Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea

"Any book about farming must now not be romantic or naïve, but brutally honest," writes fifth-generation grape farmer Victor Hanson, who is also a professor of Greek at California State University in Fresno. Hanson knows about the brutality of farming--in 1983 a glut of foreign raisins coupled with domestic overproduction caused the price of raisins to plummet from $1,300 a ton to $450, devastating small farmers in the San Joaquin valley. In this erudite look at the disappearance of the family farm and the rise of modern agribusiness, he argues that the loss of agrarians lies at the root of many of the ills that plague modern American society.