The Soul of A Farmer

The Soul of A Farmer captures the struggle of every small-scale organic farmer committed to growing beautiful produce. The 35 minute film bursts the romantic notion of farm-to-table, portraying the constant tension between Patty Gentry’s mission to grow the organic vegetables chefs treasure and eke out a living, too.

As a former chef at top New York restaurants, she instinctively knows what her customers want and need. "She is the Picasso of vegetables," Isabella Rossellini, the international movie star and activist, who is also Patty's landlord, tells us. In one scene, Isabella laughingly says, “Patty encourages me to take her garbage to my animals, but I go through it first, because she throws away things other farmers would sell.”

I began filming in the fall of 2016, when Patty’s Early Girl Farm was bursting with luscious produce. Filming continued through the 2017 season. Two years later, I returned to see whether the improvements Patty was attempting had indeed made a difference.

It is the way she deals with the many setbacks Patty faces that makes her story so captivating. Early in the film, she tells us that to improve her soil, she spread 15 tons of basalt on her three acres, “by hand.” But it didn’t help. “I’ve never seen Patty down,” says star Brooklyn chef, Missy Robbins, who cooked alongside her when they were both starting out. “I've seen her upset, but she takes whatever happens and turns it into something positive.” That attitude seems to be Patty's blessing and her curse.

Patty is approaching 50, and having farmed for ten years, with a mostly female crew, it’s obvious she hasn’t lost her enthusiasm. But when I returned with my camera in 2019, she confesses wearily, “I no longer have the energy to waste energy.”

“Something has got to change,” she realized. Patty shows us the infrastructure improvements she’s made and tells us she’s stopped doing “what everyone else is doing.” Continuing, “What I did was make smaller plantings and more of them. I used to call myself ‘the tomato pimp.’ I had so many tomatoes I was selling them at the same price as conventional growers.”

But perhaps most significantly, Patty starts a CSA—Community Supported Agriculture—to provide families with weekly shares of produce. “Everyone buys a share in the farm,” she explains. “And, they pay in advance,” which restaurants do not do. We see members cutting their own herbs, strolling through the fields with their children, receiving Patty’s cooking wisdom. She tells us the CSA is relieving some of the pressure of the week-to-week vagaries of supplying restaurant orders. “The CSA is so joyful and feels effortless. People are happy to try anything. This week I had a ton of long beans on the chefs’ list but no one bought them. So, I have enough to give each CSA member almost a pound of these magnificent beans.”

Will the CSA save Early Girl Farm? The Soul of A Farmer has an upbeat ending, but Patty remains insecure. We see her walking hand-in-hand at the farm with her partner Jennifer Lasker, tearing up as she tells us: “I’ve doubted myself, but she’s never doubted me.” Yet Patty reveals that every winter, she’s turned to Jennifer to help her financially. “If I didn’t have Jenn, I'd probably still be farming, but most likely I'd be living out of the back of my truck.”

What separates Patty from most other farmers, I believe, is that she is sustained by the poetic magic of farming. Every Saturday at daybreak, she writes a heartfelt, lyrical letter to her CSA members. Reading a portion of one letter, which ends the film, she begins, “I want you to know we think about you all week and anticipate with joy your arrival at the farm on Saturday mornings….” She describe the wonderful bounty they’re soon to receive, sharing ideas of how to cook—and think about––her vegetables. This week’s hopeful sign-off: “Like a rose under the April snow, Patty.”