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Feelgood farming 

Marsolais, Ken (Director). 2017. The Bullish Farmer (Film). Marsolais Productions. 

“The Bullish Farmer” is a film about ‘John Boy,’ a farmer in New York State. It focuses on 

John and his career choices. The audience is told that after finishing school, he worked in 

Wall Street as a financial investor for 12 years. Facing a crisis of meaninglessness, he decided 

to return to the farmstead where he had spent his childhood. With a small start in poultry 

farming, over the last decade he has gradually expanded his activities to a sizeable business - 

producing and marketing food - uncontaminated by chemicals and genetically modified 

organisms.  

It is a pleasant film to watch, with lovely images of animal flocks and herds and maize fields, 

and the portrait of John is warm and sympathetic. Nevertheless, the lasting impression is one 

of predictability and conventionality rather than surprise. This impression is furthered by short 

textual comments interspersed in the narrative, including quotes of First Nation wisdoms and 

statements by celebrities such as Jane Goodall, framing the film in a discourse equalizing 

purity and naturalness.  

It is thus a film with a very clear message – that food production should be based on locally 

developed species of livestock and plants, without herbicides or “unnatural” livestock feeds. 

The quality of John’s produce is furthermore seen to be enhanced by his highly personalized 

relation to his animals, expressed in naming, fondling and conversation, including a respectful 

talk at the sorrowful sending off of animals to slaughter. The latter is the only point of moral 

difficulty presented by the film. It is justified by John with the argument that the existence of 

his herds depends on the purpose of meat production.  

The film is launched as an anthropological one, but indirectly raises the question as to what 

this implies. The approach of the film is normative rather than analytical. If the film is 

“ethnographical” it is in the depiction of John’s individual views of his production strategy 

and his loving relations to his animals. Yet, there is no attempt to put this in a larger cultural 



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context or contribute a self-reflective perspective of the film’s key message. Rather, the film 

operates by emotionally including the viewer in an assumedly shared value system. The 

explicit moral evaluation of John’s production methods provides the red thread and focusses 

on issues of quality-of-life and human and animal health. Hazardously, the viewer is without 

problematization introduced to customers who praise the good effects of John’s produce on 

the health and development of children diagnosed within the autism spectrum. A secondary 

thread is provided by detailing the risks of monocropping with GMO-seeds and herbicides for 

long-time field productivity. Nevertheless, such ecological concerns are not dealt with to the 

same extent as health issues, leaving aside questions of energy use by agricultural machines, 

vehicles and computers. The impending climate crisis is left in silence. To a non-US reviewer, 

these biases of the film are social facts that in an anthropological text would have merited a 

reflective discussion. 

The film can be used in methodology courses dealing with fieldwork and research 

dissemination, as a good base for discussion on issues of identification, reflexivity and 

outsider/insider issues in analysis and representation. 

 

Gudrun Dahl, b. 1948, is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology with particular 

emphasis on Development Studies at Stockholm University, where she has also been Dean of 

the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her early research was concerned with social change and 

livelihood strategies among pastoralists in North East Africa focussing on the Borana of 

Kenya and the Beja of Sudan. She has also written on Swedish development discourse and on 

how egalitarianism is expressed in Swedish natural symbolism. Presently she is writing on the 

use of moral arguments in environmental contexts. 

 

 

 

© 2021 Gudrun Dahl 

 


