review by Jack Kittredge

Those who have read a Dr. Reich book (yes, he does have a PhD – in horticulture), or who have attended one of Lee’s NOFA conference workshops, know the care with which he covers his topics. That approach continues in this, his latest gardening book.

From the book’s earliest essay, on seed sprouting, in which he explains the mysteries of dormancy, stratification, plant hormones that inhibit or encourage germination, and scarification, to its final one, on flavor, exploring the impact of microclimate, pruning for light, soil quality, harvest timing, even the mysteries of terroir on this vital quality, his curiosity and knowledge combine in a speculative blend that fascinates.
[Read more…] about The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden

review by Liz Henderson

This book has been available for over 20 years, but the theme relates perfectly to the theme of this special issue of TNF, connecting the method of plant breeding that has dominated in the US with the need for the excessive and increasing use of pesticides. Robinson, who passed away in 2014, according to Wikipedia, was “a Canadian/British plant scientist with more than forty years of wide-ranging global experience in crop improvement for both commercial and subsistence agriculture.” He was a practitioner and a champion of horizontal or population breeding, an approach that attempts to replicate the level of resistance to pests and diseases found in uncultivated crops and resembles the way farmers have selected crops for millennia.
[Read more…] about Return to Resistance: Breeding Crops to Reduce Pesticide Dependence

Published by Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016
$24.95, paperback, 272 pages, 16 page color inset
review by Kathy Morris

Restoring Heritage Grains is a book about a journey; not only of wheat but of the author.  Eli Rogosa began working with wheat in Israel where she moved from Maine to find partners for peace through organic farming.  While traveling she observed farmers successfully growing a diverse variety of wheat without external inputs and saving seeds from the varieties and plants that performed the best under the growing conditions.  This was the beginning of her quest to bring landrace wheat back from the brink of extinction and this book details her quest.  A treasure trove of information, it is filled with the history of the cultivation of wheat; the diversity of the cultivars; the cultural folklore surrounding its cultivation; a ‘how to’ for growing heritage wheat; and finally using the cultivars.  It is also a call to all of us to save seeds (not only wheat); to discover what grows best for us and select for traits that we want.

The first chapter deals with wheat and its evolution since it was first wild-gathered over 23.000 years ago and cultivated over 12,000 years ago; to present day where profit is the overriding goal rather than nutrition.   And, when you consider co-evolution, here is a grain that has evolved over thousands of years with the people who cultivate and ingest it and in the twentieth and twenty-first century it has become toxic to a percentage of those people.  Thus the issue of gluten intolerance and wheat allergies is introduced in this chapter and later in an appendix.
[Read more…] about Restoring Heritage Grains:

review by Bob Banning

In this self-published book, Caius Rommens, a former genetic engineer who developed GMO potatoes as an employee of a potato company, wants to warn us about these potatoes. Their claimed benefits, he says, are false, but the harm they can cause to both farmers’ profits and eaters’ health is real and serious. He supports his argument with 109 endnotes, most of which appear to be citing scientific and trade journals.

In the book’s foreword the author relates that over several years while working for his now-former employer he gathered observations about unintended effects that his work had on potatoes. He left his employer because he couldn’t in good conscience continue to do the work that his position required.
[Read more…] about Pandora’s Potatoes: The Worst GMOs

reviewed by Billy Wilson

As a student of anthropology who is slowly finding his footing somewhere in the world of sustainable agriculture, I can’t say I’ve recently happened across a book whose content I’ve been more excited to digest than Global Eating Disorder . I was actually surprised at myself. The book looks at the globalized food system—it’s development, it’s footprint, it’s human-impacts—predominantly through a social scientist’s perspective.

As implied by the title, Global Eating Disorder seeks to convey the pathologies intrinsic to our industrial food system. There are the easi-ly-stated-but-not-so-easily-explained agricultural pathologies, such as 1) international markets demanding the flow of cheap foods causing farms to become bigger, while specializing in a few commodities—I mean “food”. This up-scaling is known in agro-business as “market rationalization”. Involved here are also GMO seeds, an unsettling reality, taking monoculture to greater heights. Ninety percent of US-grown soybeans are GMO crops. 2) Land use alterations worldwide se-riously skewing the distribution of US farmlands. Two-thirds of New England used to be farmed. This was all changed with urbanization and residential building. Farmland itself urbanized in the Midwest where tracts were cheap, abundant, and eventually consolidated. No wonder the quantity of chickens produced in the US increased fourteen-fold while, simultaneously, the quantity of chicken farms decreased by 98%! This explosion of chickens, by the way, is very much related to the explosion of GMO soybeans.
[Read more…] about Global Eating Disorder

