An East Texas dairyman and his son raise cows on pasture. Two brothers and their wives in North Dakota selectively save seeds from each year's crop to replant the next year. A New Mexico cowboy manages rangeland so that you can't tell the difference between the actively grazed land and land fenced off from cattle for 75 years. If these practices sound more like common sense than innovation to you, it's because even if you shop farmers markets and support the ethical treatment of farm animals, you may still not comprehend the degree to which modern agribusiness has abandoned common sense.

Conventional farming — the customary and generally accepted practice of farming in the United States in 2009 — includes purposely feeding animals food that sickens them to maximize production. It involves planting thousands of acres of Midwest farmland with eerily identical plants and then applying tons of toxic herbicides to them. It requires that farmers contract when they buy seed that Monsanto — an American-based multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation — owns the seeds produced on these farms. And that means a large corporation owns the future of your food — including 92 percent of soy and 80 percent of corn grown in the United States in 2008. Does that tofu still seem like a sustainable health food?

You may also want to ask yourself whether arid New Mexico should be ranked seventh in the U.S. among dairy states with the largest herd size per dairy (more than 2,000 cows), and whether dairy products should be our top agricultural product. Rain is bad news for huge dairy operations where cows are in close quarters, which means those dairy cows don't eat grass — their natural diet. Contrast the lack of apparent controversy over dryland dairy farming with the idea — one popular among many environmentalists — that grasslands grazed for thousands of years here will be healthier if grazing animals, specifically beef cattle, are banned from them.

These are just some of the questions and topics writer Lisa Hamilton incited me to think about as I read her new book, Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness (Hardcover, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, 309 pages). In it, she introduces us to Harry Lewis, a Texas dairy farmer; Virgil Trujillo, a rangeland manager and part-time cattle rancher in Abiquiú; and the Podolls, a family of North Dakota farmers. They have in common the audacity and imagination to question conventional practices and beliefs and, through their own unconventional practices, succeed in refuting them. They also share a devotion to the land and to their communities and a unique perspective that makes their stories compelling. Hamilton's evocative writing takes you out with them on the farm and the range. While I would have liked the limited bibliography expanded to provide more of the references she used to back up statistics cited, I found her research to be impeccable on those I checked myself (and repeat here).

Sense versus cents

I recently asked Hamilton why, as a consumer, you should care whether the food you feed your family is grown conventionally or unconventionally. Conventional farming has given America some of the cheapest food in the developed world and made huge profits for large corporations, which benefits their shareholders and provides jobs to millions of people. She assured me that she had no desire to label good farmers or bad farmers or to pit organic farmers against non-organic farmers. She was more interested in the ideas that farmers conceive when they farm or ranch as a steward of the land and their animals rather than manage a business that happens to be a farm. The American model of "get big or get out" farming means that most farmers are managers, which changes the values applicable to measuring success.

In a business, the "bottom line" or annual profit is the primary, and often the only, measure of success. This produces ideas like genetically modified organisms and cows fed grain (or worse) rather than what they would naturally eat. Production drives decision making. The goal is a higher number on a page.

But Virgil Trujillo, for example, measures his success by the number of young people in his community that he can get involved in ranching and by the health of his rangeland. He tells a joke about what a rancher does if he wins the lottery — just keep ranching until the money's all gone. For him, if more young people find a purpose to stay in the community, that will make his community stronger, and a stronger community will weather tough times better. A healthy range, in turn, will support that community better for the long term.

The Podolls consider developing a tomato that tastes good and is adapted to the conditions on their farm, using traditional plant-breeding techniques as a marker of success.

Harry Lewis wants to sustain a way of life that has supported families for generations in his community. Like most farmers, they just want to make a living doing what they love. What makes them unconventional is that their farming decisions are driven by that goal — not profit or production.

Trujillo is breeding his own cattle so that they will be better adapted to the conditions of the range they graze. The tomato the Podolls are selectively breeding will naturally resist local pests and flourish in their particularly wet (and documented to be getting wetter) part of North Dakota, while still retaining a healthy genetic variability.

In the feedlot-focused, Frankenstein genetics and petrochemical-dependent model of modern American agribusiness, these archaic methods are not just unconventional — they are revolutionary. They may also, these farmers argue, be the future as well as the not-so-distant past of farming, and the only way to secure our food supply.

A single new pest or disease could wipe out all those identical corn or soy plants. It has happened before: the notorious Irish potato famine occurred because the Irish potato crop was dependent on a single variety, which succumbed catastrophically to a new disease.

Large cattle operations that valued the beef sold more than rangeland health left vast tracts of New Mexico and other parts of the West devastated by overgrazing. All too frequently these days, foods are recalled for safety problems. And often — as in the recent salmonella-contaminated peanut incident — no one can really be sure where all the contaminated products go within the massive and labyrinthine manufacturing chain of mass-produced and processed foods.

These days, knowing where your food comes from can be nearly impossible — unless you buy it from the farmer. Furthermore, the cheap fuel that has powered the industrialization of food production is imminently in decline. Large mechanized operations and long-distance transportation of foodstuffs are integral to conventional farming.

Food riots around the developed world erupted when corn production was diverted from food to ethanol production. What will the food riots look like in the post-oil age? After a long and interesting discussion, Hamilton distilled into one sentence the answer to my question about why we should care whether our food is grown conventionally or unconventionally: "It's scary to think how much we as consumers [have] relegated our lives and safety and sustenance to a system that is so reliant on one-size-fits-all solutions and farming by numbers."

You are what you eat

Reading this book may make you reconsider what constitutes the true cost of a loaf of bread made with wheat produced on an industrial scale. It may also make you hesitate before reaching for that carton of store-brand milk.

Most likely it will leave you with the desire to meet these unconventional farmers: men and women who think and care so deeply about what they do that they have made personal sacrifices to continue to do it, including earning the distrust of their fellow farmers and ranchers for not swallowing a heaping spoonful of conventional wisdom. They aren't content to just feed the world. They also want to nourish and preserve their communities and the land that sustains us all along with their own ancient occupation.

As Harry Lewis points out, while he doesn't need Donald Trump, Donald Trump needs him. The big question one is left with at the end of this book is: What kind of farmer do I want to sustain me and mine? One who farms by the numbers or one who farms with a broader vision? It isn't simply a matter of economics or of political bent. But it is a choice we make every time we eat.