Atina Diffley: A Woman Farmer’s Empowering Life Story

Her book’s title comes from the sign Atina saw at the side of a road, which pointed to the pro­duce stand being oper­ated by the man who would become her sec­ond husband.

“Martin was fourth gen­er­a­tion on a fam­ily farm, and the fam­ily had never used chem­i­cals,” Atina told Organic Connections. “After the Second World War, there was a whole run-up of wheat prices, and other farm­ers started com­mod­ity crop­ping and putting every­thing into wheat. Martin’s fam­ily were lead­ers in his com­mu­nity and around the town­ship and were very strong-minded. They rejected chem­i­cal and com­mod­ity farm­ing. They always had direct-market rela­tion­ships, being close to the Twin Cities, and weren’t inter­ested in any kind of farm­ing that didn’t involve that.

“As Martin was grow­ing up, he had all these veg­etable farm­ers as his neigh­bors. He grew up work­ing for those neigh­bors and learn­ing from them. He really loved these old-timers and, as a child, rec­og­nized their value. He was prob­a­bly pretty unusual. He col­lected all their sto­ries and information.”

Once Atina and Martin mar­ried, they faced many odds—not the least of which was that organic as a descrip­tive and oper­at­ing term was rel­a­tively unknown. “I remem­ber in the eight­ies when there would be an arti­cle in the paper about ‘organic’ that it was a big deal,” Atina said. “We’d all call each other up—there were maybe only eight of us—and make sure that each of us saw it because it was just so rare. We weren’t mak­ing money in the sev­en­ties or in the eight­ies because there really wasn’t an organic mar­ket. We could grow a crop—we knew we had that part down—but the mar­ket sim­ply wasn’t devel­oped. We had a road­side stand, and peo­ple really came in orig­i­nally because it was local and fresh, and was convenient.

“Every cus­tomer had to be edu­cated. Our sign said Organic but I didn’t talk about it. Usually two or three or four vis­its in they’d say, ‘You know, this is the best food I’ve ever eaten! What do you do?’ Then we’d have the whole sum­mer to talk about it. In fall they’d sort of real­ize, ‘Oh, this is sea­sonal and winter’s com­ing in! What am I going to eat?’ Then I would edu­cate them about the food co-ops, because we had so many food co-ops here in Minneapolis–Saint Paul.”

Due to cir­cum­stances beyond their con­trol, Atina and Martin even­tu­ally had to give up the land that Martin’s fam­ily had farmed for gen­er­a­tions. One real­iza­tion that came from this was the recog­ni­tion of just how valu­able that land had been. “When we were farm­ing there, I thought farm­ing was so easy, because it was a diverse piece of land,” Atina recalled. “It still had an intact ecosys­tem. Our pests and dis­eases were largely man­aged by the diver­sity of the habi­tat and the bio­log­i­cal life that was there. Our fer­til­ity was man­aged by rotat­ing the crops and pro­tect­ing the soil.

“When the land was devel­oped, which took a period of five years, they came in and took out every tree, every bush, every fruit, every blade of grass. The wildlife all left. They even bull­dozed the liv­ing soil and sold it. We con­tin­ued to farm imme­di­ately adja­cent to that land, and we went from hav­ing our dis­eases, pests, and every­thing man­aged largely by the diver­sity of the habi­tat into com­plete eco­log­i­cal col­lapse. We lost crop after crop to those sorts of issues. It became very obvi­ous to me how utterly depen­dent we are on bio­log­i­cal diversity.”

Throughout it all, Atina learned a crit­i­cal les­son: “I don’t think it does any good to blame,” said Atina. “When we blame, we play vic­tim, and when we play vic­tim, we become help­less. That was one of the mes­sages that I wanted to send in the book. It’s why I included my first mar­riage story, because I was in a sit­u­a­tion where I played vic­tim, and when I did that I was pow­er­less. I didn’t get out of a vio­lent mar­riage until I stopped think­ing like that. People get so dis­cour­aged about all the envi­ron­men­tal issues, and they give up because they feel pow­er­less and they feel like the cor­po­ra­tions are so big and there’s noth­ing they can do. That’s why I wanted to show the change in my char­ac­ter through the book.”

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The Diffleys man­aged to find some great land else­where on which to farm, which they hap­pily did, and were finally doing well. But then in 2006 the out­side world intruded once again. A cor­po­ra­tion called Koch Industries, work­ing through laws that would com­pel the Diffleys to com­ply, was threat­en­ing to run a crude oil pipeline across their land. A legal pro­ceed­ing ensued in which the Diffleys were parties.

“Koch Industries is the largest pri­vately owned com­pany in the world,” Atina said. “They cer­tainly had the money, but I had the peo­ple on my side. I had over 4,500 peo­ple who wrote let­ters to the judge for our farm. We were able not only to pro­tect this lit­tle farm, but we were able to write an Organic Mitigation Plan for the state of Minnesota that spells out how to pro­tect the soils.” Now any organic farmer can uti­lize the infor­ma­tion from this case, and the plan itself, to thwart such future efforts by oil, elec­tric, or util­ity companies.

Today, the Diffleys have sold the farm name and oper­a­tion. They still live on the land but wanted to pur­sue many other inter­ests they have had for years. “We just really got to a point where we wanted to do other things with our lives,” Atina explained. “We love farm­ing, but it’s intense and it didn’t leave time for these other parts of our­selves. So we sold our busi­ness name, because it was a branded farm, and sold our equip­ment. We still have our land and do some seed breed­ing right now, which is very excit­ing. We also work with begin­ning farm­ers, doing train­ing with regard to mar­ket­ing, food safety, and deci­sion making.”

With the pub­li­ca­tion of Atina’s book, she has come full cir­cle: all those many hard years with lessons learned can now be shared with oth­ers. It is well worth the read.

Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works by Atina Diffley can be pur­chased through the Organic Connections book­store.

For fur­ther infor­ma­tion on Atina and Martin Diffley, their con­sult­ing and many other activ­i­ties, visit www.organicfarmingworks.com.

You can read more of Atina Diffley’s work, includ­ing her blog, at www.atinadiffley.com.