The Fat of the Land – Dream or Reality?            By Alan Borer

            Agriculture has a long and (mostly) noble tradition in the written word.  I suspect that I am not the only reader of this magazine who developed an interest in agriculture through reading, regardless of whether farming is a profession, a hobby, or just a fantasy.  One sub-genre of this farming books is the “back to the land” story.  Although plots and details differ widely, the story is basically this:  urban- or suburbanite is downtrodden or bereft of the country life.  The urbanite devours books, draws plans, saves hard-earned money, and begins to scout for real estate that might meet the needs/wants/dreams of a pastoral and profitable lifestyle.  Finally the right piece of ground is selected, or one that will do, and he or she makes the leap from urban to rural and becomes a full participant in the pastoral life.

            The farmer may not be successful.  Some of these stories are tragedies.  Sometimes the would-be agrarian finds out that the farmer’s life is not for them after all.  A fine example of this is Richard Gilbert’s 2014 book Shepherd, in which the author tries raising sheep outside of Athens, Ohio, only to meet with enough drawbacks to withdraw from the sheepfold.  Many other memoirs recount success stories, although they set the parameters of success on their own.  RFD, by Charles Allen Smart and published in 1937, is a well told story of a successful quest for the rural near Chillicothe, about fifty miles (and fifty years) from Athens.

            This is a longwinded way of saying that I enjoy the literature of farming.  Recently I had occasion to look at a syllabus from a class in “agricultural science” in the summer of 1915 at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. The then-president of the college, Walter G. Clippinger, had a long standing dream of offering a degree in agriculture, and the summer program may have been a way of testing the waters.  In any event, the list represented an attempt to cover what was up-to-the moment in sheep manuals, grain economics, marketing and the like.  The only author I recognized was Liberty Hyde Bailey, the author of so many books on agriculture and horticulture.

            The last book on the list, in the category “Other,” was a volume written by John Williams Streeter and titled The Fat of the Land: The Story of an American Farm.  The book, which was first published in 1903, was written by the son of an early Otterbein professor.  Streeter himself attended Otterbein until 1858, when he left due to financial hardship.  He served in the Civil War, and then became a homeopathic physician in Chicago.  Around 1895, Streeter became infected during a surgical procedure and was forced to retire.  He died in 1905, having spent the years of his retirement as an author.  He lived in the prosperous Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, where he built a country home called “Uppercross,” and maintained thirty acres, most of which was wooded or planted in fruit trees.

            The Fat of the Land tells the story of “Tom,” a doctor who was forced into retirement after a surgical accident (sound familiar?).  No longer able to do a physician’s work, Tom is able to spend his retirement nest egg on buying land.  After much searching and advertising, he purchased 320 acres of land near “Exeter” (which may or may not be in New England).  He carefully chose a staff of workers, planted an orchard, built chicken houses and barns, and built a farmhouse for “Polly,” his wife.  Hoping at the start to set up the farm for $60,000, Tom managed to go through $100,000 dollars in three years.  Fortuitous that he had a doctor’s savings on which to rely!

Tom wanted to run a “factory farm.”  Before the reader cringes, he did not mean factory farm in the modern sense, farming done with chemicals and advanced machinery, a farm of antibiotics, crushingly tight-packed livestock never seeing the light of day, and oceans of manure.  Tom, perhaps in his innocence, used an older sense of the word “factory:”

I wished to experiment in intensive farming . . . . I believed that if I fed the land, it would feed me.  My plan was to sell nothing from the farm except finished products, such as butter, fruit, eggs, chickens and hogs.  I believed that best results would be attained by keeping only the best stock, and, after feeding it liberally, selling it in the most favorable market.  To live on the fat of the land is what I proposed to do. . . .   [p. 9]

            The ways in which Tom built his farm, “Four Oaks,” illustrated his tenacity in keeping to this model.  Planting 3400 apple trees was not too many, because his farmhands carefully tended them, and sold the apples at a higher than average price.  Same standards applied to his chickens; buying 4000 white Wyandotte chicken eggs would lead to a massive flock even if only half would lay eggs.  Tom’s flock enjoyed clean, well-lit, heated buildings, fresh water, and grain grown in his own fields.  When time came to sell, he could get top price for eggs and fryers, because the customer knew what and where Tom’s chickens came from, and did not mind paying more for a clean, safe product:

To lack confidence in the egg is a serious matter at the breakfast table, and a person who can insure perfect trust will not lack patronage. [p. 108]

