Sophie Yeo writes:

It was one of the most beautiful—and one of the most sustainable—farms that Ryanne Pilgeram had ever seen. When she arrived, Penny, the farmer, was sorting through vegetables in the shed. Her husband Jeff, who had a full-time job as a doctor, was hauling flakes of alfalfa to feed the draft horses that they used in place of tractors.

Pilgeram, a sociologist at the University of Idaho, was touring the farm as part of her research into sustainable agriculture in the Pacific Northwest. She had grown up on a ranch in Montana and was already familiar with the world of conventional farming, although her family’s own land had been lost in the farm crisis of the 1980s.

Perhaps for that reason, she froze when a feral dog darted out from a shed and, in front of Pilgeram and the two farmers, ran off with a live chicken, which fell limp in its jaws. This dog was no stranger to the couple. She had just given birth to a litter of puppies, and Pilgeram later learned that she’d been stealing a chicken every day for a week.

“I just remember being really anxious—like, this is not going to end well, I should probably just get my car and go home,” Pilgeram recalls. “Where I grew up, they would have just shot the dog, right?”

But instead of going for his gun, Jeff offered Pilgeram one of the new puppies. She describes the moment as one of culture shock. “They were super chill about it, like it was not a big deal,” she says. “I just kept thinking that it’s a pretty privileged position to be in, to not care if some of your livestock is taken.”

In many ways, Pilgeram found that this couple (whose names she has changed in compiling her research) epitomized the new generation of farmers moving into Western states like Idaho, Washington, and Montana. [Continue reading…]