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Back in the late ’60s I kept hearing stories about some crazy farmer up near the Wisconsin border that was having parties on his land, with a great deal of creativity along with hay rides and such. I never made it up there and eventually forgot about it. Much later I became aware of Angelic Organics and for a couple of summers was a subscriber. It was not until seeing the movie, The Real Dirt On Farmer John, that I made the connection. While John was a young boy on the family farm, his parents got a movie camera. John’s amazing odyssey, from family farmer to local pariah to running the CSA (Commuinty Supported Agriculture) with the most members in the country, was largely captured on film and constitutes most of this award winning documentary that opens in Chicago this month.

Guy Spiro: John, I saw the movie the other day and I was amazed on so many levels. The first level was ... I’m from Northern Illinois, the Chicago region, and I am of an age that, as I was watching the early scenes, I was thinking, how was it that this was going on up there and I didn’t know about it?

John Peterson: You mean the farm in the hippie period?

GS: Yes. Then I realized that I did hear about you, but I just never made it there. I regret that I wasn’t there at that time, but then of course, it was really sad the way things went with your neighbors and the general family farm economy.

JP: I haven’t been on the farm much this year. I’ve been touring with the movie, and it’s been a pretty grueling life, but I’ve got good general manager who keeps things going on the farm. At my screenings I often ask the audience who has been to my farm. Almost everywhere there is at least one hand that goes up and sometimes there are a lot of hands. There have been tens of thousands of people who’ve come through the farm since the late sixties. It has never really been a formalized, glorified place but, my gosh, it’s amazing the people who have come. Sometimes a hand goes up in the audience and the person tells who they are and that they were at a party at the farm thirty years ago.

GS: How wonderful that you had the movie camera to take the films over the years, and the earlier shots when you were growing up and the early life on the farm.

JP: It’s quite amazing. We had memories of the footage. I knew about a lot of it and then we found some I had forgotten about. Some of the stuff that I shot later, from when I started up and joined organics, I had just forgotten. Then we figured out that it was all there and it painted a pretty cohesive picture. The camera was not there for every single significant moment, but it was there for enough of them.

GS: I had to laugh right near the end when you had that conversation with your neighbor who had obviously been one of the ringleaders of your problems—the part where he says, “Well, I never said anything about orgies”—not denying that he participated in the “drug and devil worship” nonsense. But he does seem genuinely contrite.

JP: Well, he was sort of a perpetrator, but the amazing thing is that the community decided to believe and follow him. That has been my biggest disappointment. Every community is going have someone who is going to be far out and extreme with suspicion.

GS: But you were third or fourth generation, right? I mean, those people knew you.

JP: That’s the amazing thing. I went to people in my community to try to stop it and they refused to help me. One of the people I went to, who I had known since I was young and had been a good friend of my dad’s, he just reversed the whole thing and threatened to kill me.

GS: Nice.

JP: Someone in his life was involved in drugs and, rather than make that person take responsibility, he decided that he should blame the pusher. He had decided that I was the pusher, and he was just crazy over it.

     When I went to him, I told him that this was making me crazy. We were at this family restaurant in Roscoe. When we were sitting in the restaurant, everyone else I knew in the restaurant was looking away and pretending that I wasn’t there, because they wouldn’t speak to me. I was talking with him so he could help me figure it out and he turned it into a death threat. I had faced this horrible time in my life of destitution and trying to get the farm started up again, and here is this person threatening that if he catches me selling cocaine to his son, he is going to kill me with his bare hands. “My bare hands, do you understand that?”

     We called him years later when we were making the film, in about 2002. This was maybe twelve years later, and the director and producer called him. They asked if he would interview and he said, “If you knew whose life you were profiling, if you really knew who that person was, you would pack your cameras and go home. He’s a miserable, loathsome human being.” It’s amazing that people like that are so willing to not examine the truth and just believe something. I mean, we’re talking a lot of people. But in this case, this was someone who was close to the family. You’d think that someone like that would stop to look into it, but no.

GS: Well, that was then and this now, right?

JP: I couldn’t believe it was happening back in the 80s. I turned my back to it and that really helped it to escalate completely out of control.

GS: As I was watching the movie, I didn’t know where it was going, but I thought, I hope this guy gets into organics. And then you did. Before the movie got there, I thought the way to revive this farm and make it work is to go organic.

JP: Organic in itself is not a formula for success. I’m sure you know that. But it can be part of the solution.

GS: Then in the movie when you did go organic, I looked over at my wife and said, “Is this Angelic Organics?” We’ve been a subscriber and gotten your boxes.

JP: That’s funny. That’s great.

GS: The movie is great. The story that it tells, the highs and lows that you’ve been through with it, really is something. How is it to be where you are now after everything that you have been through?

JP: Well, I’m an extremely, ridiculously, insanely busy person, so I’m not someone who has spent much time reflecting. I’ve been working probably ninety-hour weeks for the last five or six years because I’m bringing out books. I’ve got one book coming out this spring and two more that are close to completion. One is primarily a cook book. One is a book of short stories about farming and one is an autobiography. I also help produce music videos—one of which you saw in the film. I’m just wildly busy. It’s interesting because I have this real accountability thing in the film. I’ve redeemed the farm. I’m happy about that, but I can’t say that I just sit down, cross my arms and am at peace because I’m in the busiest period of my life, ever. And I’ve always been a really busy person. I’m happy that the farm is back on its feet. But what’s happened now is that my life is hyper-accelerated.

