American Harvest : : God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland

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Call Number: 921 Mockett, Marie
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	921 Mockett, Marie	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Inheriting her father's 7,000 acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, the author accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland, peeling back layers of the American story, the politics of food and the culture of the Great Plains.
For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett's father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family's fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth's crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as "the divide," inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals "not white," but who people she encounters can't quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

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American Harvest submitted by leighsprauer on August 7, 2022, 9:01pm Marie Mockett, a California-born, East-coast-educated woman in her forties, rides along with a group of men (and a few women) as they travel from Texas to Idaho doing custom combine work in wheat. She’s known many of these men her whole life: they have cut her family’s wheat on the family farm in Nebraska. Although she has never lived on the farm, and it has been farmed and managed by another family, the tradition is that they, the landowners, would travel to their 3500 acres to oversee the harvest each summer.
In traveling with them, she hopes to answer the pressing question: what makes Red state people and Blue state people so different? She examines this question from many angles: religious, racial, the varying amounts of trust in science, and even the effects of landscape and geography on a people. I’m not sure she is ever fully satisfied that she has found an answer; and in fact the trip is cut short because her presence, whether as a woman, a city person, a writer – she’s not quite sure – is in the end too much of a distraction to the men who are working. In that regard, her experiment, or rather, observation, might seem like a failure.
The main tension, although not the only one, are the religious differences. Most of the workers are Mennonite or another type of Anabaptist. They are mostly creationists but also believe firmly in the science and technology of farming, a contrast which is hard for her to reconcile. She is mostly unimpressed, and often upset by, the church services she attends, although there are a few exceptions. She does seem to try very hard to understand Christianity, but as a Christian myself, her ignorance is pretty astounding. Her coastal liberalism shows itself in this ignorance: she does respect the intelligence of the farmers, and admits to them that Blue-staters think they’re ignorant, but doesn’t seem to see or grasp the enormity of her own ignorance. Not understanding Christianity is not like an American who isn’t familiar with, say, Buddhism or even Islam. Even non-Christians ought to have a working knowledge how Christian beliefs influence the daily life of Christians in America. (Another issue is that her view of Christianity is pretty singularly focused: on the evangelical Christians she knows. Since the reconciliation of faith and reason is such a big sticking point for her, it’s odd that she doesn’t contrast them with Catholics or even mainstream Protestants. The reason, I would guess, is that her knowledge of these is also pretty rudimentary.)
Still, it’s a poignant book to read. Mockett is one of the few people who is able to straddle two worlds, and speak the language of each. If divisions in our country are ever to be overcome, it is people like her who will need to help bridge the gap.