The family farm created a special culture and value system in America. The great migration of people and farmers from the farms to our cities in the past half-century has dealt a devastating loss to rural America, which has never recovered. What  remains is precious. Yesterday, visiting Ed and Carol Gulley, I saw his son Jeremy, above, and his grandson Jaiboy, below, working different ends of a hay field. Ed, no longer able to walk steadily on his own, came out with a walker.

While so many of our children spend their youth in front of screens, sending often meaningless messages to one another for much of their lives,  Jaiboy and his father were cutting their hay-field. This is a hot, dirty and complex ritual of Spring.

Jeremy was harvesting square bales and Jaiboy, who is 13, was on the other side cutting hay for the larger round bales. Touch is difficult and complicated work, something I have never done and have no idea how to do.

There were three generations of Gulleys in that field, Jeremy, Jaiboy, and the grand scion of the farm, Ed Gulley, watching from the across the road.

It must have been  hard for Ed to watch others do what he did for many years, but he was proud of his family, I could see it in his face. A beautiful thing to see, a painful thing in so many ways. Ed has brain cancer, he has perhaps taken  his last ride in a tractor.  But his blood and soul were out there in the field. And that is something.

The best farming, writes Wendell Berry, requires a farmer, not the oppressive social and mechanical system taking over the family farms.

The best farming calls for a husbandman, and a nurturer, not a technician or CEO or businessman.

“A technician or a businessman, given the necessarily abilities and ambitions, can be made in a little while, by training” writes Berry. “A good farmer, on the other hand, is a cultural product; he is made by a sort of training., certainly, in what his time imposes or demands. But he is also made by generations of experience. This essential experience can only be accumulated, tested, preserved, handed down in settled households, friendships, and communities that are deliberately and carefully native to their own ground, in which the past has prepared the present and the present safeguards the future.”

We are losing real farmers, in droves, and by the day. Milk prices are now so low that milk producers are handing out suicide prevention pamphlets along with milk checks, while our political leaders grow ever fatter and more corrupt. The swamp never seems to drain, it just swells.

The new dependence on moving farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and  fewer hands – with the consequent increase of overhead, debt, and dependence on machines, has staggering cultural implications, and none of them are good. What is being lost can never be  replaced.

it was a privilege for me to stand between these three generations of farmers with my camera. I hope they all stay with us forever, but if and when they are gone, they will be missed beyond imagination. Americans have always taken them for granted, and  one day they will not take them for granted any longer.