Houses, Not Farms

Anytime the headwinds got too fierce, my father would talk about selling what he owned and moving the farm elsewhere.

At a family meeting, his cousins unfurled a subdivision map of the farmland behind our house.

A family is no way to own a farm: It makes the land vulnerable to all the things families are vulnerable to. Mainly, time — it wears away at relationships; a hundred years on, brothers are now very distant cousins. Corporations have proven themselves better suited for the business growing food than farmers. As they say, money rules.

Down in Delaware, or out in Pennsylvania, there were better opportunities, maybe. Still, the road not taken can retain its allure over long periods of time, an open question, an imagined regret about what you didn’t do and maybe could have done.

Finally, decades later, visiting one such place, the Delmarva Peninsula, my fantasy resettlement of the Foster Farm can come to a close. What I had imagined as vistas resembling a Ducks Unlimited poster was instead a vast expanse of new housing units. Everywhere was more, with grandiose front gates: The Harbor, The Preserve, Heron Point. An octopus-like sprawl of curving drives allows, back to back, exactly the same housing units, one after the next after the next after the next. As their names imply, these developments are almost all impacting wetlands by abutting and destroying them.

Sometimes we see a farmstead, a fallen roof on what was once a pretty front porch; vines arrest the falling structure before the bulldozer does. The crumbling barns and abandoned equipment is a tiny thumbprint of the (rusty) past. Even when there isn’t a beaten-down house, I know by the contour that the acreage was, until very recently, farmland.

Also, not long ago, they said farming will kill the Chesapeake. Restrictions and regulations increased for farms in the vast and essential watershed. Collateral damage is usually seen in small, independent producers. They may not be able to quickly adapt, but they somehow still managed to hang on to that waterfront land for eight generations. Until now. Whatever curbed the farmer here made no such check on development.

From this country’s own, original wilderness, I know it was ambitious farmers who broke it. But now we study and understand impact. We also have the resource of conservation to repair it. Taking the farmers off the land, and growing the eggs and chickens in ever more industrialized locations, has enabled more housing starts and not a triumph of, or even a tribute to, the environment.

So, with binoculars in hand, a farmer might instead ask: What proverbial chicken, what egg, and what does a goose really lay?