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By Root 993 0

have gone wrong with our food and the culture of its production. Sociologists write about “the Disappearing Middle,” referring to both middle America and mid-sized operators: whole communities in the heartland left alarmingly empty after a decades-old trend toward fewer, bigger commodity farms. We are quicker to address our problems with regional rather than national solutions. Local agencies throughout the Midwest are devising their own answers, mandating the purchase of locally grown organic food in schools, jails, and other public facilities. Policies in many states aim to bring younger people to farming, a profession whose average age is currently about fifty-five. About 15 percent of U.S. farms are now run by women—up from 5 percent in 1978. The booming organic and market-garden industries suggest that consumers are capable of defying a behemoth industry and embracing change. The direct-sales farming sector is growing. Underneath our stylish clothing it seems we are still animals, retaining some vestigial desire to sniff around the water hole and the food supply.

In the forum of media and commerce, the notion of returning to the land is still reliably stereotyped as a hare-brained hippie enterprise. But image probably doesn’t matter much to people who wear coveralls to work and have power meetings with a tractor. In a nation pouring its resources into commodity agriculture—corn and soybeans everywhere and not a speck fit to eat—back to the land is an option with a permanent, quiet appeal. The popularity of gardening is evidence of this; so is the huge growth of U.S. agritourism, including U-pick operations, subscription farming, and farm-based restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts. Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

In summer a young rooster’s fancy turns to…how can I say this delicately? The most ham-fisted attempts at courtship I’ve ever had to watch. (And yes, I’m including high school.) As predicted, half of Lily’s chick crop was growing up to be male. This was dawning on everyone as the boys began to venture into mating experiments, climbing aboard the ladies sometimes backwards or perfectly sideways. The young hens shrugged them off and went on looking for bugs in the grass. But the three older hens, mature birds we’d had around awhile, did not suffer fools gladly. Emmy, an elderly Jersey Giant, behaved as any sensible grandmother would if a teenager approached her looking for action: she bit him on the head and chased him into a boxwood bush.

These boys had much to learn, and not just the art of love. A mature, skillful rooster takes his job seriously as protector of the flock, using different vocal calls to alert his hens to food, aerial predators, or dangers on the ground. He leads his wives into the coop every evening at dusk. Lacking a proper coop, he’ll coax them up onto a tree branch or other safe nighttime roost (hence, his name). The feminist in me balks to admit it, but a flock of free-range hens behaves very differently without a rooster: scattered, vulnerable, a witless wandering of lost souls. Of course, they’re chickens. They have bird brains, evolved in polygamous flocks, and have lived for millennia with humans who rewarded docility and egg production. Modern hens of the sturdiest breeds can crank out an egg a day for months at a stretch (until winter days grow too short), and that they can do with no need for a fella. Large-scale egg operations keep artificial lights on their hens to extend the laying period, and they don’t keep roosters at all. The standard white grocery-store egg is sterile. But in a barnyard where chickens forage and risk predation, flock behavior is more interesting when a guy is ruling the roost.

Home Grown

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Oh sure, Barbara Kingsolver has forty acres and a mule (a donkey, actually). But how can someone like me participate in the spirit of growing things, when my apartment overlooks the freeway