The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer

by Victor Davis Hanson, Jane Smiley (Foreword)

What does the imminent death of the family farm mean to the average American? A great deal, declares Hanson, who as both a farmer and a classics professor (California State University-Fresno) imbues this provocative, eloquent polemic with personal experience plus an unshakeable agrarian vision that harks back to Greece, Rome and the early American republic. Agribusiness, says Hanson, has obliterated the rural culture that once was the matrix of American society. The superabundance bestowed by corporate mega-farms, he adds, comes at a price: factory farms, propped up by mostly hidden government support and dependent on toxic pesticides and fertilizers, pollute the air, water and soil as they turn out bland, tasteless produce for a voracious, rootless and soulless consumerist society. Hanson (Fields Without Dreams) is totally unsentimental about small-scale independent farming; far from being tranquil, bucolic and simple, he reports, it is a brutal, dirty, maddening, messy, always difficult, sometimes deadly pursuit. Yet family farming, he insists, cultivates bedrock values -- reliance on self and family, distrust of complexity and bureaucracy, skepticism of taxation, willingness to stand up to evil (whether the enemy be insects, weeds or monopolistic landowners) -- values that are integral to a resilient, egalitarian democracy but that he believes are now in short supply. Hanson models these impassioned essays on Crevecoeur's 1782 classic Letters from an American Farmer and sprinkles his barbed critique of contemporary American culture with allusions to Virgil, Pericles, Pindar, Euripides and Thucydides. Even if readers don't plan to go back to nature, his feisty, curmudgeonly,challenging, ruminative essays provide much food for thought.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Agriculture

258 pages, Hardcover

First published April 20, 2000

About the author

Victor Davis Hanson was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA, Classics, 1975), the American School of Classical Studies (1978-79) and received his Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University in 1980. He lives and works with his family on their forty-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, California, where he was born in 1953.

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty much anything by Victor Davis Hanson is worth reading. I re-read this book in August and September of 2011. A fascinating look at the growth of agribusiness and the demise of family farming, from the perspective of Classicist and farmer Victor Davis Hanson.

[Yash Holbrook · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this thought-provoking book and hated it at the same time. On the plus side, I will never look at another grape, raisin, peach or plum again without thinking of everything that's gone into getting it to my table, and who profited from it and who did not (the farmer). I will never enter a bucolic, pastoral landscape again without thinking of the muscle, sweat and failure that go into to making and tending those fields, creating an attractive perspective for the non-farming tourist but representing muscle, sweat, and bank loans that will drown the enterprise in the end. I appreciate his characterization of cultivation as a bridge between beautiful but useless (to humans) and chaotic nature and soulless but ordered civilization. Nature is tamed, not conquered, for the benefit of the many humans the farmer reaches. He makes a show of insisting (convincingly) that the life is hard and hopeless, that the farmer (even the "yeoman" farmer) is killing the land for future generations, knows it, and won't stop because it's a constant battle to "bring food from this earth."

And yet, Hanson's many self-contradictions make it hard to get on board. Start with the contradiction of being a classics scholar, quoting liberally to the point of name-dropping ancients his readers ought either to know or be impressed by him for quoting, while also fulsomely denigrating higher education. Born and raised proudly in Selma CA, he tosses in nonchalantly the sights and wisdom he brings back from trips to Greece. His fetishization of the crude, rude, anti-intellectual, curmudgeonly agrarian who loses limbs, land, family and living borders on fantasy for a better, bygone world.

I would consider this a must-read for anyone interested in where America's food comes from, how it gets to your table, and the type of person we're losing to factory farming. Again, love it and hate it.

[Motorcycle Tourist · Rating 3 out of 5]

Farmers see things others do not. Muscular labor created a self-confident, viable, and pragmatic citizen. Sadly, the last generation of American farmers have become foreign to their countrymen. Agricultural surpluses give stability and pave the way for trade, commerce, and urbanization. But urban culture is antithetical to rural values. The cycle of toil, to leisure, to degeneration seems inevitable. Jefferson’s America was 85% agrarian and brought to the government a distrust of bureaucracy, and a reliance on self and family. At the end of agrarianism, we will find the demise of real conservatism. In the century to come, well-meaning but intellectually disingenuous souls will write treatises on the beauty and serenity of farming itself; proliferating in inverse proportion to the demise of family farming. In the meantime, we farmers just dream of the past, lie about the future, and rail against the present.

