If somebody were to ask me what I might suggest for Ed’s tombstone (nobody has or should), I might suggest one of his favorite slogans: “Drink Milk, Save A Cow.”

Ed may not have expressed the idea in the most graceful way, sandwiched as it was between  two bleached halves of a steer’s skull, but still, it is a powerful statement with much meaning.

The sign might as well have said “drink milk, save a way of life.

According to the United Stations, 2,473,018 people died in the United States in the most recent year for which the data is available, which means 6,775 die each day.

Was Ed’s death the most important? Was it worth all this fuss and attention? The wonderful Aretha Franklin died early this morning also, her death was all over the news. Ed’s obituary in the local paper cost $50.

Ed’s death is important, and not just because he was a good friend and a fascinating man.

His life and death is important because he is a powerful symbol of what so many Americans are feeling as we become a corporate and  angry and selfish nation disconnected from each other and no longer interested in sustaining the land or protecting the individual, and the individual’s way of life, which is to say the farmer’s way of life.

About a half century ago, the politicians and economists and corporations who run our country decided that the family farm was no longer efficient, it required the labor of too many people. They decided  expensive machines could do it better and faster and cheaper.

Since this policy was embraced and announced, America has seen one of the greatest migrations in the country’s history, from the farm and rural America to the cities, where tens of millions of people gave up  doing what they loved and knew in order to seek safety and meaning in jobs they mostly hated working for people who care nothing about them.

No more life in nature, no more life with animals, no more lives full of choice and meaning.

This migration was to devastate Main street, rural America, farming communities, and especially the family farm.  It set the stage for the bitter polarization ripping the country apart. It was the beginning of the end for farmers like Ed.

Ed recognized this, he often described himself as a dinosaur, and I knew from the first time that this was the truth. He hoped to badger his fellow farmers into fighting or changing or diversifying in some way. It didn’t happen. I remember telling there was no way our greedy and sometimes valueless society was going to turn and spend money and save the farms.

It is a cliché to say somebody is the last of a breed, but Ed was, in fact, the last of a breed.

You will not again see many like him in our lifetime.  But he was a troglodyte. He could never fit into the corporate vision of the farm or the country, any more than I could. Maybe that’s why we loved one another.

The strongest force that followed the great flight from the farms has been economic ruin on the family farm.

Stagnant prices, growing debt, murderous competition from corporate farms, bloodless economists and government policy that supported bigness, not family or individuality or quality of life.

This became a tsunami for farmers, an overwhelming series of difficulties for them to fight.

It wasn’t just another business that began to fail, it was a way of life.

Ed Gulley was a doomed warrior for that life, he fought for it every day of his life, and he knew he never  really had a chance. His own life has a think, become it’s own legacy, it reminds us of what we had and what we seem determined to lose.

Today with thousands of farm families losing their farms every week, the economists and politicians are still saying, as they have said for decades now, that people like Ed  Gulley deserve to fail, need to fail, because they are the least efficient producers of food, and that all of us are better off for their failure.

I always regarded Ed as a freedom fighter, as many farmers are in different ways.

Ed fought for much more than milk prices, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously.

He found for the right to live freely and for himself. He fought for the right to pursue a calling, not just a job. He fought for the right to live in community when many Americans are quite alone. He fought to life a life in nature, and in close connection to the land.

He fought to live a life with animals, to give his cows the best lives work animals have ever had in this world. He fought for the right to be different, to get buried in the camo shirt and shorts that were his uniform.

Ed saw his world clearly.

He saw the insularity of farmers, their unwillingness to engage with the outside world, their failure to pursue their own interests with political leaders who cared about them, their willingness to go deeply into machine debt and lose their storied independence, their resistance to change and to new technologies that might help them.

They endured the flight of their sons and daughters from the family farm, which could no longer support them, to the big cities.

I had the sense that Ed’s death marked not only his life, but an era in which the family farm was the soul of America, a breeding  ground for freedom and hard work and fulfillment, the source of Main Street’s strength and community and vitality.

As Ed  grew older, the family farmers themselves began to age and fade away,  unable to fit into the new Corporate Nation, which is the very antithesis of what the family farm always stood for.

The great question that hovers over the future of the family farm, wrote Wendell Berry, a farmer, author and environmentalist, is this question:

what are people for?

Is our greatest dignity in bad work and unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings, of a rich and valuable and iconic culture the social goal of government and industry? I think so.

Berry and other lovers of the farm point out that this is the only conclusion we can reach from our new attitude towards work, especially the manual work necessary to preserve the land, care well for our partners the animals, preserve individuality  and self-sustenance rather than expensive mechanization, automation, and the new ethic,  cost saving  and profit-making at all costs and by any means.

The great irony of the family farm, which was for centuries a bastion of freedom, is that it is no longer affordable for anyone to farm but giant companies with access to endless cash. And the government and the economists and the corporate vampires got their wish.

Where do people and their lives fit into this new and cold way of finding our food, and living our lives?

Nobody can say.

Ed stood for many things, but not this new economy, this new way of agriculture,  which seems to have quite openly forgotten what people are for. He never allowed himself to lose his independence to bankers or tractor makers.

He saw his own world fading, and his place in the new world disappearing. In that sense, his passing had meaning beyond his own life.

Ed never forgot what people are for. As a result, he will be remembered and celebrated long after many people are not.