Still from “The Bug” music video
photo courtesy of AngelicOrganics.com

In honor of Burning Man—which I’m reluctantly skipping this year—I’d like to talk a little about the counterculture in modern America.

After leaving Chicago, I stopped by Angelic Organics: a bastion of creativity in conservative Northern Illinois, a leader in organic and biodynamic agriculture, and the subject of a PBS documentary entitled The Real Dirt on Farmer John.

Teen John
photo courtesy of Angelic Organics

John Peterson grew up on this farm in Caledonia, near the Wisconsin border. His father died when he was young, and he wound up running the farm himself by the time he started college.

“To me, farming is poetry, drama. It’s a source of infinite fascination.”
- Farmer John Peterson

In school he met the counterculture: 60s idealists and artists, revolutionaries and back-to-the-landers. Farmer John believed in the importance of agriculture, and he was astounded that some of the city kids had never touched hay; he was also enamored of the free-spirited creativity they brought to his life. He opened the farm up to friends who wanted to visit and work, and created a place where openness, artistic expression and creativity mixed with hard work and good food. His farm, in many ways, realized the dreams of a million hippies—and it worked. For a while.

But the 60s ended, and times got rough for Farmer John. By the 1980s, he’d lost most of his land and had been ostracized from his community by a series of nasty rumors about his lifestyle and friends.

For small-town kids like me, the rumors sound familiar: it’s a cult! A satanic cult! They’re a bunch of gays and druggies doing animal sacrifice! I heard the same rumors about members of my own community, and accepted them as fact. So did many people in John Peterson’s hometown.

In the film, he talks about the pain of living as an outsider when you’ve done nothing wrong—which, in his case, was compounded by massive debt. Over the course of several years, Farmer John was forced to sell nearly the entire farm: he found himself destitute, hopeless and friendless in a town where his family had been pillars of the community.

(...)
Read the rest of The Real Dirt on America’s Counterculture (580 words)

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