“Thirty Years of Farming” was written by the Canadian songwriter Fred Eaglesmith, who recorded it in the late 1980s. The bluegrass singer James King later made it one of his signature songs.
The song tells of a family farm lost to the bank. After thirty years of work, a farmer watches foreclosure take the land, and the lyric measures that loss not in dollars but in a lifetime of labor and belonging gone in a single stroke.
James King’s recording, made in the early 2000s, became closely tied to him and to his hard, emotional singing. The version heard here is by James King.
