home. I asked. She told me, “Things always taste better fresh off the farm.”

My only encounters with farms were viewing them on television and from an airplane window some 15,000 feet in the sky, where I’d look down at the rows of green, brown, and yellow spread below me, covering the Midwest like an intricate patchwork quilt. The sight intrigued me much in the same way as Israel did before I really got to know the country, but I never cared enough to learn more. And, as the fields always looked so barren, I figured there wasn’t much to learn anyway.

As such, the first day of this American Farm Literature course was—to be a little melodramatic—paradigm changing. Listening to other students share their prior knowledge about agriculture and their opinions about political issues related to farming made me feel hugely inadequate and unprepared to comment on just about anything. That evening, I went to the library and checked out thirteen (yes, I’m that crazy) books about Yeoman farmers, agricultural theories, and so forth. If it had a picture of a vegetable on it, I picked it up and skimmed it.  Reading these texts helped me feel like I wasn’t a complete outsider in the course and that I at least had a foundational knowledge about the subject I’d once thought there wasn’t much to learn about.

Throughout the semester, I learned a good deal more. As we studied Jefferson, Carson, Smiley, and Kingsolver, etc., I was exposed to the historical backing that justified the tragedy in novels like The Grapes of Wrath and A Thousand Acres; I learned about the politics of agriculture and how the government has used farming as a means to unite citizens in times of war and espouse rhetoric; I discovered that farming is largely about forming relationships with the land and your local community; I learned that discovering FarmVille in the middle of the semester does not to great things for your sleeping habits; I grew wise to the (mostly) harmful effects of chemical farming and agribusiness; in short, I learned about the significance of farming and the power that it was on all of our lives—even those of us who have never stepped food on a farm.

As I went through the process of learning about agrarianism in American society, a couple of recurrent themes caught my interest (which I’ve already alluded to a bit): the political power of the farm and the importance of community and diversity in cultivating a healthy farm. The artifacts contained in this journal speak to those ideas. Because I accumulated these items over the course of the semester, not everything falls into those themes explicitly, but the all fit in a way.

The cover photo to this journal is a collection of visual rhetoric that comments on the political power and the (desired for) diversity of the farm. My “Theorizing the Farm” exercises run along a similar vein, as do the undertones of most of my short, unwritten assignments.

In terms of organization, each page of the website has navigational directions that are fairly straightforward. If a drop-down menu is available for a given section, it will appear when the mouse hovers over it. You can also just like the tab, though, and it will direct you to a landing page. Also, citations for each of the images are listed on a separate Works Cited page, which can be found HERE.

Thanks for a great semester. I’ve sincerely enjoyed the readings and the conversation.

Best,



Trisha



(A PDF Version of this Preface is Attached Here)