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of liquid manure until there is enough spring growth to make sure it won’t flow straight into the river. On the other hand, says Brynn, “there used to be fifteen different houses filled with people farming this land. Now it’s all one big farm.” The cows are confined to a huge barn instead of walking in the fields, standing all day on pavement like city commuters waiting for the bus. The farmers are producing milk at commodity prices, hoping to stay big and efficientenough to compete with the mega-dairies of California and Arizona and Wisconsin, hoping to defy the odds that have shut down 80 percent of Vermont’s dairy farmers in the last thirty years. For the hardworking family it might mean a necessary path to survival, but for the region it didn’t really replace the smaller-scale farming that had once thrived here. It was, perhaps, a kind of holding action—keeping the land in use, unsubdivided, till an economy emerged that could allow it to be more diversely farmed.
    And so, when we finally reached the edge of this sea of corn, emerging on a dirt road, I bade David farewell and set off again to the west—interested to see, among other things, if there were signs of that new economy emerging anywhere. If the same kind of creative thinking he was bringing to forests had begun to bubble up on area farms. If the trend toward bigness was inevitable, or if other visions beckoned.
    All morning, walking the back road from Bristol toward Middlebury, I was in open country. There were fields in corn, and meadows and pastures, and there were abandoned fields growing in. An awful lot of former farms had been divided up into house lots—until recently, Vermont law exempted parcels over ten acres from state septic laws, so the houses tended to be spaced about the same distance apart. Many had expanses of grass out front, and for some reason, probably because a thunderstorm was threatening for later in the day, itseemed as if every single man above retirement age was out on his rider-mower. Some had clearly cut their lawns just a day or two before—their passage left no discernible wake, like the Russian babushkas forever brooming their spotless patch of sidewalk. But it was a sign of atavistic devotion nonetheless. Farming may have all but disappeared in this country (fewer than 2 percent of Americans list it as their occupation, making farmers scarcer than prisoners), but some desire to tend the soil persists.
    And occasionally it erupts, despite all efforts at suppression. I reached Chris Granstrom’s farm about one in the afternoon, and slung my backpack down in his garden shed because the rain was clearly just minutes away now. Granstrom is, come to think of it, tall and skinny, with a broad smile. He arrived in the region twenty-five years ago to attend Middlebury College. “Between my junior and senior year I worked the summer for a dairy farmer a little ways west in Bridport,” he says. “As any good farmer should, he did his best to talk me out of staying with agriculture. But I loved the whole thing.” And he loved it still, though a little more sadly and wisely. “We’ve farmed U-pick strawberries here for twenty-one years,” he says. “Between that, and my wife teaching, and a little freelance writing, we’ve made it. On a Saturday in the spring we’ll get vast crowds. But you know, we’ve been growing them in the same soil. Rotating them, of course, but still, by the fourth rotation, they justweren’t as vigorous. And I was learning about all this,” he says, with a sweep of his hand that took in a small pile of cuttings, his daughter Sara who was busy transplanting them, and a greenhouse beyond. “This” was his new project: wine grapes specially bred for the North, a concept he stumbled across at a website called littlefatwino.com .
    O NLY A YEAR after planting, Granstrom now has row upon row of sturdy vines where his strawberries once grew. We’re walking them, clipping promising-looking