Access Utah

Thomas Jefferson called farmers “the chosen people of God” and claimed that they were inherently virtuous, the best citizens for the new republic. Evelyn Funda, author of “Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament,” says that “the American imagination has endowed farming with profound and enduring symbolic significance. ...no other occupation —with perhaps the exception of motherhood—so fully spans the imaginative range of human experience or is so profoundly invested with symbolic significance in our culture, even by those who have never worked or lived on a farm.” In Jefferson’s day, 90 percent of the population worked on family farms. Today, in a world dominated by agribusiness, less than 1 percent of Americans claim farm-related occupations. What was lost along the way is something that Funda experienced firsthand when, in 2001, her parents sold the last parcel of the farm they had worked since they married in 1957.