I had often pressed on [my father] essays and novels of Berry's. Like Berry’s father, mine was a white-collar professional who farmed on the side and deeply loved his rural community. He was perhaps the last of the country doctors to make a home visit and receive a cherry pie as payment. Yet it was also my dad who first pointed me toward a darkness behind the agrarian romance. Once, while handing back to me the book in which appears “A Defense of the Family Farm,” wherein Berry recommends the Amish practice of using family and horses instead of machinery, my father tersely noted that this idyllic vision depends on children doing forced labor.
Yes, but so does sending children to school. (That’s a minor quibble. The essay is superb and superbly provocative.)