reviewed by Scott Hedley

Perhaps no other large animal enterprise offers as fast a turnaround on investment as hog raising. Range-raised pork is now sought out by the informed consumer concerned about issues of factory farming and willing to pay a premium to get a healthy, quality alternative.

Klober’s four step system is as follows. First, farrowing is done in a central area that is regularly cleaned and disinfected between farrowings. There is no continuous farrowing and thus no perpetual pool of very young and lactating animals that are often the epicenter of health problems. Second, soon after farrowing, the sows and litters are moved to pasture or wooded lots. Third, each group remains intact through weaning, and this is done by removing the sows and leaving the pigs in a familiar environment to reduce stress. Finally, pastures or lots are then kept free of hogs for at least 12 months to break the life cycles of most pathogenic organisms and parasites.
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Reviewed by Julie Rawson

I am on an earthworm self-education binge right now, and when I start on such a binge I often find it helpful to go back into history a bit. For example, I am halfway through both of Weston A. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration and William Albrecht’s Foundation Concepts as I write this. Reading these authors who wrote from 70 – 100 years ago gives me an important perspective regarding our present day concerns about topics like climate change and carbon sequestration. I didn’t know until recently that Charles Darwin was a major force in our understanding of the earthworm and its role in agriculture and humus management. He spent 39 years studying the earthworm before he published The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habitats in 1881, right before his death.
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reviewed by Julie Rawson

This book is hot off the press. I am a person who regularly devours Jerry’s articles in Acres, USA because they are so information-packed, so positive spirited, so thoroughly researched, and always based in the practical on-farm application. Brunetti’s writing (and public speaking) is always something to be sought out by anyone who is involved with grass-based agriculture. This book goes one step further in that it is relevant for the vegetable grower, also.

Each of the 13 chapters takes a topic and discusses it at length including some deep scientific facts, some anecdotes about leaders in that particular area of science or its agricultural application, and some recipes for successful farm or garden management regarding that topic. Throughout there are recommendations for further research on any topic that piques the reader’s interest. The chapters are titled as follows – Soil as Supraorganism, The Mineral Nature of Soil, Trace Elements, The Biological Nature of Soil, Compost and Compost Tea, Foliar Nutrition, The Eternal Earthworm, Water: A Medium for Metamorphosis, System Acquired and Induced Systemic Resistance, Our Precious Pollinators and Predators, Cover Crops, The Tools of the Trade, and Back to the Future: a Permanent Agriculture.
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reviewed by Vidya Tikku

Set in the Bronx of the 1970’s landlord fires, The Pollinator’s Corridor follows the lives of three teenage friends who attempt to convince wild bees and butterflies to cross the Bronx by planting ‘corridors’ of native flora throughout the industrial wasteland. Connecting fragmented forests, watersheds and city parks, our heroes restore biodiversity to the blighted ghetto by uniting marginalized communities and laying the foundations of ecological health in an age of crisis and decline.

The story is especially relevant today where a lack of environmental leaders in the political world catalyzes concerned and caring individuals and communities to take action in their own spheres of influence, making change where they can and when they can. They reflect Birk’s mantra of resisting by action in your own work, refusing to stop the daily actions in your own life and finding inspiration in your creation, a pollinator’s greenway in this case.
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review by Lucia Stout Huebner

If you are interested in any aspect of Medicinal Herb Farming, this is the book for you. It’s well organized, beautifully written, loaded with information, discusses many important environmental issues and most of all inspires the reader.

Preparing his Eagle Scout project, my son was charged with preparing a report that any person could use as a guide to complete the whole project on their own This book does just that for the Medicinal Herb Farmer. But this is more than simply a how-to book. The authors have woven their own story and thoughts about sustainable and organic farming into each chapter so the text is interesting and a pleasure to read. I marked many passages to revisit later and found the text encouraging and realistic.
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Reviewed by Larry Siegel

Seeds have developed a certain cachet; I can number a half-dozen books I have read on the subject in recent years. This is long overdue; the seed represents, after all, the vital link between yesterday and today and tomorrow (though the mad scientists are probably at work to eliminate this link). To the mix we can now add Seedtime by Scott Chaskey. The inner jacket of the book refers to Chaskey as a poet, farmer, and educator. [Read more…]

review by Jack Kittredge

This is a scholarly work, published by a university professor for use in university classes. So if you are looking for a soft read, look elsewhere. If, however, you are looking for a detailed factual history of the origins of the animal rights movement in America, its growth and close relationship to many other re-form movements like abolition, temperance, and suffrage, and its fascinating role in establishing a litmus test by which national assimilation was ascer-tained, you will want this short volume. Those who are interested in the mythology of American exceptionalism, that belief in the uniqueness and benevo-lence of America’s republican political institutions, will find much to ponder in its shared history with animal welfare concerns.