reviewed by Jane Hammer

You know that first warm, sunny morning of the New England spring, where you can finally feel in your bones that yes, the seasons keep on turning and it will be green again…that is how I felt reading Cows Save the Planet. This book presents the first real message of hope about our future in the face of weather extremes and global warming: how people from North Dakota to Australia, New England to Zimbabwe are cooling their local climate naturally, regenerating their soil and water resources, and sequestering carbon for the betterment of their own lives as well as global systems. It’s a pretty quick read—succinct, inspiring, well designed and not preachy. Readers receive a thorough introduction to many of the pioneers of soil carbon farming and a good explanation of how carbon and water cycles are related to soil health, food security, climate stability, and rural livelihoods.
[Read more…] about Bringing Back Biodiversity, and Restoring Nutrients to our Food

This is an excellent book.

Judith is an easy-to-read writer who has a knack for discovering people who are doing ground-breaking environmental work. She visits them, relates their story, explains the insights they have had, and shows us how their work can restore the natural order. You will be wiser and much more hopeful when you finish reading it.

The topic of Water in Plain Sight is, of course, water scarcity, which is growing worldwide. Schwartz travels to many places where water used to be available and is no longer. She meets with people who understand what has changed, have a solution, and are implementing it.
[Read more…] about Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World

review by Liz Henderson

Grocery Story is a good lively read as is appropriate for a book that the author intended as an organizing tool to boost public awareness of the benefits of food co-ops. I met Jon Steinman when he came to Rochester, NY to speak at the Abundance Co-op, his first appearance on a 300-stop tour of co-ops and bookstores around North America.  Together with Melinda, the Marketing Manager at Abundance, we appeared on Connections, the local public radio talk show. After spending a decade producing a show called “Deconstructing Dinner,” where he took viewers for a close look at all the ills of big food, Steinman wanted to imagine an alternative food system – he found his answer in the network of food co-ops.

The book opens with a concise history of how this country went from small local groceries to chains of groceries to the concentrated supermarket chains of today. Consumer weakness for convenience proved a useful tool in the hands of food industry titans. The first A & P opened in 1859, proliferating over the next decades till there were 16,000 stores in 1929, together with 70 factories assembling products and 100 warehouses.  Kroger was born in 1883; by 1927, its stores numbered 3,749. A Piggly Wiggly was the first self-service grocery, a model quickly taken up by competitors.  A favorite technique for driving out smaller stores was loss leading, until the practice was banned in 1933.  Steinman has an amazing quote from Huey Long, a powerful right wing demagogue: “I would rather have thieves and gangsters than chain stores in Louisiana!” With all his power, Long could not stem the relentless chain store tide that anti-trust actions held back for a while through the 1970’s until Reagonomics opened the flood gates to the mergers of the 80’s and 90’s and the advent of Walmart (1988).
[Read more…] about Grocery Story: the Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants

Review by Ben Goldberg

As an Extension Specialist and head of the Compost Learning Lab at North Carolina State University, and organizer of the annual international NC State Vermicomposting Conference, Rhonda Sherman is a dedicated and motivational voice for vermiculture and vermicomposting. Her book, The Worm Farmer’s Handbook, is the printed version of this dedication. Be prepared to go on an engaging tour of the diverse and fascinating world of worms as Rhonda shares her long-accumulated wisdom about maintaining a healthy and productive worm farm or vermicomposting operation.

As defined by its subtitle, Mid To Large Scale Vermicomposting for Farms, Businesses, Municipalities, Schools, and Institutions, the book is in-tended to be a guide to establishing a successful worm composting venture, whether for profit or ecological benefit. In no way, however, does that lessen its value to small scale worm farmers, or for those who simply maintains a bin down cellar or under the kitchen sink. As the book strongly emphasizes, there is tremendous value in gaining a practical hands-on understanding of worm composting basics before growing in scale. Drawing from her own experiences and those of others, Rhonda offers valuable tips and strategies that are appropriate to all skill levels and sizes of operation. She creates a solid platform of understanding that will help you productively manage not only your worms and system of operation, but your business management procedures as well.
[Read more…] about The Worm Farmer’s Handbook: Mid-to-Large-Scale Vermicomposting for Farms, Businesses, Municipalities, Schools, and Institutions

Reviewed by Andy Simon

“Ed stood on the summit — or near enough for a good story when he got back to New York. His open mouth chewed thin air, which hit his throat like liquid nitrogen.” These first sentences of Charles Simpson’s novel hardly seem like the opening of

a book about genetic engineering in agriculture. However, this is only the first of many surprises in this fast-paced, intelligent, political, exciting book. Simpson manages to combine a taut, erotically- charged detective story with a fine-grained analysis of Big Ag and Big Tech’s plot to control global food production. It’s quite a read.