Agriculture will always be war. Sometimes heroic, but too often it is a struggle that kills slowly. Surviving these wars gives the farmer humility, endurance, and perspective.

[Lloyd Fassett]

11/16/25 found it browsing at Dudleys in Bend

[Wm. Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could be titled why are farmers so grumpy.

[Cameron Davis · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is complete and utter manure. If I could rate this book a zero, I would. Here's why. The book is:

1) Filled with inaccuracies.

Example: "Family farming, ancient and deemed inefficient, is gone." No it's not. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (2025), family farming accounts for 95% of America's agriculture. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/20.... Maybe the author is complaining that we should have more small family farms. Maybe he's complaining about something else. The reader will never know because the author doesn't write with accuracy.

2) Incomprehensible.

Example: Family farming...is gone. "In its place we have, I suppose, modernism and postmodernism--currently the self-acclaimed cultural censor of the affluent society--offering cynicism and nihilism as smug cover for joining in the fray." Try to figure out what the author is saying. I bet you'll come up with a few different interpretations. The writing sounds like the author is attmepting more to sound smart than to ensure his point gets through to the reader. It's the very same smugness he's complaining about.

3) Poorly researched.

Example: "In the absence of an agrarian creed, no intellectual has stepped forward to craft a higher culture for the people beyond materialism and consumerism." This is false. From George Washington Carver to Wendell Berry, Fred Kirschenmann, Wes Jackson, Leah Penniman, there are lots of others who have offered different intellectual roadmaps for a higher culture that integrates agrarianism with democratic vitality, economic resiliance, and a balance of individualism with communtity-mindedness, across societies.

4) Illogical.

Example: "We are not starving in this country...But we are parched and hungry in our quandary over how to be the good citizen." Some 20 percent of our country suffers from food insecurity, and many within that number are children. Expecting people to take the time to be "good citizens" if they can't put food on the table shows a lack of understanding about the priorities people have in life.

If there's one redeeming attribute about this book, it's the author's attempt to refamiliarize us with J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer."

Unfortunately, the book's lack of credibility overshadows its attempt to achieve this one goal. Which leads to the final and by far the biggest problem.

5) Inauthentic.

The thesis of the book is that we haven't lived up to our archetype of a self-reliant farming society. At the same time, his other books, such as "The Case for Trump," belie the author's profound failure to level with readers. Farmers from across the country have stated time and again how Trump's tariffs, war with Iran, and other policies have hurt them (even if many continue to support the Administration) to the point where family farm bankruptcies continue to increase. For example, the American Farm Bureau Federation's (not a liberal organization in its views by any stretch) own data show farm bacnkruptcies trending up during Trump presidencies and down during the Biden presidency. https://www.fb.org/market-intel/farm-...

In other words, reality shows that for the U.S. to support an agrarian society for a robust democracy, government support is one factor of many for success.

The author may not wish that to be true, but reality is very different. Too bad this book is not based on the intellectual honesty needed to re-build the very society the author argues for.

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting stuff form a owner/operator of a family farm located in California's central valley. A little overly cranky at times but seemed mostly fair and believable like an experienced older man just telling you how it is, with analogies from ancient Greece thrown in. Mainly appreciated hearing an advocate for the family farm that was more Jefferson and less dirty hippie.

[Ammon]

I'm trying to explore Georgics. This was my first exposure to Goergic literature and I'm impressed by some of it, but I hate a lot of what this author has to say so far.

He seems to believe that there is inherent value in farming and that there is something inherently wrong with not owning your own land and using it for your subsistance.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for an independent project for one of my classes. I love Hanson's premises-- what are we losing, when our culture loses small farmers? While I enjoy academic essays, this was heavy at times and terribly hard to get through.

[Esther]

This book was an honest read and very enjoyable.

[Marti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Still prefer fiction, but this was interesting & good for harvest time.