If you like pretentious, self congratulatory voice-overs by a guy who decided to become a farmer with other people's money, despite the notable handicap of knowing absolutely nothing about farms, because his dog Todd "asked" him to, then this is the documentary for you!
From the get go the story telling is amateur level. The farmer slash former photographer slash farming wannabe transparently pulls at our heart strings with lines like "I would look up at the cosmos and feel very deep feelings as I realized that I was actually spinning within it" or some such nonsense that has zero meaning and belongs in a middle school English class's self published book of student poems.
We begin with two LA yuppies buying a dog but uh-oh, problems arise! That problem being, they had no idea that leaving a dog cooped up in a small urban apartment all day might not be an ideal living situation. So the dog barks all day. In their first demonstration of total selfishness, the filmmaker and his wife talk about how difficult this was for them. Nary a word of regret over obviously ruining their neighbours' lives with their stupid and impulsive buy of the completely wrong pet for their living situation.
How to resolve this? They buy different gadgets and try multiple dog whispering experts to no avail. The dog continues to act out with non-stop barking and the destruction of property. This results in their eventual eviction - how unfair!
Because it apparently does not at any point occur to them that selling or giving the dog away to someone with an appropriate property for this dog is a possibility, the couple decide to just move away and buy a farm. It's obviously what Todd wants and Todd's word is law!
At this point our photographer-cum-farmer John Chester says "I realized I had to get us a farm to save Todd." Seeing a joke, I said "Or was it Todd who was saving me" - and we all laughed because you know, could you imagine if they actually said something so obvious and pretentious in the movie? Little did we realize that is exactly how the film would end. Ugh.
How to pay for it? Well if you're a yuppie couple, apparently all you have to do is throw a party, invite all your fellow yuppie friends, have them wear plastic pig noses and get them to "invest" in your business idea, which is, I guess, to buy a big farm for their dog to use and then, I don't know, make money off it somehow? (They never actually explain anything about their finances, their costs, their profits, or even whether any of these people got their money back.)
When they drive to check out the farm the wife keenly spots several places. "There could be a garden there!" "We could put trees over there!" "That looks like a good place for something!" Yes. It's a farm. Those areas are literally everywhere around you. What really grabbed me though were their lingering questions as they purchased this 200 acre farm with other people's cash (must be nice). Questions like "Do you think we can grow bananas?" Uh... don't you think you maybe should have done say a minimum of research into farming before using other people's cash to buy one for your dog?
Anyway, speaking of the dog, just forget about the dog. Other than a couple shots of Todd looking unimpressed and staring at the camera which serve absolutely no purpose, he is pretty much not referenced again until the end of the movie. More on that heart-string pulling later.
After purchasing this farm with their fellow yups' investment money, the two try to do farm type things like look at trees and shovel around dirt, but the ground is like totally way too hard. They quickly identify this as their number one problem. So they hire a hippie (aka an organic bio-diverse farming design guru) who turns out to actually for real know something about farming AND have real world experience. This is the only logical decision I remember these people making in the entire movie, and judging by how confused they are by Alan's advice it's apparent they just stumbled into it somehow. Good thing they did though, because for the rest of the movie Alan just tells them what they need to do, and why, and they just do it (or get their workers to, anyway).
You see, much of their labor is free because they apparently had hipsters and students lining up to donate their time to help them get the operation running. Because, you know, yuppies have the luxury of cash to hire experts as well as abundant free volunteer labor who want to see what it's like to be on "a real farm".
This is one of the biggest problems with this documentary. The only real point John Chester seems to have is that farms should be like his amazing farm and have all this diversity and sculpt the land and yada yada yada but he doesn't explain anything about his business model. Real farmers don't have money to do this, or hire regenerative agriculture architects, or piles of hipster kids showing up in crocs asking if they can please do manual labor for free.
Anyway, back to the story... Our new farmer buys a pregnant pig and whines and complains through the birthing process. "How many is that? Nine? That must be it. There can't be any more that that. Wait, there's MORE?!" John Chester then rests his weary face in his gross pig-goop-covered hands, apparently too upset to realize that more pigs is actually better than less pigs.
At Alan's suggestion, they pull out all of their weeds and burn them. They pull out all of their trees and crops and burn them. They build a pond and stock it with hundreds of baby ducks apparently for no other reason than because they are cute. They plan to plant 3 varieties of fruit trees but Alan has them put in 75 because "diversity diversity diversity". (I say again, this documentary would have been a thousand times better if it was about the story's real hero, Alan - or if he never entered the picture and it was actually a hilarious documentary about two blowhard yuppies buying a farm on a whim and then completely failing.)
As if it wasn't already super clear that these people don't know anything about farming, when coyotes start stalking their chickens he refuses to ever shoot a coyote because he has a feeling they play a part in helping the farm somehow. Which completely falls apart later, when enough chickens die that he throws these morals away and finally blasts one with a shotgun. Later in the movie he claims they do play a part in removing gophers, but that's the exact same role that owls, and dogs, and snakes, and a bunch of other critters are also doing. So, yeah, maybe just stop lecturing us about how great and in touch with nature you are and just shoot the stupid coyotes.
The part of the movie I object MOST to though is him NOT shooting a coyote. At one point he finds a badly wounded coyote that has apparently suffered a broken neck, struggling to breathe. So what does John Chester do? He goes to the house, gets his video camera, and documents it. Hovering around the poor coyote, putting the camera in its helpless face, doing some more "poignant" voice over narration. Just shoot the coyote and put it out of its misery instead of getting some "cool" footage and celebrating yourself in narration, you knob!
This follows another part in the movie where he finds a badly wounded baby lamb, mauls it, brings it to the house for no apparent reason, then takes it BACK outside before shooting it. If an animal is suffering and needs to be put down, just do it. Don't do a bunch of selfish garbage with your camera first. This is why people who don't know anything about farming shouldn't just decide to raise tons of livestock.
Also it's not exactly a true ecosystem when you end up having to fence everything in completely. (By the way, there's a real flaw in your logic when you don't want to cruelly shoot a coyote but you will fence everything in to, you know, deprive it of food.)
After Alan passes away, the filmmakers talk as much of their own anger, frustration and disappointment as they do about the man who literally saved their farm. We get it. It's all about you.
What we end up with is a not very in depth, very repetitive look at their farming journey. We add this thing to our farm, which attracts this pest, which leads to us adding this thing, which attracts other pests... At every point they are completely unprepared and surprised. Do these people not talk to any other farmers? Do they not have the internet? It takes them two years to realize that their ducks will eat the snails that eat their crop's leaves. Apparently they also NEVER realize that snails themselves are a delicacy which could be sold. It's just two yuppies stumbling through a farming journey and succeeding despite themselves. I bet any real, struggling farmer who watches this must be in disbelief at how fortunate these two are.
The one plus is John Chester is obviously a good photographer and there are quite a few good shots of the farm and its animals. The narration is bad but it's not constant so animal lovers like us are treated to some good quality shots.
Anyway, after a bunch more lame, self-congratulatory narration - and shameless self promotion of their farm and website - John Chester explains that Todd (remember him? The dog from the beginning of the movie?) died, and "at that point I realized who it really was who saved who". Audible groans in the room. Even louder groans as he explains that Todd, who is the reason they got this farm, is now... wait for it... a PART OF THAT VERY FARM! It's like a cycle of life to death to life again. This yuppie farmer is explaining these things to us because he has it all figured out and none of us has ever realized any of this before.
It's 85% a boring, self-centered, pretentious, completely uninformative waste of time, and 15% very nice footage of farm animals.
2/10
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