Good Land: My Life As a Farm Boy Book

Bruce Bair was nine years old when his father Harold first put him to work on the family wheat farm near Goodland, Kansas. "He couldn't stand it anymore. Labor unused. Labor playing with kittens. Labor chatting happily with its mother over dinner." The boy's initiation into mechanized farming ends in "a tower of twisted iron twenty feet tall," a catastrophe that causes his atheist father to utter a prayer. Good Land is the chronicle of forty years in the lives of one farming family on the High Plains. Bair writes with biting humor about his isolation as a young man, his sibling rivalries, and his education in a one-room school - a story that will refute all of the myths perpetrated by Winslow Homer and television's Walton family. And always looming is Harold, Bair's stern, stubborn father, a genius with metal and an acetylene torch and the sort of taskmaster who might drive any son off a farm. All three Bair children will eventually leave the farm, but the author is continually drawn back, returning year after year to help out with summer fallow and wheat sowing, and to do battle with his father. But Good Land is no romantic or nostalgic looking back at a vanishing way of life. This unsentimental account of a single family is also the story of the evolution of American agriculture, as the machines on the land grow in size and as smaller, marginal farms are swallowed up by larger ones. It is the story of "Big farming," told with wit and clear-eyed honesty.