For several years, I went to the farms of dairy farmers who had to sell their cows and shut down their farms. I wanted to take pictures of the end of a small farm, in the ghoulish way I learned as a journalist.

I stopped doing it because there were no more family dairy farms around me and it was heartbreaking to see these hard-working and broken farmers sobbing when their cows were hauled away to corporate farms.

I thought of exhibiting my pictures in a show, but after thinking about it, I didn’t save any of the photos. It broke my heart to look at them.

We think of ourselves as a benevolent country, but we are not.

I consider the abandonment of the family farmer a black stain on American history and one of the worst tragedies I’ve witnessed in my life.

We will be feeling their loss forever.

“People are fed by the food industry,” writes author and poet and farmer Wendell Berry, “and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”

The old farmers paid a lot of attention to food.

Nature, wrote Berry, is a party to all of our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and  a sterner sense of justice than we or our leaders do.

I’ve been reading the wonderful new novel about farming called Pastoral Song, and one of the characters, a crusty old farmer reminded me of the wisdom and character of these farmers, many of whom I got to know before they died abruptly of broken hearts or vanished into Florida trailer parks.

I stopped and asked a dozen farmers if I could observe the end of their farmers, and every single one of them said yes, they wanted somebody to remember what it meant to be a farmer. They didn’t wish to be forgotten.

From time to time, I remember my promise and write about them on my blog.

The farmers I meet with and photographed are faint memories now, no one came to interview them or remembers them.

No part of the government fought for them or came to their aid. No congressperson was around to fight for them.  It is one of the great betrayals in American history. They fed us for centuries.

Most of those farms remain empty, eerily quiet, the dust and manure buckets covered in mist, she silos looming out of the fog. Ghosts, every one of them.

The old farmers worked hard and seemed to know their days were numbered. They were old-fashioned. They loved their cows and loved seeing them sitting or grazing in a green-shaded pasture to graze or chew their cuds.

It killed them to see their cows whipped onto trailers and hauled off to factory farms where they would never see grass or the outside again. Time and again, I saw the old farmers gather to say goodbye to a farm. They were all weeping.

The farmers knew about the earth, they worked to preserve the soil, fix their fences, plow and till their fields, without the giant tractors the corporate farms can use.

They worked from dark to dusk every day of the year and they saw themselves as stewards of their animals and of the earth.

One told me that he thought people in modern America remained children for much of their lives. They are free but without purpose or values.

No young person would work on a farm anymore, and the farmer’s children had abandoned the farming life for better-paying jobs in the cities working for people they hated and who cared nothing for them.

Most of the farmers had become stubborn in their old age and suspicious of change, they saw the end coming way too late to do anything about it, they all seemed to know they were doomed but had no plans to change.

In a way, I fell in love with these weathered old men, even though they had little in common with me. They often each said the same thing.

The next generation in America, they often told me,  was freeer than they were,  but had little meaning in their lives.

They were disconnected from almost everything that mattered – nature, animals,  the dignity of work, honor, honesty,  the obligation to protect the earth, lives of meaning, the joy of a calling rather than a job,  the chance to die in your sleep or in a barn milking cows.

The farmers didn’t go on Twitter or Facebook, or mind other people’s business. They hid behind computers to send angry messages to strangers.

And they had plenty to be angry about.

They all said they loved their way of life and wouldn’t change a day of it, even if they could.

But they couldn’t.

My story so far has a happier ending than theirs, in part because they shared their souls and wisdom with me. I heard what they said, I listened to it, it is a part of me.

These old farmers taught me a lot about the choices I wanted to make in my life.

My life had to have meaning.

I think it’s very true that we have the freedom to play, but so many of the people I know are disconnected from the things that matter.

My world changed when I bought my farm, and I am no farmer. But my own farm taught that life and death are no surprises, but each was a part of the same thing.

More than anything, I wanted a meaningful life.

I wanted to re-connect to nature. I became increasingly sentimental about my farm and cherished the remnants of the old ways, which helped shaped the values that formed our country.

Every farmer saw life and death almost every day, sometimes more than once. They made little money but worked for the honor and pride of it.

Most of the farmers no longer had the option to change.

They seemed trapped between the old farming values of hard work and thrift and the economic realities of the corporate era and global economics.

No individual can really compete for long against the rulers of the Corporate Nation we have become. But some can avoid the struggle, become their own voices, spare the hypnotic toys and machines of the new world, the monster TV and the big machines.

I’m not sure yet whether I have achieved what I set out to do or even come close.

I fear, as most creative people do, becoming one of those dinosaurs, those ghosts who fail to keep up with the changes in the world and are devoured by them.

I don’t know how much time I have, but I will never forget the old farmers – my friend Ed Gulley was one of them – who fought for their values to the bitter end and never turned their fate over to bankers and lenders, or the latest thing.

More than anything, the old farmers inspired me.

They lived their own lives and in their own way, and none of them ever listened to another person’s voice in their head telling them what to do.

I am close to accomplishing what I set out to do.

I’ve ducked the trap of being caught between book publishing and my blog. I keep to the old ways of writing – longish essays on whatever I want – but turned to a new tool of the digital revolution.

I think of those old farmers, spirits now, every time I ride past a farm.

I am living a life with animals and learning every day about Mother Nature.  I am living a life of meaning. I am free to play but don’t have time.

That is one trap I couldn’t avoid.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, wrote Wendell Berry, that we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

That is my story.