When Tarrah Young, one of the featured protagonists in Steven Suderman’s documentary, To Make a Farm, is asked if she would consider herself a “back-to-the-lander,” she shrugs the question off. “It’s a derogatory term,” she says and continues to dig through her bucket of dirt. (“Back-to-the-lander” was a term used in the ’60s to describe hippies who fled the city to start small scale farms.) “I associate it with naiveté,” she continues. But then the comparisons start to roll in: she’s from the suburbs, she wasn’t raised in a farming family, her motives are idealistic. “Oh God …. yeah!” she says with pained laughter.
If Young of Green Being farm isn’t a “back-to-the-lander,” then what exactly is she? Is she a hippie who thinks mucking through manure will save the world? Is she the reincarnation of Laura Ingalls Wilder? Is she a radical activist slowly bringing down corporate farming from her little corner of Canada? Or is she something altogether new?
These are the central questions raised in To Make a Farm. The film follows Tarrah and four other Canadian farmers as they struggle to eke out a living in the big world of small farming. Like Tarrah, all of Suderman’s subjects are new to the world of agriculture. They are idealistic, sensitive and unpretentiously poetic.
Though the threat of a ruined cabbage harvest might not sound incredibly exciting compared to a Tom Cruise movie, it seems very important once you’ve invested in the fate of these farmers. Which gets a thoughtful audience member thinking. What’s more important? The fate of Jack Reacher? Or the fate of a living thing meant for your plate? What’s more tangible than life? Than watching life grow?
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