Mini-Review

On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm

Chronicle Books, $18.95 hard

"Sustainable agriculture" is a common catch phrase tossed around by a new generation of chefs and farmers. Broadly, it refers to the community effort to support small farms, gone quickly bankrupt by corporate agriculture and/or bought out by shortsighted developers. It is a phrase, like "green space" and "ozone depletion," that enters the speech of an environmentally active generation. Yet, like many political catch phrases, it is an abstract idea to suburban shoppers who choose among the worst produce grown and whose kids only know brand-name packaged foods. Michael Ableman, who runs a comparatively tiny organic farm, smack dead in the center of a Los Angeles suburb, brings us his own intimate experience cultivating and preserving not only a green space, but a community nourished by exposure to all that takes place there.

Goleta Valley, an area nearly 100 miles from L.A., was once a vast landscape of rich farm land that has since been plowed over by suburban sprawl (read: ecological and cultural decay). What remains of the once-pristine, fertile land is home to Ableman and his crew at Fairview Farms. When you consider that 46 acres of prime farmland fall to nonagricultural use each hour, it's a wonder that this 100-year-old, 12-plus acres farm continues to thrive. But then you read Ableman's account of this farm's staunch resistance to such decline, and you understand exactly why it has.

Fairview Farms (and small farms in general) have a prized spokesperson in Michael Ableman. He is a seasoned farmer and activist -- each role requires an obsession with detail and a magnified vision of purpose. It's the sort of refined sensibility that makes him a good farmer -- the eye for aphids, the nose for ripe fruit, the vision of seedlings maturing -- that also makes him a great exponent. He knows all too well how a bruised peach is inextricably tied to endless debates in city council, the future of his farm, and his son's future. Through anecdote and reminiscence, he fervently articulates this connection. "We all hear stories of the greed that undermines our global environment," Ableman writes. "Until the bulldozers are idling at your back door, it is an intellectual concept." What helps him spot and respond responsibly to an infestation of lygus bugs informs his strategy for dealing with neighborhood complaints and injunctions. "There really are no pests on the farm," Ableman explains, "only imbalances caused by our misperceptions." Instead of pesticides, he protects the lygus bug's home in the cover crops that keep it from eating neighboring peach trees. Instead of protests, he offers his neighbors "an all-purpose cornucopia" of incomparably good food.

Not that they were all grateful, at first. In his 20-year tenure at Fairview, Ableman fought ordinances to silence his roosters and to cease composting. He endured derogatory slurs from punk kids about his humble labors and criticism from their parents about the occasionally higher cost of his food. He dealt with fast-food trash littered at the edges of the farm, with industrialized farmers who mocked his "messy" organic efforts, and developers who unconscionably continued to mess them up. But Ableman is so bonded to the farm that it seems to generally puzzle him that others might find it (and him) problematic. Maybe his neighbors resented the explosive niche of nature in their midst. Nature, for those who seek to restrain it, is disturbing. Nature, when given a political voice, is a threat.

Ableman's attitude toward the surrounding community is of the same optimistic fatalism that he brought to his purchase of holiday turkeys one year: "I was convinced that our turkeys would be raised with respect, that intelligence was a matter of perspective, and that come next Thanksgiving the turkeys and I would have worked out the killing thing." In the spirit of community interaction, and to avoid excessive compromise, Ableman opened his farm to public classes and tours. The avocado trees became a spot for storytelling; the local school yard garden, a life lesson over strawberries. Eventually, the farm was bought by a public trust that ensures its permanent farming status. It is no longer the sole project of one impassioned man and his crew, but it is still a center for community gatherings and farming apprenticeships. It is no longer threatened by a developer's plow, nor insensitive, skeptical consumers.

On Good Land is not simply a memoir of Ableman's tenure managing this disadvantaged farm. Nor is it any sort of political manifesto, although it offers resources for informing an activist's position. To some readers, it may be a plea for greater consciousness; to others, reeled into his effortless, emotive prose, it is a call to tears. It is, he might say, but a single chapter in a land's long history, of which Ableman's tremendous efforts are only a small part. For despite all of his political and agricultural successes, Ableman convinces us, in the end, that the true value of this land is greater than any single man's experience of it.