Lamb works to preserve family farm
NOTE: Brooks Lamb will discuss Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on Oct. 21-22.
Brooks Lamb, author of “Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place,” has had a heck of a week. But not an unusual week.
Lamb and wife Regan Adolph had spent two hot days cutting, baling, hauling, unloading, and stacking hay at his parents' farm in Marshall County, about 40 miles south of Nashville. Then they headed home to Memphis to their other
full-time jobs.
“We have about 25 or 30 mama cows, beef cattle there, and we raise calves off of those cows,” Lamb said. “We have a pretty substantial garden. … We've got a backyard flock of chickens that my parents, especially my mom, stewards.”
Lamb, a graduate of Rhodes College and author of “Overton Park: A People's History,” is a link between the family farm and academia. He earned a master's degree from Yale School of the Environment and works as a land protection and access specialist at American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit that advances environmentally sound farming and aims to enhance economic viability for farmers and rural communities.
His resume and rural roots make Lamb, 29, uniquely qualified to write a book about the importance of farming in the U.S. and suggest helpful policies to support small farmers as they struggle to survive.
The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Chapter 16 : You have a day job, help work your parents' farm, and hope to buy one of your own. That life seems very hard. Why is it rewarding to you?
Brooks Lamb: There's something for me that is profoundly spiritual in being intimately involved with a place to take care of animals, to take care of the land itself. There's a contentment and a joy there that's almost indescribable for me. I think a lot of people look at the hard physical work of farmers and see it as drudgery. I think one can also look at it as an expression of an art form. That's how we look at it.
Chapter 16 : You raise cattle for slaughter. How do you reconcile that with your commitment to the well-being of farm animals?
Lamb: I think our goal in the production of meat is to do everything we can to minimize cruelty and ensure a good existence for that animal's life. There are really responsible ways in which you can give a wonderful life to an animal and avoid a lot of the climate issues that we so often hear of when it comes to livestock production.
Chapter 16 : The book has a lot of statistics about how small farms are vanishing because of development and large-scale farming by corporations. Why is it important how farming is done?
Lamb: There are a variety of reasons. As farms grow larger and industrialize and you need fewer people and fewer families, a lot of rural communities are deserted.
You can look at ecological destruction and the contributions of industrialized agriculture to climate change. As farms specialize and mono-crop more, as land is lost near major urban
cores, you lose a lot of the capacity for local and regional food movements.
Farming is, or at least it can be, one of the most intimate connections we have with the earth. As acreage is getting bigger and bigger, and there is less actual connection to the ground, we lose that intimacy and that relationship and that awareness.
Chapter 16 : You compare running a good farm to being in a good marriage. Can you flesh that out for me?
Lamb: A marriage is a partnership, right? If it's done well, both parties in the marriage will flourish. It takes a lot of work. It takes effort, it takes sacrifice. But in the end, there's a fulfillment there, a joy that I think is really powerful. I think the same goes for farming when farming is anchored in love and understanding.
Chapter 16 : Is it going too far to relate these principles to having a successful life?
Lamb: Something like 1% of American society lives on a farm, so most people who read this book are not going to be farmers, and I don't think we need a mass back to the land movement. Instead, we can work to practice these virtues where we already are. If you're living in an extremely dense area like New York City, it might mean cultivating a relationship with a street tree in the sidewalk and paying attention to that tree as you're walking to work − trying to really be aware of how it changes throughout the season, perhaps giving a little bit of water out of your water bottle as you pass by as a gesture of love. I think that we can practice those virtues wherever we are, with the idea being if we all work together to love and care for specific places on Earth, the planet itself will be better off for it.
To read an uncut version of this interview − and more local book coverage − visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.