The urban-rural food movement.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: COMMENT - Essay

Just a few blocks from The Progressive's offices, the Dane County Farmers' Market-the biggest direct, local farmers' market in the country-attracts thousands of shoppers every Saturday morning from April to November.

People flock to the Capitol Square to enjoy the sheer abundance of beautiful vegetables, flowers, meats, and cheeses, grab a cup of coffee, catch up with neighbors, stop by tables set up by various nonprofit groups, and chat with more than 160 area farmers who sell the highest quality produce grown on some of the richest farmland in the world.

This is the agricultural hub of an agricultural region. It is no coincidence that it is also the cradle of progressivism, a century-old vision of local democracy, stewardship of the land, and a way of life that treasures community.

Under a bright blue awning at the market you can stop and talk with the Carr family, of Pecatonica Valley Farm.

John and Mary Lee Carr, who worked the land in Iowa County, Wisconsin, for most of their adult lives, have passed down their farm to the next generation: their sons Wade and Todd and daughter-in-law Amy and their three grandchildren, who gather eggs, feed the pigs, and take care of the small operation themselves.

Over the years, the Carrs watched the rise of industrial-scale agriculture wipe out small farms and beautiful little towns all over the region.

"By banding together and fighting, we can just make it," John Carr says. But the outlook is not good. The reason, he says, is simple: "We've been steamrolled by the twenty-four-row corn planter."

Carr embraces the farmers' market, the slow food movement and the urbanites who support local farms. "But you get away from the university town and you're in the jaws of corporate marketing and corporate farming," he says.

The destruction of small farms by corporate agriculture is a much more serious problem than just nostalgia for a quaint, old-fashioned way of life. It is a crisis of historic proportions, for urban and rural people alike.

"I see us becoming basically a landless society, much like the Middle Ages in Europe," says Carr.

Rural Wisconsin is looking more and more like the feudal societies the Carrs' immigrant ancestors fled when they came to the United States. Modern corporate farming has led to what Carr calls "the violent restructuring of local culture."

It goes like this: "Folks are forced to go to Madison to work, and it's handy for them to stop at the big box store on their way home. The...