Read It and Reap
“Modern Farmer” and the back-to-the-land moment.
Each issue of Modern Farmer, the stylish agrarian quarterly, has an austere portrait of an animal on the cover. So far, there have been six. The animals look remote and self-satisfied, as if nothing you said could matter to them, just like human models. The first cover had a rooster with an eye resembling a tiny dark paperweight. The second had a goat looking haughtily askance. The third was of a sheep whose gaze is so penetrating that she seems to be trying to hypnotize you. The fourth was of a pig in profile whose ears flop forward like a visor; according to a note by the photographer, a pig’s flopped ears trap smells as it searches for food. The fifth had a hulking farm dog with a ruff like a headdress, and the sixth has a serene-looking cow with a black face and a white forehead and nose. Ann Marie Gardner, the magazine’s founder and editor, says that she always thought she would have animals on the cover. The art director, Sarah Gephart, says, however, that she had nearly finished designing the magazine when Gardner told her that the cover would have animals. “We thought it would be people,” Gephart said.Modern Farmer appeared in the spring of 2013. After three issues, it won a National Magazine Award; no other magazine had ever won so quickly. According to Gardner, though, Modern Farmer is less a magazine than an emblem of “an international life-style brand.” This is the life style of people who want to “eat food with a better backstory”—from slaughterhouses that follow humane practices, and from farmers who farm clean and treat their workers decently. Also, food cultists who like obscure foods and believe that fruits and vegetables taste different depending on where they are grown. Also, aspirational farmers, hobby farmers, intern farmers, student farmers, WWOOFers—people who take part in programs sponsored by the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms movement—and people who stay at hotels on farms where they eat things grown by the owners. Plus idlers in cubicles searching for cheap farmland and chicken fences and what kind of goats give the best milk. Such people “have a foot in each world, rural and urban,” Gardner says. She calls them Rurbanistas, a term she started using after hearing the Spanish word rurbanismo, which describes the migration from the city to the countryside. Rurbanistas typify the Modern Farmer audience.
Modern Farmer has its offices in Hudson, New York, two hours north by train from Manhattan. Gardner lives nearby, in Germantown, in a house among fields by the Hudson River. She was born in Queens, in 1964, but she grew up near Boston. She went to Boston College, and in the fall of 1990 she went to the Harvard School of Public Health to study behavioral science, and also, partly, to get a Harvard degree, so that people would take her more seriously, she says. After that, she was briefly married, lived in London and wrote for Tatler, among other magazines, then moved to New York to work at W. In 2000, she came to Hudson to do a story and ended up renting a barn that had been fixed up to live in. She had planned to use it on weekends, but when the moving truck came to her apartment in Manhattan, she says, she told the movers, “ ‘Take everything.’ I didn’t ever want to go back to New York.” During the next few years, she was the editor of T: Travel, the travel edition of the New York Times Style Magazine, and a founding editor of the British magazine Monocle. She had the idea for Modern Farmer in 2010, after travelling almost constantly for Monocle.
“I don’t have a farm,” she told me recently. “I sort of dream about it. When I told people I lived in the Hudson Valley, though, they would say, ‘You’re so lucky. Do you have chickens and goats?’ In Iceland, they wanted chickens or already had them. In Rome, they wanted goats. You go to Italy, you have to have a ten-minute conversation about olive oil and the tomato.”
We were walking down Warren Street in Hudson, which descends slowly to the river. Gardner is small and blond, with practical-looking hands that seem fitted to carry a tool. She has a round face and avid blue eyes that appear to have degrees of radiance, like headlights. She went on to say that, returning from abroad, she would see “all these really earnest, earnest young farmers coming to town meetings. They would be so idealistic about organic farming, and then you would have these old-time farmers who were full-on pesticide users, but they had a lot of experience, and there were just so many clashes. Anyway, I was doing a story in New Orleans, where this Hollywood agent guy mentioned a piece in Monocle about farmers in Japan going back to the land. He thought it could be a TV show, and I was, ‘Yeah, I think it should be.’ So I started trying to write a TV show, not in Japan but in Germantown. I was kind of imagining a show with the sort of epic landscape of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and all the clashes between old farmers and new farmers.”...MORE
