When our great-grandfather Seb Ancestor built Ancestor Fields Farm 140 years ago, he was guided by a vision of earth-borne food harvested and passed along to the consumer as naturally as possible. His original dream began with fresh grains and produce handpicked by one of his four wives, straight from Seb’s family to yours.
Six generations later, as Ancestor Fields has grown over the years, we’re happy to say we’re still operating from Seb’s original vision of good food for good people, with only a few changes.
For instance, instead of running on the sweat and blood of Seb’s original four wives, our farm is now worked by eighteen different pairs of hands,1 also belonging to some wives, not all of whom are married to the same man. That’s right, our grains are now harvested by the wives of a small assortment of husbands, as opposed to just one.
But despite the slight uptick in the number of husbands involved, it will comfort our customers to know that not all of our harvester-wives were originally married to their current husbands—but to other husbands—who are also in the Ancestor Fields family. That’s right. They swapped.
While Seb may not have been able to envision in his lifetime some of the changes we’ve adopted at Ancestor Fields—automated watering, pasteurization, flagrant wife-swapping—we’re confident he’d approve of us doing whatever’s necessary to provide you with the very best food for your families.
Do the wives sometimes fight, stage walkouts, and unionize after a poorly thought-out swap? Of course, they do. This is a farm, after all. But have those fights ever stopped us from getting our grains onto the shelves of your local farmers’ market or co-op? Only during peak wife-fighting season.
You see, here at Ancestor Fields, we believe in the well-worn practice of hiring non-family help when a wife swap goes awry and the wives turn against us. While hiring outside the family might go against Seb’s original vision for his farm, our small group of husbands here at Ancestor Fields simply do not possess the finesse and charisma that Seb was known for. Despite several attempts, none of us have been able to keep more than one wife at a time.
We just wish Seb had left some of his wife-acquiring secrets behind, along with the deed and all the farm-running papers. There’s an ongoing search here at Ancestor Fields in which the husbands are assigned specific areas of the farm to scour for Seb’s mythical “wife papers,” which his grandson alluded to on his deathbed. Seb III might have been out of his faculties on morphine when he said it, but we’ll never give up looking for Seb’s wife-hoarding secrets.
Because there’s literally no way we’ll be able to keep running this farm under the same profit margin without utilizing plural marriage. Unfortunately, as it is, we’re at a struggle to even retain one wife apiece. Sometimes, they just… leave.
But for now, you can still trust the Ancestor Fields name to bring you the very best in minimally processed, nutritious food that you’ve always enjoyed, picked and packaged with love by the Ancestor Fields workers. Is there some resentment and contempt mixed in with the love? There sure is. But it’s a contempt that is meant for us, the husbands of Ancestor Fields, and not the consumer, who has nothing to do with bitterly disappointing our wives.
So, when you sit down to enjoy the bounty of a meal provided by Ancestor Fields, remember that every wholesome bite is brought to you with generations of dedication and increasingly unstable marriages, and that probably one or more of our wives left us in the process. Enjoy!
1 A nineteenth hand does belong to Sister Rachel, who came to be this way feeding cattle bred from Seb’s original steer, which a century of veterinarians have advised us not to breed, due to propagation of the rare cow-fang gene.
