The following is an excerpt from Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, published by The New Press and reprinted here with permission.

In 1963 my dad bought a ramshackle farm with rich but extremely rocky soil in the rural Bull Run Mountains of Virginia, forty miles southwest of Washington, D.C. Today it is on the verge of suburbia.

He grew up in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, rode the rails, and eventually, in his late fifties, found his way ‘back to the land.