For 12 consecutive months, author Brian Bender lived a nomadic life on small organic farms across the United States. Leaving behind a teaching career, he hopped from farm to farm through an organization called WOOF: World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Along with his spiritual journey, Bender embarked upon a spiritual quest in meditation centers around the country. The heart of this story lies with the unusual people, animals, and tasks on each farm. Bender entered this year of transformation a high school science teacher and came out educated in the ways of sustainable living and human happiness.
Farming for Health describes the use of farms, farm animals, plants and landscapes as a base for promoting human mental and physical health and social well-being. The book offers an overview of the development of ‘Farming for Health’ initiatives across Europe, resulting from changing paradigms in health care and the demand for new social and financial activities in agriculture and rural areas. The contributors are drawn from a range of countries and disciplines.
An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.
Farming for Us All gives us the opportunity to explore the possibilities for social, environmental, and economic change that practical, dialogic agriculture presents.
“Charles Massy has written a definitive masterpiece that takes its place along with the writings of Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Masanobu Fukuoka, Humberto Maturana, and Michael Pollan. No work has more brilliantly defined regenerative agriculture and the breadth of its restorative impact upon human health, biodiversity, climate, and ecological intelligence." --Paul Hawken In Call of the Reed Warbler, Charles Massy explores regenerative agriculture and the vital connection between our soil and our health. It is the story of how a grassroots revolution—a true underground insurgency—can save the planet, help reduce and reverse climate change, and build healthy people and healthy communities, pivoting significantly on our relationship with growing and consuming food. Using his personal experience as a touchstone—from an unknowing, chemical-using farmer with dead soils to a radical ecologist farmer carefully regenerating a 2000-hectare property to a state of natural health—Massy tells the real story behind industrial agriculture and the global profit-obsessed corporations driving it. With evocative stories, he shows how other innovative and courageous farmers are finding a new way. At stake is not only a revolution in human health and in our communities, but the very survival of the planet. For farmers, backyard gardeners, food buyers, health workers, policy makers, and public leaders alike, Call of the Reed Warbler offers a tangible path forward and a powerful and moving paean of hope. It’s not too late to regenerate the earth. Call of the Reed Warbler shows the way forward for the future of our food supply, our planet, and our health.
First published in 1926, this classic survey, which includes nearly 250 photographs, examines the traditional farming methods of the densely populated lands of China, Korea and Japan and shows how fertility can be maintained over many centuries through conserving and utilizing natural resources. In the Introduction, the author notes: ‘The United States as yet a nation of but few people widely scattered over a broad virgin land with more than twenty acres to the support of every man, woman and child, while the people whose practices are to be considered are toiling in fields tilled more than three thousand years and who have scarcely more than two acres per capita, more than one-half of which is uncultivable land.’ Researchers and scholars in the fields of human geography, regional studies and earth sciences, as well as social and economic history will welcome this landmark study being returned to print.
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An unsettling journey into the disaster-bound American food system, and an exploration of possible solutions, from leading food politics commentator and former farmer Tom Philpott. More than a decade after Michael Pollan's game-changing The Omnivore's Dilemma transformed the conversation about what we eat, a combination of global diet trends and corporate interests have put American agriculture into a state of "quiet emergency," from dangerous drought in California--which grows more than 50 percent of the fruits and vegetables we eat--to catastrophic topsoil loss in the "breadbasket" heartland of the United States. Whether or not we take heed, these urgent crises of industrial agriculture will define our future. In Perilous Bounty, veteran journalist and former farmer Tom Philpott explores and exposes the small handful of seed and pesticide corporations, investment funds, and magnates who benefit from the trends that imperil us, with on-the-ground dispatches featuring the scientists documenting the damage and the farmers and activists who are valiantly and inventively pushing back. Resource scarcity looms on the horizon, but rather than pointing us toward an inevitable doomsday, Philpott shows how the entire wayward ship of American agriculture could be routed away from its path to disaster. He profiles the farmers and communities in the nation's two key growing regions developing resilient, soil-building, water-smart farming practices, and readying for the climate shocks that are already upon us; and he explains how we can help move these methods from the margins to the mainstream.
Farming across Borders uses agricultural history to connect the regional experiences of the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the North American side of the Pacific Rim, now writ large into a broad history of the North American West. Case studies of commodity production and distribution, trans-border agricultural labor, and environmental change unite to reveal new perspectives on a historiography traditionally limited to a regional approach. Sterling Evans has curated nineteen essays to explore the contours of “big” agricultural history. Crops and commodities discussed include wheat, cattle, citrus, pecans, chiles, tomatoes, sugar beets, hops, henequen, and more. Toiling over such crops, of course, were the people of the North American West, and as such, the contributing authors investigate the role of agricultural labor, from braceros and Hutterites to women working in the sorghum fields and countless other groups in between. As Evans concludes, “society as a whole (no matter in what country) often ignores the role of agriculture in the past and the present.” Farming across Borders takes an important step toward cultivating awareness and understanding of the agricultural, economic, and environmental connections that loom over the North American West regardless of lines on a map. In the words of one essay, “we are tied together . . . in a hundred different ways.”
"Eloquent and detailed...It's hard to have hope, but the organized observations and plans of Hoffman and people like her give me some. Read her book -- and listen." -- Jane Smiley, The Washington Post In her late 40s, Beth Hoffman decided to upend her comfortable life as a professor and journalist to move to her husband's family ranch in Iowa--all for the dream of becoming a farmer. There was just one problem: money. Half of America's two million farms made less than $300 in 2019, and many struggle just to stay afloat. Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth's eyes. She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. Growing oats is good for the environment but ends up being very bad for the wallet. And finding somewhere, in the midst of COVID-19, to slaughter grass finished beef is a nightmare. If Beth can't make it, how can farmers who confront racism, lack access to land, or don't have other jobs to fall back on hack it? Bet the Farm is a first-hand account of the perils of farming today and a personal exploration of more just and sustainable ways of producing food.
Part memoir and part philosophical look at why we travel, filled with stories of Matt Kepnes' adventures abroad, an exploration of wanderlust and what it truly means to be a nomad. New York Times bestselling author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, Matthew Kepnes knows what it feels like to get the travel bug. After meeting some travelers on a trip to Thailand in 2005, he realized that living life meant more than simply meeting society's traditional milestones. Over 500,000 miles, 1,000 hostels, and 90 different countries later, Matt has compiled his favorite stories, experiences, and insights into this travel manifesto. Filled with the color and perspective that only hindsight and self-reflection can offer, these stories get to the real questions at the heart of wanderlust. Travel questions that transcend the basic "how-to," and plumb the depths of what drives us to travel — and what extended travel around the world can teach us about life, ourselves, and our place in the world. Ten Years a Nomad is a heartfelt comprehension of the insatiable craving for travel, unraveling the authenticity of being a vagabond, not for months but for a fulfilling decade.
