REMEMBERING ROSIE

A fourth-generation dairy farmer reminisces about growing up in rural Wisconsin.

School psychologist Block recounts her childhood on a dairy farm in the Midwest in the mid-1900s. She chronicles a time when small farms, like her family’s, were at their height before a decline after World War II. With tender nostalgia and measured sentimentality, the author, one of five children, reflects that “everything revolved around school, church, and community. There was little contact with the outside world.” She offers vignettes about a wide range of topics, including the history of German migration to Wisconsin, and reveals a great reverence for her parents and other small farmers who made a living doing grueling but fulfilling work. Along the way, she provides vivid details of a bygone era that she claims was a simpler one. The resulting mosaic of everyday life on a farm is charming, but Block’s political take on small farms makes this book stand out from similar remembrances. In the chapter “Leaning Left,” she describes her parents as staunch Democrats who were inspired to organize small family farmers against corporatization that would ultimately destroy small dairy farming. Her father spent years organizing local farmers for the National Farmers Organization, helping them to negotiate a better price for their milk from large dairy companies. In one of the book’s most insightful reflections, she recalls her dad’s explanation of the plight of the American farmer: “Farmers are the last cowboys. They wouldn’t organize even if it was important to their livelihood to do so. Farmers enjoy their independence too much.” Today, the number of family farms is declining, and the steady drop in farmers’ incomes correlates with a spike in suicide rates among members of that group. Block exposes important social issues in this part of the text, although the majority of the book is an ode to happier times.

A tenderhearted and socially conscious memoir of dairy farming.