Although there were clear precedents in such conflicts as Puritans versus Royalists regarding animal sports in very early 15th century England, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s adoption in 1641 of a Body of Liberties which prohibits “any Tirranny or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man’s use”, Davis places the origins of animal protectionism in the Second Great Awakening, that Protestant religious revival movement which swept America from about 1790 to 1840. As a part of the much larger Romantic movement, that Awakening rejected rationalism and deism in favor of enthusiastic emotion and a direct relationship with God. One outward sign of that relationship, according to Davis’ reading of the period, was a concern with animal mercy.
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reviewed by Dr. Stephanie Gilfoy, ND

The front cover clearly states the goal of America’s Two-Headed Pig: to explain how to go about treating nutritional deficiencies and disease in a genetically modified, antibiotic resistant, and pesticide dependent world. Author Leah Dunham is the daughter of a veterinarian and as such grew up seeing her father diagnose and cure herd illnesses through providing cattle with proper nutrition. As this book clearly describes in great detail, however, proper nutrition is a lot harder to come by and has been getting even more difficult in the more recent years as politics, money, and health collide.
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review by Josh Pincus

The Art and Science of Grazing, by Sarah Flack, is a wonderful and thorough examination of our current thinking on managing pastures for livestock. The book is both an essential introduction to the theories that guide pasture management as well as a detailed assessment of the science behind these prac-tices. This blend of breadth and depth makes this book an essential addition to the reading list for any aspiring or practicing grazer.

The Art and Science of Grazing is written in four parts. The first is Laying the Groundwork, where the author introduces some of the general ideas that overarch grazing and pasture management as a whole. The second section, Grazing from the Plant’s Perspective, focuses on how the actual plants in the pasture live and grow, how they react to different types of grazing, and the vital role that the soil beneath the grass plays in the process. In the third section, Grazing from the Animal’s Perspective, Flack focuses on rumination, how ruminants graze, how their gut generates the nutrients they need from the forage they consume, and some of the many challenges that grass based livestock can face. The final section of the book, Designing and Managing a Grazing System, takes a close look at how to actually put all of the previous ideas into practice out on the pasture. Every section is full of clear and helpful pictures, graphs and charts that help make the clear writing even better. [Read more…]

Reviewed by Laura Davis

The original French language version of this book was published in the fall of 2012 and was titled Le Jardinier-Maraîcher.

As a fellow market gardener on a small piece of land, I pay attention when a farmer says they can bring in $60,000 to $100,000 income per acre annually with a profit margin of 40% in diverse vegetable crops on 1 1/2 acres of land, without a full size tractor. Jean-Martin Fortier encourages aspiring farmers to explore the idea of a profitable micro-farm and takes one on a step by step journey on how to achieve it. I enjoyed not only reading about Fortier and his wife Maude-Hélène’s success at making a good living but was heartened that their success was compatible with making a good life for their family.
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review by Elizabeth Henderson

I hope that many organic farmers and our supporters will read this book, the result of ten years of study of the conditions for farmworkers and farmers in the Hudson Valley of New York. Gray gives us an honest picture of how farm labor relations look through a labor justice lens. As passionately as any NOFA member, Gray wants to reform our food system, but she wants to be sure that in our rush to be more humane to chickens and earthworms, we do not leave out the human beings who do so much of the work. It might help you to start with the final chapter, “Toward a Comprehensive Food Ethic,” her testimonial as an ardent locavore, so that you can read the rest of the book without nagging worries that she does not care if she puts farmers out of business.
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review by Andy Fellenz

Ben Hartman grew up on a 400 acre farm in Indiana. Together with his wife, one part-time employee and several seasonal interns he operates a profitable 5 acre market farm growing crops on less than 1 acre, including 9,000 sq ft of greenhouse space, in Goshen, Indiana.  In Lean Farming he introduces farmers to the concept of Lean.  Unlike most books with farming in the title, Lean Farming doesn’t suggest the best way to plant something, what crops to grow or how to manage for insects or disease. Instead, it discusses the concept of Lean Management and how it can be used to improve farm profitability.
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review by Jack Kittredge

There is a tradition in German writing going back at least to Kant or Hegel, possibly farther, that finds signs of Spirit in every manifestation of reality. Rudolf Steiner certainly is part of that tradition. So is Erhard Hennig.

It is difficult to convey this kind of thinking to many Americans, trained as we are in a very materialistic and reductionist science. It strikes one as impres-sionistic rather than linear, intuited rather than deduced.
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reviewed by Jack Kittredge

No, you aren’t seeing double. This and the previous book reviewed in this corner have very similar main titles, distinguished only by, as my old Latin teacher would call it, number.

This is the first book Stone Barns has published, and a remarkable one it is. Practically every writer of note in modern alternative agriculture has written an essay in it. Thirty-six of them, from Wendell Berry, Joan Gussow and Eliot Coleman to Joel Salatin, Allan Savory and Temple Grandin have weighed in.

The hope for this slim book, as the Stone Barns executive director says in the introduction, is that: “The letters and essays in this anthology reveal im-portant ideas about food, agriculture, and culture – how patterns of eating and farming have emerged and evolved, and sometimes devolved, and how they need to coalesce now in a way that creates a more sustainable future.”
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