 From the time of “The Colonel,” the patriarch of the MacDougal family, who first claimed the property, to the novel’s present, the 1930s, and the family's last owner of the property, Johnny, the Colonel's great grandson, Bromfield traces the interactions between the MacDougals, their neighbours, the nearby town, and the land itself.Throughout the novel, Bromfield suggests the corrosive effects of a mercantile and industrial economy upon the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian society.Although the novel ends in the family selling off the farm to a developer who then leases it to less-than-caring tenants, its concern for the land continued as Bromfield returned to the United States and made Malabar Farm a model of sustainable agriculture.