‘The Biggest Little Farm’ doc packs a big punch

“The Biggest Little Farm” is a documentary in which a married couple with successful careers chucks it all to start a traditional-foods farm, an idea that sounds so annoyingly precious it practically makes your teeth squeak.

Happily, this is a movie about not just idealism but practical idealism, and the struggle that maintaining it requires. It looks drop-dead gorgeous and, despite a few storytelling short cuts, it’s unex

pectedly moving. You may not want to quit your job and start shoveling manure, but it will make you think about sustainable food and ecosystems, without beating you over the head with its ideas.

John Chester directs the film, which is about him and his wife, Molly. He’s a documentary director and cinematographer; she’s a chef and blogger. When the film begins, the farm is under siege from the California wildfires raging in 2018. The farm is surrounded on three sides by the flames, they’re evacuating and … cut to flashback, in which John and Molly are squeezed into a cramped Santa Monica apartment.

They adopt a dog, and make it a promise: Theirs will be the last home he ever has. Then his barking gets them evicted. They’d always talked about starting a farm, and the time was now. All they lacked was a plan. And money.

Here’s one area in which the film falls short. John, who narrates the film, talks a little bit about investors. We see a snippet of a presentation to friends. He says one person told another person who told another, and lo and behold, soon they had people wanting to invest in the farm.

You have to believe there’s more to the story than that. Who paid for this? A lot of people? A business? Who knows?

Next thing you know we’re on the farm — Apricot Lane Farms, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles. The soil is hard and barren, a beekeeping setup is filled with lifeless bees, everything is brown and dead or dying. It looks pretty dire. The ground is like concrete. It’s not exactly what John and Molly had in mind.

And there is a record drought.

This is where the film shifts from the pie-in-the-sky theoretical to the getyour-hands-dirty reality. And it becomes a better movie because of it. Farms are relentlessly challenging in every way, particularly this one, which John and Molly, with the inspiration of a sort of farm-whisperer named Alan York, decide to make incredibly diverse in terms of what they grow and raise. Alan’s idea is a self-contained ecosystem, where everything contributes to the overall picture — even pests. And even coyotes that sneak in at night and kill hundreds of chickens. It’s not unreasonable to think that if coyotes are killing your animals, you might want to kill the coyotes. But not in Alan’s vision. So John and Molly must figure out other ways to deal with them, while protecting their chickens.

Everything works like that as they work to solve problems. An explosion of snails threatens crops. A duck pond grows stagnant and toxic, killing fish. These are seemingly unrelated events, but guess who likes to eat snails? Quack quack.

The whole circle-of-life bit seems simplistic at times. But there’s no questioning John and Molly’s commitment to the project — which has become their lives. Death is a part of that cycle, but so is new life. Both are carefully handled and moving.

The film unfolds over seven years, and the results are visually stunning. We never really learn of the financial success or failure of the farm, though it seems to do well despite some serious obstacles. Monetary gain isn’t the goal here, or at least not the one shown. It’s more about doing your part to be a good citizen of the world. And if ducks can help you get rid of your snail problem along the way, all the better.