If you’ve ever seen the film Easy Rider, you probably remember the long sequence in which Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda stumble across a hippie commune in a rocky, dusty place somewhere in the southwest. The hippies are trying to grow their crops in what looks like infertile soil and Billy (Hopper’s character) thinks they’re doomed to fail. Wyatt (played by Fonda) thinks they’re going to succeed and, near the grisly end of the film, Wyatt declares that they blew it. What did he mean? One possible explanation is that they should have stayed on the commune and worked to make it a success rather than going on a cross-country trip fuelled by drug money. In the real world, Michael Malone, the subject of Gary Beeber’s documentary, Michael Malone, Portrait of an American Organic Farmer, seems to be a hippie who didn’t blow it. Like the characters in Easy Rider, Malone was harassed as a young man for having long hair (an experience he likens to being Black in America). But Malone wasn’t cowed into getting a haircut and getting a real job. Instead, he decided to learn how to support himself and his family through organic farming. And rather try this in New Mexico or Arizona, he planted himself in Ohio. His farm, Hungry Toad Farm, is just outside of Dayton and Malone has been there for decades. His early countercultural background has stayed with him. He doesn’t rail against corporations or the man, but he’s found out how to make his own way in the world and made his peace with the world as it is. But he still maintains that he’s, “A 60s kind of guy.”
The film itself is, as the title suggests a portrait. Beeber is a photographer as well as a filmmaker, so this isn’t too much of a surprise. The interviews all take place on the farm, and are candid enough that one employee warns Beeber to be careful of accidentally interviewing Malone with his fly open. We don’t hear from Beeber at all. Mostly it’s just Malone speaking about his life and his farm. Judging from Malone’s unkempt mop, there clearly was no makeup or hair person working during these interviews. The photography here, though, is always eye-catching and intriguing. It takes a special kind of skill to make something as mundane (in both senses of the word) as a farm grab our attention as Beeber does.
One of the things we learn form this film is just how complicated running a relatively small scale organic farm can be. It is knowledge that Malone has spend decades honing. He hopes one day that his children will take over the reins. One can’t but wonder while watching the film whether he will be able to pass on all the knowledge it will take to keep the place going. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, goes to great lengths to list the enormous amount of knowledge a farmer had to have in order to be successful compared to workers in the city. My own uncle, who’s been a mechanic for John Deere since his mid-teens in the mid-70s, says that a similar problem is developing with mechanics. It’s not really possible to learn everything one needs to know to be successful by simply taking classes and reading books. It takes a lot of hands on experience, and, apparently in the world of mechanics and perhaps organic farming as well, there don’t seem to be enough young people pursuing that hands on experience.
Malone, for his part, does not have grand ambitions of branching out with franchises or making loads of cash. His hope, other than having his kids take over, is to keep doing what he’s doing until he keels over. He’s not interested in retiring. If one had to come up with a definition of what it means to live a well-lived life, these would have to be some of the key characteristics. If you’ve found an activity you can pursue without ambition gnawing at your liver and without suffering terrible regrets, until the day you die, you’ve found a path that would make both Wyatt and Socrates proud.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.