A Family Legacy, and the Pursuit of Independence

There are a lot of ways to respect your parents. You can emulate their behavior, or you can take what you've learned from them, and completely change the rules, and cut your own path out of life.

My husband grew up in a farming family. They're some of the hardest-working, most loving and and honest people I've ever met. His father spends his days in the fields with his brother and uncle, sweating under the steel roofs of tractors and combines as they use every drop of daylight to get the job done. Rob tells me about days as a kid spent helping on the farm in whatever ways they could, loading seed, helping in the shop, wherever their father needed them, there was him and his brother. It was a labor intensive job, but one that bore in him a strong work ethic, and an amazing bond with his family. Never have I met anyone quite as hard working and kind-hearted as the Hagest family.

Sometimes I don't think my husband ever expected to pursue a career in the agricultural industry-at least, not the way he was brought up doing it. We all grow up doing something, and we usually spend most of our lives trying to break the monotony and do something completely different. But my husband saw ways to improve the family business, ways to make it more sustainable and environmentally friendly, and now he spends his days in the yard experimenting. He uses the knowledge he gleaned from his father about farming and applies a whole new method of thinking to it, and I'm amazed at the applications he's come up with.

He's taken the ideas of a subset of agriculture, called permaculture, and applied it to a food garden, and has found some creative and simple ways to make food gardens more self-sustaining and productive, with no genetically modified seeds or pesticides of any kind. It's truly amazing.

You see, in this relationship, I'M the bleeding heart environmentalist, but after much debating and fact-checking, I've finally convinced (or rather, a series of macho-men permaculturalist podcasters have) him that it does matter what you put in the ground. After doing some of our own research, and watching plenty of dramatic and bleak documentaries, we realized that the food industry had become completely monopolized by agricultural giants that weren't just controlling 70% of the world's food supply, but that they were genetically altering our seeds to be Round Up resistant, and dumping millions of barrels of toxic poisons into the soil that produced our food. On top of that, these same CEOs that control and supply the majority of our food sit on the boards of the FDA and Health Department, further corrupting the system.

We were horrified by what we learned, but we were even more horrified by how inescapable the reach of corporate agriculture seemed. That's when we put our brains together and started working on changing things.

Rob began gleaning information on alternatives to traditional farming methods such as monoculture, and started learning about polyculture, and natural food gardens that support themselves by allowing a diversity of plants to form symbiotic relationships with one another, rather than just planting row after row of beans or whatever. We did away with chemicals, completely. It wasn't easy, and it's something we're still working on, but we don't eat anything with corn or soybean products in them now, since that is the most genetically modified crop in the US. We started to examine everything we used, and did away with chemical cleaners and fast food, and started learning about wild foraging for food.

This intellectual awakening has inspired a whole new life for us. A little over a month ago, with the tremendous support of our friends and family, we moved to the rural Little Belt Mountains in Montana. We decided we wanted to be away from the city, and start learning about living as independent of a supermarket as we could. We escaped the endless reach of corporate agriculture, and now we work every day towards changing the way we live.

It wasn't an easy change. We miss our families, and our friends. But this was one inspired by his family, in a lot of ways. Many generations ago, his grandmother moved to Indiana from Wisconsin, and began a new life on the Hagest family farm. Now, her grandson has done just that, and is building on his family's legacy of hard work and perseverance, with a new found respect for the long term repercussions of his actions. Together, we will continue to work towards complete food independence. He is his father's son, and every day, my husband works towards being a pioneer like his dad. He respects his family by taking what they've taught him, and building on it.