John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part I
(Page 6 of 17)
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
PLOWBOY: Where did you go? What did you do?
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SHUTTLEWORTH: I covered a good bit of ground and I tried my hand at a number of things. Over the next 10 years I lived for various lengths of time in Oklahoma City, British Columbia, Philadelphia, Mexico City, Seattle, Honolulu, New York City and a lot of points in between. I even went to Europe for two months once as the road manager for a group known as The Bitter End Singers. I worked on the flight line at an airport, in two different aircraft electronics shops, in an advertising agency on New York's Madison Avenue, as a service station attendant, for Boeing on the SST, in a plastics factory, as a truck driver for Seaview Farms in Hawaii, for a tradeshow display shop, as a door-to-door salesman, in promotion and as a freelance cartoonist/writer. In all, I had 30 or 40 changes of address during that decade of my life, and I held down 80 or 100 jobs. Somewhere along the way I learned how lucky I had been to grow up the way I did.
Actually, of course, it wasn't so much that I learned as that I relearned to value my upbringing on a small family farm. I would have been quite content to stay right where I was and never leave the country in the first place, you see. It's just that such a course of action wasn't possible.
What our politicians like to call "progress" had begun to squeeze the little farmers off the land shortly after World War II. By the time I was old enough to have my own place, it was no longer possible to hold onto one in the old way. The boom was on, and whether you liked it or not, the suburbs and the big farmers were pushing up the value of your shirttail-size place. That meant higher taxes every year, taxes that were harder and harder to pay because everything you sold — cream and eggs and the occasional cow or pigs or chickens — brought less and less.
It didn't matter that your produce was healthier and tasted better or that the way you raised it was easier on the land. The folks in town only seemed to care about price, the one thing that agribusiness could deliver.
And so the factory farmers poured on the chemicals and flooded the supermarkets with cartons of standardized, thinshelled eggs that contained watery-yellow yolks,. and the local grocery stores stopped taking in trade the little farmers' mixed baskets of large, medium and small eggs with the bright-orange yolks that stood up so firm in the pan. The big dairies learned how to palm off 2% butterfat milk as the "real thing." This left them with so much excess cream for butter and other products that the market for home-separated cream disappeared.
And so it went, and so went the small family farm. And so a whole generation of farm people was cast adrift to find a new place in the world.
PLOWBOY: And you were one of those cast adrift.
SHUTTLEWORTH: Yes, and I didn't like it. I hadn't liked this business of squeezing people out of the country and into cities from the very first day that I became aware of what was going on. I guess I was about six at the time — and I set out to do something about it.
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