Generational Drift and the Death of the Family Farm

My farming story, albeit different from many others, has been dwelling heavy on my mind lately. A few days back, I visited my parents to help them move from my childhood home to a house, more suited for their newfound empty nester status.

Before leaving town to return to my new life - I took a short detour to visit the family farm. It’s the time of year where the berries are ripe, and many handfuls of fruit, fresh from the earth, was what I had been craving.

My grandparents are immigrants, who moved from Denmark to Minnesota with my father and his two siblings in the mid-1970s. They went back and forth between the two countries, two recent medical school graduates, trying to build a life together, until eventually settling on the shores of Lake Superior, just outside of Duluth.

My grandfather (I call him Farfar, the Danish word), bought himself a plot of land, with plans of starting a farm. He wanted to spend his summer days outdoors, growing fresh fruit for others. The adventure turned into a success, and the family spent harvest season, for decades, surrounded by friends, united by our love for fresh, together. It was an organic pick-your-own raspberry, strawberry, and current utopia.

I spent every summer I can remember with Farfar up at the farm. It was my first job, pulling rocks and weeds from fields, rooting new plants and making the place look pretty. It taught me business, hard work, respect, and leadership. It gave me time to connect with myself, my elders, and the earth - albeit, at the time, I didn’t respect it for what it was. The experience, which made me so much of who I am, would not last forever.

As I started nearing the end of my time in high school, after two years of running the operation, largely by myself while my Farfar and Farmor (my grandmother) traveled, I began to neglect my responsibilities there in favor of other things, better paying jobs, friends, parties, girls. I assumed that my grandparents, my younger siblings, and my cousins would pick up the slack in my absence.

The farm was already struggling at this point, you see? The strawberry patch was given up years ago, replaced with U of M agricultural researchers and their massive greenhouses. A large patch of land leased for poultry use instead. A land dispute with a neighbor costing us our driveway and our barn. Consecutive years of poor weather, disease, and a shrinking pollinator population left us losing money every season. Yet, I feel guilty, as if there is something I could have done.

My grandparents now - they’re aging. Farfar has aphasia, a neurodegenerative disease that targets language processing and speech, and it’s difficult, though worthwhile, to communicate with him. Farmor, one of the strongest and most inspirational women I know, has Parkinson’s, and though I’m doing what I can to help, it’s not enough.

As I sit in my “home”, hours away from the place I know truly is home, reflecting on my walk through the overgrown, unkempt acres of raspberry, looking at Farmor’s memoir on my bookshelf, I can’t help but feel overwhelmed with emotion that I contributed in letting this project which spanned generations of my family and community and could have continued to, fail. I can’t help but think, just as I did then, neglecting my family and not cherishing time with my elders in pursuit of selfish and unimportant things, I’m doing the same thing still.

Farfar and Farmor

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