I watched "The Real Dirt About Farmer John" last night - my food politics obsession continues. It's better than I thought it would be, mostly because there's a ton of lovely family footage dating back to the 50s. And the guy does have an interesting story:
In short, he was heir to a multi-generational family farm. He got his mind blown by the hippie movement at college, then his father died, so he inherited the farm in his early 20s. He turned it into an experimental commune for years, and wound up being an early victim of the farm crisis in North America. He went through a wilderness period, and over the years developed a new model for economically viable small-scale farming.
More fuel for my grudging belief that the hippies were right about a lot of the important stuff, and possibly a partial antidote to the more pessimistic docs like Food Inc., and Collapse.