Review: Biggest Little Farm, no spoilers that I know of.

There are some really nice things and some really not-so-nice things about this movie, which opens with the raging California wildfires of 2018 racing towards the fences of Apricot Lane farm, the “little” 240 acre biodiversity adventure an hour north of L.A. founded by the film’s director and narrator, John Chester and  his foodie/blogger wife Molly.

There are also some glancingly referred to but never seen or ID’d big money backers of the film, which took the premise into another realm of reality for me. I don’t know anyone with any money who would pay for a young couple with no farming experience to go and do anything this improbable.

Unless, maybe, they were thinking about a movie.

Biggest Little Farm is something of a documentary, feature film and infotainment commercial for the sprawling Apricot Lane Farm in California (in its seventh year, you can pay for a guided tour with Chester himself along with many other tourists.)

Chester is smart about how to present this movie.

Not only are we wondering  from the first moment how the farm will survive the seemingly unstoppable fires threatening it, he wants us to accept that the whole reason for this life-changing, Quixotic, idealistic environmental experiment is his cute but ill-behaved rescue dog Todd.

Todd was making so much trouble in their tiny Santa Monica apartment that they were getting evicted and decided to go turn their lives upside-down and go run a biodiverse farm rather than give him up.

As long as we are alive, Chester told Todd dramatically, “this will be your last home.” Oh, oh, I thought, I’ve seen this movie before. I’ve even had a movie like this made about me.

As someone who loves to tell stories about his dogs, and profit from it, this makes sense. Nobody wants to go see another movie proclaiming the end of the earth on a beautiful Spring Day. Get the cute dog out in front and put it all on him, the critics will swoon.

I’m all for exploiting dogs for the benefit of a story, but have  I ever loved a dog that much? I hope not.

Like much else in the movie, which is beautifully shot, filled with endearing moments,  cute animals and environmentally correct messages, it made me  twitch a little bit.

For one thing this is no “little farm.”

Chester is vague about the funding, but it must easily have gone into the tens of  millions of dollars. It took an incredible amount of work and money to even begin to restore this huge farm.

Apricot Lane Farm was an agricultural wreck when John and Molly bought it, they tore up hundreds of acres, planted tens of thousands of diverse fruit trees, brought in sheep, chickens, ducks, guard dogs and the most modern, sparklingly maintained and expensive farm equipment I have every seen anywhere, on a real farm or in the movies.

Chester is vague from the beginning about where the money comes from to sustain this long and difficult venture;  to turn the wasteland he bought into  a beautiful, irrigated, soil healthy, model bio-farm.

The story takes place over seven drama-packed years, in which everything that can happen to a farm happens to this one. If there were such a thing as an Agricultural Super Hero, it would be this big/little farm, it could be a character in the Avengers. You can’t knock it down a million times, but you can’t kill it.

The couple, who had no previous agricultural experience, rise to the moment, again and again. Unlike any farmer I ever heard of, they hire  a mystical farm guru named Alan York who tells them to stock the farm with all forms of animal and crop life.

Even though John and Molly do not believe this plan will work, or even understand it, they follow this advice to letter and come to love York as a mentor and friend.

There is enough organic waste in this movie to fill an Olympic stadium, and I should caution readers of this blog that although the film is gorgeous and there are beautiful wildlife and nature shots which alone make the movie worth seeing, there is also enough animal blood and guts spilled, replete with maggots and headless corpses and ruptured intenstines to make a livestock horror movie.

To Chester’s credit, life on a farm is not sugar-coated, as it often is in popular culture. It is presented accurately  as real, difficult, bloody and unpredictable.

No mention in the movie is made of money after the first couple of minutes, and as someone who owns a small farm (I am no  farmer, but a writer with a farm) I caught my breath a hundred times in the movie, soaking in one mishap and natural disaster and coyote-attack after another, wondering each time how on earth are they every going to get enough money to pay for that?  

We will apparently never know. But the money apparently kept flowing. I’ve seen a lot of farms go under for a lot less.

The movie was interesting for what was not in it.

