Brian Donahue dropped out of college in the 1970s to learn to be a farmer, and in 1980 was one of the co-founders of Land’s Sake Farm in Weston, Massachusetts, a non-profit community farm. He also worked as Director of Education at The Land Institute in Kansas. When he eventually returned to Brandeis University, he focused his research on the New England farm landscape over time, producing careful studies of the Concord area that became not only a multi-award-winning book–The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (Yale University Press, 2005)–but an important component of planning for the restoration of a Revolutionary-era agrarian landscape at Minute Man National Historical Park. He currently teaches American Environmental Studies at Brandeis.

An excerpt from our interview with Brian:

Sometimes I think organizations that are working with farmers want the farm to pull its own weight economically, and the farmers do too and so it’s kind of backwards from the way we often think about it, but there’s kind of an expectation that if the farm is somehow subsidized that it isn’t real, that the real farmers out there make money… Well, most of the real farmers aren’t making it as a business. The history of American farmers is farmers exploiting themselves and most of them going out of business in order to provide cheap food for this larger industrial economy. It’s never benefited farmers, and a lot of them have just stayed in it by self-exploiting or by some kind of subsidy…