Farmer’s Almanac

by Ernest J. Finney

....I kept going over Logan’s questions. I had to be careful with her; I wasn’t used to having anyone that smart grilling me. She brought up the talk about the cancer cluster in children in that little farm-laborer town south of us. “Do you think we’d be responsible for poisoning them when it would mean our own selves, too?” I said like I always do. “Are we that stupid or greedy?”

And Logan said, “Why don’t you ask that to the tobacco farmers?” I didn’t have a ready comeback for her.

I kept thinking about her comments about the number of young girls getting knocked up, and how the farmers are asking for programs that will bring more pickers in when so many people in the Valley are out of work. She doesn’t understand the farmers’ myth, that we hardworking men and women of the soil deserve special consideration because we feed the people of this great nation. The premise that we are somehow accountable for unemployment, which leads to dysfunctional families, hence the high rate of social ills, has nothing to do with us. The Valley is a very conservative region. We vote our own self-made myths first, we strong, independent individuals who work the fields of this great valley for the betterment of mankind. Stewards of the land. That means we overwhelmingly vote Republican, anti-government, honoring the myth rather than the reality of who actually got us the water in the first place or the subsidies we enjoy, which allows us to go on complaining bitterly about all the regulations imposed by that same government. There is nothing wrong with contradiction as long as you can make some money off of it. We only think in triangles: we get subsidy money from our govern-ment, give some back to our representatives to make sure to vote the way we want them to, and nurture the consumers’ belief that their food is grown on a 40-acre family farm with the kids helping out with the chores....

Ernest J. Finney lives in Visalia, CA. His most recent collection of stories is Words of My Roaring (UC Press).