Continued: In defense of rural lifestyles

Dean Hulse "fled small-town life" as a young man who saw little future for himself on the prairies of Westhope, N.D. Hard on the Canadian border, this is where his family had farmed for generations.

"Burning within me at the time was a desire to be as unlike rural people as possible," he writes. But after decades of city life and separation, "the imprints of small-town culture remain clearly tattooed on my consciousness."

Most home-grown writers who lament the evolution of rural society, from small family farms and vibrant farm-service towns to an ever more mechanized (and depopulated) factory model, can't avoid sounding defensive. And there is a familiar sadness in this collection of deeply personal essays, an underlying acknowledgment that today's industrial agriculture grew from decisions we all made and a premise made religion by the likes of former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz: "Get big or get out."

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, North Dakota had 53,000 farms in 1962. Forty years later, there were 30,000. The number continues to fall, and one can measure the withering of rural population in towns like Westhope, where the barbershop of Hulse's youth is gone -- as are two of three grocery stores, the hardware, the machinist, the lumberyard, the drugstore, "and nearly half the people, including me."

After college, he returned to Westhope. But he quit farming after two years, and in 1979 settled in Fargo, where he has continued to write and "rant" against prevailing national farm philosophy: "I oppose the view that a farm is a factory, which its 'operator' can make maximally efficient through the constant accumulation of costly, complex machines [and] reliance on an increasing array of fossil fuel-derived chemicals."

He champions renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and a renewed agrarian populism.

"If a more agrarian, small-scale agriculture offers hope for a depopulating countryside, why not support it?"

He writes evocatively of a farm youth spent helping a cow birth a calf in the cold and dark before dawn, of riding fence lines with his father and grandfather in a work-worn farm pickup, and of admiring the organized disarray of a farm shop. He describes the country air in springtime "nearly saturated with the smell of moldy earth," and the bright trill of a western meadowlark, so clear and proud it seems the state bird is performing on his shoulder.

But he insists that his "postindustrial vision of home ... is neither nostalgic nor utopian, merely untried.

"I see a community as accepting of new ideas and different cultures as its members are supportive of people who grieve. I see a landscape dotted by modern wind turbines providing electricity and independence. ... Farmland producing not one crop annually, but many, growing in the same field. ... I see freedom, democracy, and country folk, plenty of them."

Chuck Haga, a former writer for the Star Tribune, lives and writes in Grand Forks, N.D.