GLR January-February 2026

ESSAY

Farmers Are Us, Too P ATRICIA A NN M ATHUAND T AYLOR H ARTSON

E DITOR ’ S N OTE : The following is by a pair of grant recipients in a program launched in 2022 by TheG&LR , the Charles S. Longcope Jr. Writers and Artists Grant, which was awarded to two recipients last year. Awardees are expected to produce an article for the magazine as part of their project, of which this is the first of two. “E LDERBERRIES are very queer,” Sadie says as she sits across the couch from Tig, a doctoral student at Notre Dame. The sun has just dipped below the horizon on a farm in rural Wisconsin as Sadie begins to illus trate her practice of ecological storytelling with tales of elder berries. “I think of them as the queer medicine aunties of the

farm has been upheld as the standard—many farmers’ lives do not fit into this model. Here we use the term “Midwest” to describe the traditional homelands of Indigenous people such as the Miami, Peoria, Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Iowa, Odawa, Anishinaabe, Dakota, and many others. This expansive definition shows that queer Midwestern farming can look like community gardens fighting for food sovereignty. It can look like foraging practices that build place-based relationships. It can look like planting trees against the grain of the monocrop corn belt. For every queer farmer, there is a unique approach, a new set of questions, an al ternative way of looking at the world. Some farms are big and some are small; some land is rented, other places are owned, and still others managed collectively. Queer farmers might sell their goods at farmers markets or to local distributors or give to neighbors or share with friends. A major throughline in queer farm

ecosystem of the farms that I’m on. They’re beautiful, anti-capitalist, gener ous, giving—it’s this very mutual-aid vibe.” Sadie is one of more than seventy queer Midwestern farmers that Tig met during their doctoral fieldwork, many of whom used ecological metaphors—or what we would come to call “earth les sons”—to make sense of themselves and their identities. Thanks to funding from this magazine, a collective of thirty growers produced Playing in the Dirt , a spiral-bound, full-color book to share these earth lessons, as well as other sto ries, art, and writing, about what it means to be a queer land worker in the heartland. When people think of Midwestern farmers, they tend to imagine rural, white, heteronormative people with

ing is that the relationships with plants, bugs, land, and animals that farming af fords are life-affirming. They expand our understanding of care and joy and depth. After all, how unnatural can top surgeries be when we know that care for apple trees requires pruning? How im possible can democratic collectives be when we see healthy honeybee hives that, collectively, will travel as far as the moon and back every day? In lieu of agricultural narratives about ecological competition or economic control, queer farmers find abundant examples in the world around them that show care, joy, collaboration, hope, and resiliency are possible. “Plants are pretty gay,” one farmer told Tig. “They’ve got all their sex or

lives structured around the nuclear family. The truth is that, ever since white settlers began seizing land from Indigenous peo ples, they’ve been imposing a relationship to land oriented around violence, destruction, and wealth accumulation. Cen turies of exploitation have resulted in white, heterosexual men accumulating land and generational wealth, and government policies have continued to make it difficult for underserved farmers—like Black, Indigenous, and people of color farmers; queer farmers; or first-generation farmers—to access the re sources necessary to run a farm. Playing in the Dirt shows how—despite all the ways the rural, white, heteronormative Patricia Ann Mathu is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Univ. of Ala bama. Taylor Hartson is a PhD candidate in sociology at Notre Dame.

gans in one, or something. They’re little weirdos in a great way.” In this spirit, here are three plant lessons from queer farmers that provide lessons about meaningful Midwest food and medicine production. S UNFLOWERS AND S ELF -E XPRESSION “I’ VE NEVER FELT COMPETENT at self-expression,” one farmer said. “I’m not a fashionista, I’m not super extroverted. I’m not personally the most flamboyant, but those sunflowers were fucking flamboyant. And it felt like a way of getting at self-ex pression. I can’t create a piece of art, but I can grow some sun flowers, and they’re beautiful. And okay, there’s my gender in the flowers.” Sunflowers pop off. There are countless varieties: “Mam

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