The Last Generation
Zoey Allen grew up on her grandfather’s farm, in north-central Kentucky, where she helps him break and train horses. Her grandfather had hoped that she, or one of her cousins, would take over the operation one day. But, across the country, small farms are getting squeezed.Jackie Allen and his granddaughter, Zoey, whom he calls Zobug.
Zoey Allen grew up on her grandfather’s farm, in north-central Kentucky, where she helps him break and train horses. Her grandfather had hoped that she, or one of her cousins, would take over the operation one day. But, across the country, small farms are getting squeezed.
Jackie Allen and his granddaughter, Zoey, whom he calls Zobug. Allen, who used to compete in fishing tournaments to supplement his income, says, “You’re not guaranteed nothing when you farm.”
Jackie Allen, Jr., a third-generation farmer in Bardstown, Kentucky, leases two hundred and sixty acres near the Beech Fork River, and accepts that the family business ends with him. His progeny either see no future in it or aren’t in a position to take over. Across the country, small operations like his are falling to consolidation, and to high expenses, outside interests, and policies that privilege large-scale producers. The federal government “pretty much controls the market prices on your grain,” Allen, who is sixty-seven, said recently. “It’s just stupid, the way America does. We got a world of farmers that need help, but they’ll take billions of dollars and give it to foreign countries when they have trouble. Most of your mom-and-pop farms is about gone.” Last year, farm bankruptcies jumped by nearly fifty per cent.
Allen grows soybeans, corn, and hay on rented land. “I’m always proud of my crops,” he says. “But, you know, when you lose money, it depresses you. You figure, what am I gonna try to do next year to make it better?”
Tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump are worsening the problem by driving up the cost of fertilizer, and of steel and aluminum, which are essential to the manufacture of farming equipment. The tariffs have also provoked retaliation from major customers, including China, once a reliable buyer of U.S. commodities. In February, a bipartisan group of former government officials joined representatives from the grain, pork, corn, dairy, biofuel, and soybean industries in beseeching Congress, in a public letter, to reverse Trump’s trade policies, citing “tremendous harm” and the possible “widespread collapse of American agriculture.” When farmers suffer, they wrote, “the entire rural economy is impacted—from schools, to churches, to main street businesses.”
Farming “ain’t like going to work, taking your lunchbox, working eight hours, and getting to come home and sit down and watch the tube, or mow the grass. Your day don’t never end when you’re a farmer.”
Zoey breaks and trains horses with her grandfather, who says that the animal has to “like you, and trust you. Once you get that, you can teach that horse to do about anything.”
Farmers were struggling long before Trump. In the eighties, during a crisis triggered by skyrocketing interest rates and plummeting land values, Allen abandoned dairy, a 24/7 stressor, and focussed on row crops. For extra income, he fished in tournaments with his wife, Cindy, winning cash and boats. He led fishing expeditions at Kentucky Lake, until Asian carp, an invasive species, overtook much of the crappie and bass. He sublet a hundred acres. He fixed farm machinery, cut timber. He bought, trained, and sold quarter horses. He kept cattle—enjoyable, but all-consuming. When Allen was forty-one, a branch fell on him while he was cutting timber, cracking his hard hat and his spine. As he was being loaded into a medevac chopper, he told his daddy, “Check on my Charolais heifer, because she’s gonna have a calf—probably tonight.”
In the I.C.U., Allen dreamed about being trapped beneath the floor of his barn. The dreams were so upsetting that he had to be restrained. He spent nearly a month in the hospital. In rehab, he asked, “When y’all gonna let me go home?” When you can dress yourself, he was told. The next morning, he had his clothes on. Allen soon returned to farming, with a back that constantly ached.
Zoey likes horses better than people—“the horses don’t talk, and they don’t judge”—and she likes mares over stallions. “They can be moody, but they try harder,” she says. Her horses are Dixie, Bell, Socks, and Ace.
Fifteen years ago, his granddaughter, Zoey, was born. Both her parents had addiction. Zoey was days old when her grandparents took her in. She was not yet three when Allen, whom she calls Pappaw, or Paps, put her on a pony named Tucker; Paps said she “rode the hair off that thing.” Later, she liked hopping on a horse and flying bareback through the fields, her long hair flopping between her shoulder blades. She won barrel races with an almost feral intuition. “You got to be born with that talent—God had to give it to you,” Paps once told Bob Miller, a Birmingham-based photographer and documentary filmmaker who’s been chronicling the family for years. Zoey’s profound connection to horses used to mystify her classmates. “I don’t understand them,” she says, “how they can sit in their room all day and play on their phones, or play video games, and not go outside.”
Zoey is grateful that, at birth, she wasn’t “sold for money, or put up for adoption, or taken away.”
Cindy works at Walmart, but the farm couldn’t run without her. Zoey just wishes that she weren’t so afraid of horses.
Land now costs so many thousands of dollars per acre that to profit, Allen says, you’d have to “put houses on it.”
Zoey fell in with horses because “you can trust them, and they trust you. They’re just peaceful.”
Allen taught Zoey and her cousins, Dalton and Brendan Clark, the art of “noodling”—how to sink barrels in rivers, then catch fish that swim inside. “They ain’t diehard about it, none of them,” he says. “There’s too much other things that’s easier.”
Now a high-school freshman, Zoey prefers horses to school. Paps taught her how to break and train them—what to do when “starting a new horse,” what to do when thrown. “The No. 1 rule,” she says, is “after you get bucked off, you always get back on. You gotta show the horse who’s boss. If you don’t, they’re gonna try to get away with a lot of things.” Horses may give Zoey a path forward in life, regardless of what happens to the farm. She’d move to Texas if not for all the tornadoes. So, maybe Tennessee; maybe Wyoming.
“When I’m in a barrel race, I won’t hear music, I won’t hear my friends hollering, or the announcer. I mute everything out, and just pay attention to my horse.”
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