            Tom and Polly approached their farm not merely as an economic enterprise, but also as a chosen life – and an interesting life:

            We were both keenly interested in the experiment.  Nothing that happened on the farm went unchallenged.  The milk product of the day was a thing of interest; the egg count could not go unnoted; a hatch of chickens must be seen before they left the incubator; a litter of pigs must be admired. . . . flowers were blooming, trees were leafing, a robin had built in the black oak, a gopher was tunneling the rose bed – a thousand things, full of interest, were happening every day.  As a place where things the most expected do happen, recommend me to a quiet farm. [p. 172]

            And,

            For sharp contrasts give me a dull country.  The unexpected is the usual in small and in great things alike as they happen on a farm, and I make no apology to the reader for entering them in my narrative.   [p. 209]

            The book has no exact ending.  Tom and Polly reckoned that, despite their considerable expenses, they created what they wanted – a self sustaining farm making a small profit, and farmed in a rational yet humane fashion.  As a book, Streeter’s work is thoughtful and pleasant reading when it kept to its overall subject.  At times it reads like an accounting textbook.  Chapters on labor strikes and an overseas voyage seem out-of-place.  But as a whole, the book was well-received.

            The surprising success of the book was coupled with an audience that did not always understand that The Fat of the Land was, and was meant to be read as, a novel.  Yet from the outset, readers saw it as a real, “how I did it” account of an actual experiment.  Then as now, the book review in The New York Times, set the pace:

            Here, combined with hints of a story and several episodes quite foreign to the matter in hand, is what purports to be a detailed account of an ambitious and successful experiment in factory-farming by a man who spent the greater part of his fifty odd years in the practice of medicine. [New York Times, March 5, 1904]

            Note that the Times used the words “purports to be.”  Yet in the review that followed, there was no further mention of the fact that the details of farming expenses, labor, animals, and other facts were presumably, all figments of the author’s imagination.

            The book became a bestseller, and went through four printings.  It was not his intention, but Streeter became known as a source of quotations for the agricultural press.  Of the many periodicals that quoted him, few or none pointed out that readers were taking farming advice from a physician-turned-novelist.  For example, the Farmer’s Review in their March 31, 1904 article on “Location of the Farm House” quoted at length from Fat of the Land.  The same journal quoted the book again on April 15, 1905 in the article, “Grow More Clover.”  The February 20, 1904 issue of American Gardening described the book as a factual account:

            The author’s farming experiment did not begin until he was fifty-three; but his book shows what an orchard property cared for will come to in seven years.  The author points out to young people how an income will grow from an orchard of a few acres, and that the fun of doing it will be more worth while than the income.  [p. 123]

            Although Otterbein University, as Streeter’s alma mater, could not be blamed for using the book in its curriculum, it was not the only school to think highly enough of it to use it in the classroom.  The superintendant of the Hendricks County, Indiana, school system used Fat of the Land as a textbook secondary only to Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Principles of Agriculture in 1907. And in a report to the nation’s librarians, the American Library Association ended a list of agricultural books for public libraries:

. . . .  Streeter’s Fat of the land have [sic] come to be almost as popular as novels. 

Despite the wide use of a novel as a textbook and a provider of instruction for farmers, there does not appear to be any dishonesty or “cover-up” in the story of The Fat of the Land.  Dr. Streeter died on June 4, 1905, not too long after his book came out.  In a letter to a fan, Streeter claimed to have spent but sixty days writing the novel, and that at least part of that time was spent in a Chicago hospital.   Posthumously, some of the reviewing sources pointed out that Streeter’s book was in fact a novel.  The August, 1905 issue of Book World stated:

Dr. John Williams Streeter, whose “Fat of the Land” has interested so many people, numbers of whom believe the book to be actual fact instead of fiction, which last it is, died in Lake Forest, Illinois. . . . where he also owned and worked a farm.  From this last, much of his inspiration for “The Fat of the Land” must have been derived.

            The Fat of the Land made an impression on many contemporary farming people.  A bestseller of its time, it is rarely mentioned today, except as an early example of a “back to the land” book, and a fictitious example as well.  Many of the book’s lessons on farming still apply to the right kind of farm.  And while “Four Oaks” may have been no more than a dream of the author, all of us who dabble in agriculture know that dreams are important stimulators.  They may never get beyond the dream phase, but, like Streeter’s dream, they are the beginning of every farm – fiction or not!

[originally published in Farming Magazine, Spring 2020]