GS: Was Angelic Organics one of the first successful CSAs?

JP: I think that the CSA movement probably started around 1990. We started around 1992. So, no, we were a pioneer, but we didn’t invent the idea. But now we’re certainly the longest lasting CSA in Chicago, and I think that we have the most members of any CSA in the country.

GS: You went beyond organics into Rudolph Steiner’s biodynamics. That is a whole other step. I like that scene of you potentizing those seeds.

JP: Well, organics is a good step, but I think that it’s in danger of being a bit materialistic in that it’s much codified. There are certain elements that are completely overlooked, such as the community element. It’s an easy thing for big business to come in and exploit or emulate. The bio-dynamic model is very different and it cannot be imitated by a vast industry.

GS: I know what you mean about big business and organics. In the early 1970s, I and two of my friends were flying in organic produce from L.A. and distributing it to the Chicago health food stores. But then we ran into a large produce distributor who got into organics (and this is a story for another time). The big companies can come in, but they don’t have the soul. They don’t really get it. It isn’t the same.

JP: As I often say in the Q&A’s after the film, a product can be emulated, but a relationship cannot. The community supported agriculture relationship is not something that can be imitated. You cannot take a big business and imitate a warm and friendly relationship with a regional farm that is producing the food for the customers. It’s not going to happen. They can figure out how to undersell the CSA products, but there is nothing they can do to compete with the relationship. That’s the key to community supported agriculture. It’s not something that Monsanto is going to figure out how to invade. Exciting isn’t it?

GS: Exactly. Especially with their frankenfoods. Well, it’s like any sort of factory food. The conglomerate bakeries like Hostess can crank out more cupcakes than anyone else, but they can’t touch the cupcakes that the local bakery in your neighborhood can make for you. As people move towards wanting quality in their foods and their lives, not just convenience and lower price, you’re at the forefront of something that’s going to be much bigger than people think.

JP: The whole biodynamic model is a way of working with food, building community, and creating a farm that is not going to happen out of any agri-business model. So I think we have two things going on that make the farm somewhat insulated from capital. Capital is always looking for the price spread to exploit. They look for a producer who isn’t being as efficient so they can come in and offer a lower price to make money on it and get the producer out of the way. They’re not going to do that in biodynamic or CSA models.

GS: What would you like to communicate to our readers that we haven’t touched on as we’ve talked so far?

JP: It’s interesting that Chicago has helped to sustain this farm, Angelic Organics. It’s because of Chicago and suburbs that we’ve been able to survive and prosper. I mean, that’s just an interesting thing and I would like to see more of a CSA movement in Chicago. There are a lot of cities; Madison, Wisconsin, probably has fifteen or twenty CSAs. I think Portland. Oregon, has twenty or twenty-five CSAs. There is a huge potential market for community supported agriculture. I think it’s a matter of finding farmers in the area who can create that model. It’s a challenging model to create.

GS: Is there an organization of CSAs?

JP: New York has one, but not Chicago. It seems that it would be good to bring people together around an organization like that in Chicago.

GS: I was wondering if there is a national organization.

JP: Not really.

GS: More and more people are going to want this as they become aware of it.

JP: The film is coming out in four cities, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Portland, in January. But now, because a lot of people are hearing about the film and requesting it all over the country, theaters are hearing about it and requesting to screen the film. It’s just really growing. I mean, it’s a phenomenon that is escalating so now their booking more cities for February for a broader release. Here in Amsterdam, the film was voted number three by audiences out of 165 films. This is like the biggest and most prominent documentary film festival in the world.

GS: That’s great!

JP: This film did really well here and now it’s selling into other countries such as Finland and Australia. France and the Netherlands have either bought it or are close to buying it. There is a lot of interest from other countries as well as from television with possible theatrical release. It seems like many millions of people are going to see it. That’s what it seems like. It’s going to help support this movement. When I show this film and ask people how many in the audience are going to join a CSA after seeing the film, usually at least a third of the hands in the audience go up.

GS: I would think more than that.

JP: Well, some people are shy. But over here there is a craze. I was interviewed so much. There were three television programs done on us. Dutch television took me out to meet a Dutch farmer and make an eight-and-a-half hour segment out of it. The interest here was astounding.

GS: You’ve always been a pioneer.

JP: There were so many offers, I had to say no to stuff.

GS: Can you make a statement of essence?

JP: I think there is this new relationship with farms that is forming in different parts of the world. It’s a model where community is formed around a farm. In the future there is a huge possibility for a general renewal of culture and society around this relationship because originally farms were real centers around which a lot of culture formed. The agricultural system was very important to the cultural development of society. I feel that with the CSA model, bringing people around food and around a place within a region, there are a lot of things that are going to come out of this that we’re just barely able to imagine at this point. I’m very excited about it. There are a million people who are getting their vegetables from community supported agriculture in the United States. That’s a lot. It’s a very positive act when people join a CSA. It doesn’t have to be a defiant act or shaking your fist at agri-business. It’s just an act of choice. It’s a huge step in turning the world around.

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