The State Of Farming

Fewer and Fewer young Folks are getting into Farming. what does that mean For their Future —and ours?

- Cat Carter

SANDERS PEACH FARM, FILBERT, S.C.

Dori Sanders sits in a gray truck with the window rolled down, her chin resting in her hand. The long, wooden tables at her family’s roadside market are bare. Her cousin, David, paces next to them anxiously.

The night before, violent storms passed through this part of South Carolina, just outside of York, turning the soil to muck and making it impossible for the family to navigate the fields. My hope of returning home with a bag of freshly picked peaches quickly fades.

To me, this is disappointing. To Sanders, this is farming.

Farming is not a profession for the impatient, or the unyielding. Over the years, Dori Sanders has learned to accept days lost to bad weather. “On days like this, I read and rest,” she says.

She also writes, and what started as a way to record what life was like on their farm—which she expects will leave the family after her generation passes—grew into a second career as an author.

Sanders is sitting comfortably in the driver’s seat, her long arms waving as she talks. When she laughs, which is often, she laughs with her whole, sturdy frame. She proudly shows off the Harley Davidson sticker on her back windshield. There was a bike that went with it, but she recently accepted, as she says in her best Brando voice, “an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

“My brother says I am tearing up the eighties,” says Sanders, who won’t share her exact age. “I am tearing it up, which means there’s very little of it left.”

I hear no complaint in her voice when she shares this, or when she talks of living on her own, or any other aspect of the life she has chosen. “The farming life is so mundane. You do the same thing, year in and year out,” she says.