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.
[Read more…] about America’s Two-Headed Pig

review by Jack Kittredge

I have always wished that I had taken advantage of my proximity to Lynn Margulis during the many years she was a professor at UMass before her death in 2011. The time never seemed quite right to interview her on agricultural aspects of microbial behavior, and then, before history had a chance to recognize her Nobel-quality contribution to evolutionary biology, she was gone. This documentary is a tribute to her insights and her willingness to share them. It is composed of many photos and clips of Lynn throughout her life, explaining her work, and of her colleagues talking about her and the revolutionary impact she had on science.
[Read more…] about Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis Rocked the Boat & Started a Scientific Revolution

review by Jack Kittredge

Doug Fine is a journalist turned hemp farmer, so who better to write a book about it, you would think?

That is what I thought when I picked this up, hoping to get a fairly straight story about farming hemp and the details of that trade. Unfortunately, while there were good tidbits and facts which I could pull out of the narrative, the writer’s style was so chatty that most of what he had to say was irrelevant to anyone looking for hard information. It is full of breezy references to hemp grower collectives around the country and Doug’s musings, cutting back occasionally to his own New Mexico goat farm and the time a bear killed most of his goats.
[Read more…] about American Hemp Farmer: Adventures and Misadventures in the Cannabis Trade

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…] about The Art and Science of Grazing: How Grass Farmers Can Create Sustainable Systems for Healthy Animals and Farm Ecosystems

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.
[Read more…] about The Market Gardener, A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming

review by Maryellen Sheehan

A Farmer’s Guide to Climate Disruption collects together Rebekah Fraser’s “Changing Climate” columns originally written between January 2016 through December 2017 for the now defunct Growing magazine. Fraser updated and expanded these articles with additional interviews for the book. Each chapter explores one aspect of climate disruption on agriculture through the lens of researchers, climate leaders, and growers across the country.

The book covers a vast span of material, beginning with a broad look at food security and communicating changes, before digging into soil, nitrogen management, water, and pest issues, and concluding with examinations of individual applications of climate-smart farming methods.

One issue Fraser threads throughout is farming’s dual role in climate change. Our food production decisions can both worsen climate disruption from field to global scales, but also provide a major path to mitigate disruption. Fraser also poses the dilemma of looking into the future where we don’t just face growing crops in a changing climate, but also 30% population growth by 2050. With our global agricultural land base nearly maxed out, reaching this production level is doubly a challenge, and building resilience in our food system even more critical.
[Read more…] about A Farmer’s Guide to Climate Disruption

review by Christy Bassett

These folks really like garlic. This cookbook begins with a table of contents that reads more like a menu: Appetizers, Dips, Dressings and Sauces, Beverages, Soups, Breads, Cakes, Cookies and Desserts, Chow Time, Entrees and Sides, Oils, Vinegars and Pickles, Tidbits and Fun. Who would have known that garlic had a place in every course?

In the introduction The Garlic Seed Foundation gives a brief history of how they collected recipes for the book from fellow farmers, garlic lovers and friends. They also mention that the recipes included are really more like guidelines- multiplying the amount of garlic from one clove to one bulb to taste in each recipe is mentioned more than once. (Because who doesn’t need more garlic?) Since it is written by farmers for farmers, the need for quick and easy recipes that can utilize homegrown ingredients is paramount. But the authors are also quick to note that winter time cooking may be different from kitchen activities during the rest of the year and include a handful of more time-consuming recipes as well. The additional information attached to these facts is infused with good humor and conversational tone.
[Read more…] about The Garlic Farmers’ Cookbook

review by Julie Rawson
NOFA/Mass has launched a “Campaign for Pesticide” Reduction (CPR) in collaboration with Toxics Action Center, a long term environmental organization in Boston. Interestingly, we last collaborated on a joint project with them back in 1997 when we were at odds with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority because they were labeling their sludge product, ‘Baystate Organic’. We won that one and they took the word “organic” off their product. This campaign some 21 years later may be a little harder to win. We are hoping to pass as many municipal bans on the use of glyphosate and neonicotinoids as we can in the state of Massachusetts. On the positive side, we are assisting municipalities in establishing organic action plans for town owned and managed properities.
[Read more…] about Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science

review by Jack Kittredge

Beavers, the world’s second largest rodent (after South America’s capybara) used to be everywhere. They come in two varieties, the North American one (Castor canadensis) of whom there were an estimated 90 million inhabiting every stream and creek in the temperate part of the continent before Columbus, and a Eurasian one (Castor fiber) which was equally widespread in the old world.