Besides money, we see very little of Molly Chester, except for quick shots of her smiling, or showing sorrow over an animal corpse. The movie has a very clear and appealing environmental message, but there is no mention of climate change, global warming, or the destruction of good farming soil all over the country as chronicled by Wendell Berry.

Nor is there much mention of the giant agri-farms imprisoning animals under the most awful conditions and mass marketing food.

Molly, whose idea it was to move to the farm in the first place (even before Todd made them go), says almost nothing about how she feels about the move, whether she regrets it or wishes they could flee.

And there is not a single word or scene showing how the relationship of this couple evolved under such challenge and stress.  This moviegoer wants to know.

It was almost as if any kind of personal reality – they had to be scared out of their wits – would taint their cheerful unflappability.

The movie can be funny – Farm Guru Alan York is so caught up in his radical view of farming that he can’t even articulate it, and John – who is unfailingly straight and calm – can’t quite get over the fact that York shows up dressed in sandals and wearing linen.

I could never really get a handle on this couple, I have no sense of what they are really like under the resolve and wholesomeness.

They also seem to have a full brigade of helpers, paid and volunteer. Beautiful, tanned and fit college kids we are told, showed up from everywhere to help, local immigrant workers on the payroll.

And a lot of help was needed. This, too, is never really explained, but would make most farmers skeptical.

The middle of the movie is compelling, even fascinating, as this couple – who never once argue or squabble onscreen in seven years of trial, struggle and looming disaster – figure out how to make a farm work the old-fashioned way.

They do this by balancing nature, fending off coyotes, aphids, snails that kill fruit trees, bird invasions, drought, root  eating gophers, groundhogs, hawks and owls. Except for shooting the occasional coyote, they don’t believe in killing predators, they try to use them to get rid of other predators and pests.

They let nature heal itself and restore the farm (with the help of a lot of manure).

Without question, they offer powerful lessons about preserving and harming precious and productive soil in a better way than the giant corporate farms now taking over agriculture. The food is better, the land is better, the eggs are  better, the soil is healthier and lasts longer, the animals live in a better way, the farmers are fulfilled.

I would certainly recommend that anyone who is intrigued by farms, or who loves animals, or understands that climate change is real, or who wants to hear some good ideas about how human beings can  help nature do its work better than we can, go see this movie.

The animal cannibal scenes are jarring, but far overwhelmed by the beauty of the documentary. The movie held my attention and I could watch those nature shots forever.

I thought the injection of the dog Todd to such an obviously manipulative degree was ludicrous and cheapened the movie. Any real farmer would gag at the shiny, clean and very expensive equipment that the Apricot Land Farm has. I’ve been on a lot of farms taking photos, and never seen anyone that squeaky clean.

There is nothing home-made, dirty, grease and oil-stained,  or patched together out of used parts.

Even the farm truck that takes the young pigs to slaughter was white (I’ve never seen a white truck on a farm) without a speck of dirt on it.

I think Chester and those silent backers of the film were thinking movie all the way, that explains the dog – who has no bearing at all on the story –  and the avoidance of any personal trouble or heavy-duty environmental propaganda.

I liked much about the movie, but I left the theater thinking this farm is so unrealistic, and so far beyond the range of any farmer or any couple without Hedge Fund partners that it was almost like a Disney Farm Movie of the future.

It is really the story of a Corporate Progressive Farm rather in opposition to a Corporate Commercial Farm. I like this version better.

Two-hundred-forty acres is not for young couples looking to give security to a dog.

Real farms are not just gritty in the personal sense of people (I can’t  help but think of the chaos and junk of the Gulley Farm and every other farm I’ve seen) but hard and heartbreaking in every sense. Every real farm is a struggle.

I won’t tell you of those fires reached Apricot Lane Farm or not, you’ll have to go see the movie.

I would have loved to hear from some beleaguered small farmers in the movie, reacting to the changes made at Apricot Lane. Did they think there was anything there for them? Is there anything there for us?

If any idealistic young couple without Wall Street backing asked me if this is something they could do or should do, I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d say: “this is, as far as I know,  the right way to do it, but it is not remotely something you could ever do.”