[Read more…] about Uncertain Harvest

review by Liz Henderson

This little book, only 75 pages long, is a great introduction to caring for the health of your soil whether you are gardening or farming, small or large-scale. For non-beginners, rereading this book at the start of each new farming/gardening season would also be a helpful refresher. In Stika’s words, this book “is a soil-centric view on restoring the soil first and then realizing all of the crop production and environmental benefits that will follow.” (xvi) Before taking up a plow or fork, Stika wants us to understand how soils function so that when we maximize productivity, we do not undermine future yields and ecosystem health.
[Read more…] about A Soil Owner’s Manual: How to Restore and Maintain Soil Health

review by Jack Kittredge

Woody, studied practitioner of the bon mot, starts this compendium saying “I’m sad as hell and I’m not going to fake it anymore”. What follows, which he terms “a call to farms”, is a booklet of poetic free association/verse and snippets about history, literature, economics, popular culture, natural science, agriculture, contemporary politics and virtually everything else which enters Woody’s wide-ranging mind.

Tasch’s strength is that he conflates diverse ideas from these various streams, many of which turn up topics (soil, microbes, carbon, health, simplicity, life) with which most readers of this journal are quite familiar. This sometimes illuminates truths not contained in any of the individual citations but that are visible for a moment in the flash of something reflected.
[Read more…] about Soil 2017: Notes Towards the Theory and Practice of Nurture Capital

Reviewed by Sanne Kure-Jensen

Gardeners and farmers considering permaculture or season extension will find this film an excellent resource. It features over a dozen perennial vegetables on Toensmeier’s Massachusetts garden. The host also shows high-elevation, temperate gardens at Las Cañadas in Huatusco, Veracruz, Mexico (bosquedeniebla.com.mx). Those growing conditions are comparable to those in the Pacific Northwest. The final segment of the video covered Toensmeier’s workshop at ECHO’s global farm in North Fort Meyers, Florida (echonet.org).
[Read more…] about Perennial Vegetable Gardening with Eric Toensmeier (DVD review)

review by Jack KIttredge

I have always enjoyed reading Eric Toensmeier. His enthusiasm for perennials is infectious and we have planted several varietal selections found in his 2007 book “Perennial Vegetables” on our farm in Barre, MA. The amazing 1/10 of a acre he and Jonathan Bates planted to perennials in their back yard in Holyoke, “Paradise Lot”, is a wonder of diversity.

Many of us in NOFA have been focused on developing practices and tools that sequester carbon and mitigate climate extremes when raising primarily an-nual crops, especially those grown in the northeast. The term “carbon farming” has been used for these practices (although often, according to Toensmei-er, it is associated with direct compensation of the farmer for such sequestration.) Now Eric has taken on the long-needed task of analyzing perennial plantings from the same perspective.
[Read more…] about The Carbon Farming Solution:

review by Richard Robinson
Hobbies are respectable enterprises, and everyone should have at least one. But nonetheless, the phrase “hobby farm” grates on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. It’s a phrase I have only ever heard from the mouths of people who are not farmers and have done no farm work, and in fact are deeply alienated from the work—physical, mental, aesthetic—that farmers do every day to make food, and beauty, from the land they care for. To me, a more-than-part-time-but-less-than-full-time farmer, “hobby farm” evokes a combination of condescension and cluelessness, such that I am predisposed to reject out of hand a book that calls itself “Organic Hobby Farming,” even when it follows that up with its more promising subtitle, “A practical guide to earth-friendly farming in any space.”
[Read more…] about Organic Hobby Farming: A Practical Guide to Earth-friendly Farming in any Space

Reviewed by Noah Courser-Kellerman

“When I came to Goosegreen farm” Newman Turner begins the 1951 classic Fertility Farming, “the first calf was born dead. Disease was already master of the farm. Was I to be man enough to face such a master and turn his efforts to my own advantage?”

This book is part memoir, part practical guide and part fiery manifesto. It is about the power of good farming to resuscitate a dying farm and a vision for a new, regenerative agriculture based on biological principles, keen observation, respect for the land and hard work. I believe that Turner’s work is not as well known as it should be, and that his writings deserve a place in the canon of visionary organic writers in the company of J. Russell Smith, Masanobu Fukuoka, Sir Albert Howard, Lady Eve Balfour, Rudolf Steiner, William Albrecht, George Washington Carver, Edward Faulkner and others.
[Read more…] about Fertility Farming