The hallmark behavior of beavers is to build dams to slow the flow of streams and raise the level of water, causing flooding. The resultant ponds enable the rodents to reach their favorite foods – trees such as willow, cottonwood and aspen. These, once toppled by the animal’s amazing gnawing capacity (using self-sharpening teeth) and floated to the center of the pond, can be piled and stored for winter fodder largely unreachable by predators on shore.
[Read more…] about Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why they Matter

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.
[Read more…] about Labor and the Locavore: The making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic

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.
[Read more…] about The Lean Farm: How to Minimize Waste, Increase Efficiency, and Maximize Value and Profits with Less Work

review by Sanne Kure-Jensen

Increasing media attention has focused on shrinking insect and pollinator populations. In this thoroughly researched book, Jody Helmer describes our dangerous situation and recent efforts to restore pollinator populations. The author quotes numerous research studies describing issues facing pollinators, successes and challenges of habitat restoration for native (wild) bee and pollinator populations as well as the dangers of inactivity. The book’s final chapter focuses on citizen science opportunities to collect valuable data. Helmers table called “Twenty-Nine Ways You Can Help Pollinators” offers a checklist for helping pollinators in residential yards, on city balconies or community gardens with pollinator-friendly plantings.

Helmer said thankfully, “farmers, gardeners, businesses, non-profits and eaters alike are stepping up to save the creatures that feed our world, planting habitats filled with native species, avoiding chemicals, participating in citizen science projects and spreading the word that pollinators are in trouble and we need to take action to save them.”
[Read more…] about Protecting Pollinators: How to Save the Creatures That Feed Our World

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.
[Read more…] about Secrets of Fertile Soils: Humus as the Guardian of the Fundamentals of Natural Life

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.”
[Read more…] about Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future

review by Maryellen Sheehan

Between being a farmer with a longtime side interest in agriculture and politics and working for NOFA-NY, I’ve always felt like I should know way more about the farm bill than I do. Yet self-education seemed an eye-glazing enterprise too hard for a tired farmer to jump in to read about at the end of a day. I don’t know how I missed the two earlier editions of this work, but Daniel Imhoff’s (with Christina Badaracco) 2019 edition of The Farm Bill: A Citizen’s Guide is the book on the farm bill that sleepy farmers (and all interested citizens) have been waiting for.

Imhoff takes this complicated, dense topic and breaks it down into its components in a compelling and page-turning manner that caused both my husband and me to geek out with this book for several weeks. They start off explaining the basics of the farm bill in the most readable format I’ve ever encountered. It then launches into the history of US food policy before exploring issue by issue policy topics and reform opportunities like “Nutrition, SNAP, and Healthy Eating,” “Ethanol,” or “National Security.” Imhoff concludes with a more hopeful “The Future of Food Policy” before wrapping up with excellent footnotes and a stellar resource guide “Activist Tool Kit.” Arresting charts and sidebars tracing the startling and at times eye-opening ups and downs of American farm and food policy enliven the entire work for more visual learners.
[Read more…] about The Farm Bill: A Citizen’s Guide

review by Gregory Luckman

Jay has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Boston University School of Medicine and currently researches stem cells and epigenetics at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Although these credentials provide him with a scientific background and the perspective of an insider in the current medical research “establishment,” he remains independent and critical. In fact, he devotes most of Chapter Three to describing how funding bias, “alliance bias,” and publication bias have distorted the big picture that the peer-reviewed scientific literature provides to issues of nutrition and health. He picks up on this theme again and describes his own orientation in the Chapter Six subsection entitled “Estrogenics and Cancer” with the statement that “. . . the system promotes playing-it-safe and doing the same, tired, experiments everybody else is doing. Hedging bets and then sensationalizing the mundane findings is, unfortunately, the secure career path in science today. And that, my friend, is one of the reasons why I am personally not out on that academic ‘ball field,’ playing hard and wearing my team’s hat, cleats, and tight pants.”
[Read more…] about Estrogeneration: How Estrogenics Are Making You Fat, Sick, and Infertile