I have always been powerfully touched by the lives of farmers, and I can’t say for certain why this is so, since I did not grow up around farmers, spend much time on farms, and I am not a farmer now, but a writer with a farm, which is quite different.

I respect the farmers that I known, they work brutally odd, against overwhelming odds, with little or no understanding or much appreciation from the world beyond them. The ones I know are honest and open, accepting of me, trusting and welcoming. Farmers grow the food and harvest the milk we drink, and they rarely have any money.

Their lives are an obstacle course, a minefield of the animal complications and uncertainties, government bureaucracy and the never-ending onslaught of corporate competition. Many tell me that righteous and clueless animal rights politicking is helping to suffocate them and their lives.

Yet I am often invited into their homes and barns, given coffee and pie, permitted to take my photos, listen to their stories. I don’t know, there is a connection there, I can’t say I have figured it out. They seem real to me, genuine, and graciously embattled. And I have never met people who love animals as much or care about them more.

There is a reason, I think, that the life of the small family farm has played such a giant and mythic role in the life of this country and the imagination of its people. Everywhere, family farms are dying, and I am compelled as a writer and photographer – and the grandson of immigrants – to capture something of their lives before they are gone. The Gulleys are a good place to hang out, Ed’s farm art has created a welcome wall just outside of the house. You know right away where you are.