Having grown up with a mixed picture of farming, where on the one hand there was the Old MacDonald Had a Farm kind of fantasy about how cute everything is mixed with the reality of my father's stories about growing up on a farm. So the one thing I do know is that it is a lot of hard work, with long hours and no days off. The movie's main characters (one of whom is also the filmmaker) left urban life
and got into farming because they had this mixed idea as well. The reality of
farming is that there are a lot of factors that are out of your control, a fact telegraphed in
the movie's ominous flash-forward opening, which heralds a
Biblically-scaled natural disaster that the farmers will have to survive
somehow.
But all in all, this is a very likable, if sometimes a bit too polished
and vague, exercise in environmental philosophy and rural nostalgia,
about a couple of well-off, upper-middle-class professionals
(respectively, a documentary filmmaker and a chef and organic food
blogger) who decide to chuck it all and go back to the land, conquer
adversity, and do pretty well for themselves, all things considered. I would recommend it, as I think it covers a lot of the realities while having more than a bit of luck.
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