These days, you can’t toss an organic pomegrante drink in New York City without hitting someone gushing about “farming.” People are joining CSAs, flocking to the farmer’s markets, and insisting that their restaurants and supermarkets carry free range eggs and meat. Heck, even Farm Aid is coming to NYC this year! (As someone who coordinates CSAs for a living, this makes me swoon a little.)

But even with our newfound city-folk expertise on all things sustainable agriculture, most New Yorkers would be surprised to meet a farmer like Farmer John.

Last week I went to a pre-screening of a new award-winning documentary, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, where I was introduced to my first ever dirt nibbling, feather boa wearing, world travelling, performance artist farmer. Farmer John grew up on a working farm in Illinois. He was in line to pick up the family farming business from his father and grandfather before him - and he did it happily.

But John had his own way of doing things - some which got him into trouble with his nosy neighbors, some which caused him to lose almost everything, and some which raised a vibrant organic community farm, Angelic Organics, out of the Illinois soil.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John introduced me not only to John, but to a wild cast of characters including his endearingly midwestern spitfire of a mother, a few of his enchanting former loves, his cantankerous neighbors, a band of hard working hippies, and a group of Chicagoans who support Angelic Organics through their CSA (at 1500 members, it’s one of the biggest CSA farms in the country). The movie also - quietly and without banging the audience over the head - tells the story of loss and hardship that small and medium-sized farmers faced in the 1980’s (and continue to face today) at the hands of the Farm Bill and the U.S. government’s insistence that farms “get big or get out.”

This movie, and the surge of popularity in CSAs and local, sustainable foods, reminds me of a Jewish text I learned from the Mishnaic period, Avot de Rabbi Natan, that says:

Rabbi Achai ben Yoshayah stated: One who purchases grain in the market—to what may such a person be likened? To an infant whose mother died, and they pass him from door to door among wetnurses and [still] the baby is not satisfied. One who buys bread in the marketplace—to what may such a person be likened? It is as if he is dead and buried. But one who eats from his own (what one has grown himself) is like an infant raised at his mother’s breasts.

We (Jews or New Yorkers in specific and people of all backgrounds across America) are beginning to crave that connection that we’ve lost to our food and are turning to farmers to help us reconnect our food - the nourishment that sustains us - to the land and the people who grow it. As the vote on the 2007 Farm Bill approaches, The Real Dirt on Farmer John reminds us that it will take both hard work and relentless creativity to push our government to create the policies that protect us as farmers and eaters.