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Daniel and Cheryl Smith pose with Jax on their farm near Arena, Wisconsin. She retired in 2020 after 25 years of teaching elementary school in Illinois and Wisconsin. She gives back by assisting with a food pantry and a community luncheon for the food-insecure in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Daniel Smith’s ‘Ancestral’ draws from the 30 years he farmed his family’s dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. With poetry grounded in the rural Midwest, the book explores a family’s deep attachment to the land, the physical work of farming and the emotional disruption one endures when such a life is no longer sustainable. His poems provide a powerful depiction of the changes impacting agriculture and our rural communities.

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Daniel Smith signs books after a reading while his wife, Cheryl Smith, looks on.

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The Smith farmhouse is photographed about 1941 on the Smith family farm near Freeport, Illinois.

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The 320-acre Smith family farm near Freeport, Illinois, was purchased in 1934 by Daniel Smith’s grandfather, Jack Smith. Daniel Smith’s parents, Robert and Mary Smith, farmed it from 1941 to 1978. That’s when Daniel and Cheryl Smith took over but then in 2008 sold the last 101 Holsteins.

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Daniel Smith, shown with his dog, Jax, is an accomplished poet, essayist, public speaker and agribusiness executive with a lifelong commitment to agriculture and the environment. He’s operated his family’s dairy farm in northwestern Illinois for three decades. With the practicality of a farmer and the syntax of a poet, he has authored three books of poetry. He began in November 2024 serving as director of the Community Connections Free Clinic in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Since its inception in 2006 the clinic has served more than 15,000 patients who are uninsured or unable to pay for primary health care. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he and his wife, Cheryl Smith, live on a small farm in the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin.

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Daniel and Cheryl Smith’s ‘Winter House’ is on their farm near Arena in the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin. In his poem ‘Our Winter House’ he wrote, ‘Someday, when all these chores are done, I want to live with you somewhere far back, in a snow-covered lane … Rising each morning to sweep the drifted snow from the kitchen floor … Nothing to hold in my hands but the gold of each moment lived alone with you, together, in our winter house.’

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The barn on the family farm is a reflection of an era now gone.

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John Sumwalt For Agri-View

Daniel Smith’s “Ancestral” book of farm-to-table poems blew me away. I can’t remember when I have been more deeply affected by a book. I read it in one sitting, at times weeping and then laughing uproariously. I don’t know if one needs to be rural-raised like me to fully appreciate the joys and pathos of the farm life Smith describes so exquisitely, but it certainly helps.

John Sumwalt new mug 2024 — John Sumwalt

John Sumwalt is a retired pastor and the son of dairy farmers. He is the author of “Shining Moments: Visions of the Holy in Ordinary Lives.” Email johnsumwalt@gmail.com or call 414-339-0676 to reach him.

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