Published by Dutton Publishing, 2016.
Penguinrandomhouse.com
Available in Hardcover, Audible, Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play Books from $12.99 to $24.00.
352 pages or 10 hours and 19 minutes of listening time.
reviewed by John Duke

To be honest, I did not read this book. I listened to it, twice. I also watched the author present the book on a Youtube video dated November 2016, titled “Dietert, Human Superorganism” from Albert R. Mann Library. Rodney Dietert, PhD, is a professor at Cornell University in Ithica, NY. He has also authored Strategies for Protecting Your Child’s Immune System and Immunotoxicity, Immune Disfunction, and Chronic Disease. In 2015 he received the James G. Wilson award from the Teratology Society for the best paper of the year on the microbiome. In 2014 he appeared in the award winning documentary “Microbirth”.
[Read more…] about The Human Superorganism:

review by Bob Banning

In about 40 essays, Denizens offers a series of narratives showing how the author’s seventeenth-century southern New England ancestors participated in the history of their times. In reading the book, we learn about a variety of features of life in those times in parts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, including a few things about food, drink, and agriculture.

One of the author’s ancestor’s, William Cheseborough, settled land including salt marshes on the banks of Wequetequock Cove, in present-day Stonington, Connecticut, because “salt marsh hay was prized as a food source for livestock until grazing pastures could be established.” Online, I found various sources expressing concern about the health of salt marshes of the Northeast. In early colonial times, the health, and even survival, of human beings may have depended on using salt marsh hay for fodder.
[Read more…] about Denizens: A Narrative of Captain George Denison and His New England Contemporaries

review by Jack Kittredge

The purpose of this book, Alex says in the foreword, is to inspire people to use natural organisms to clean up human waste of all sorts. Fungi are particularly well adapted to this task of decomposition, he asserts, and this book is to serve as a guide to how to use them for this function.

He starts off making sure we are aware of the vastness of the problem of waste. Hazardous wastes, those that can cause “substantial threats to our health and the environment” are produced at the rate of 400 million tons per year. That comes, he says, to about 13 tons per second! These come from common products like batteries, cosmetics, cleaning products, paints, pharmaceuticals, and electronics. The US has 200,000 “superfund sites” that are unusually high in hazardous waste, whose cleanup will cost an estimated $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years. The scale and expense of this problem and its current technological solution make it daunting. One of the major techniques now used in such clean-ups is bioremediation with bacteria and plants. Dorr asserts, however, that mycoremediation can serve this role far more successfully and economically. He displays a graph from Paul Stamet’s book “Mycellium Running” which seems to demonstrate this advantage.
The next part of the book is devoted to showing how fungi (mushrooms, yeasts, molds, and mycelia) can degrade and remediate metals, chemicals and microbes.
[Read more…] about Mycoremediation Handbook: A Grassroots Guide to Growing Mushrooms and Cleaning up Toxic Waste with Fungi

Reviewed by Richard Robinson

Charles Dowding is one of the pioneers of “no-dig” (or as we Americans call it, “no-till”) gardening. He has a large garden behind his house in Somerset, England, and a large following online and in bookstores. He is a celebrity gardener, whose nine books extol the virtues of the no-dig way in language that both instructs and comforts—this isn’t hard, and I’ll show you how. If you haven’t seen him on YouTube, take a few minutes, and you too might become a fan. I am.

So I was primed to like this book. I regret to say I came away somewhat disappointed.

The major problem as I see it is right there in the title: the book is apparently drawn from an introductory course that Dowding teaches, both in person and online. And like far too many books of similar genesis, this one comes across as a combination of lecture notes and handouts from a course that is likely much livelier and lovelier in its original venues, rather than a thought-through book on its own.

[Read more…] about Charles Dowding’s No Dig Gardening, Course 1

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

Published by Cornell University Press, 2020, $21.95 paperback, 147 pages plus 64 more of references and index
review by Jack Kittredge

This analysis of the current interest in treating farmland as an investment could not be more timely. Although the most recent boom in land investment peaked during the years 2008 to about 2014, following the international food crisis of 2007, there is still a very active market for farmland based both on the value of food it can produce and also the resources it harbors. This book looks at that boom in farmland investing in the US and in Brazil, the latter in part because you learn much more by studying the same phenomenon in two places — so you can compare and contrast — and in part because of the very size of Brazil and the extent to which capital is attracted to land investment there.
[Read more…] about Fields of Gold

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

The Living Soil Handbook: The No-Till Grower’s Guide to Ecological Market Gardening by Jesse Frost (Chelsea Green, 2021)

The No-Till Organic Vegetable Farm: How to Start and Run a Profitable Market Garden that Builds Health in Soil, Crops, and Communities, by Daniel Mays, (Storey, 2020)

Reviewed by Andy Simon

These are two recent manuals that should be on your bookshelf, side by side. You can tell by their titles that they share a focus: no-till farming. In fact, they share much more than that and you might well think that reading both of them would be redundant. However, they each have particular strengths and treasures that complement one another. Whether you already have a market garden operation or are thinking of starting one, there is much to be learned by spending time with Daniel and Jesse.

Full disclosure: I am not a commercial grower, just a small-scale no-till gardener and the Coordinator of a community garden in Burlington, VT. Also, through our community garden, I have a connection with Daniel Mays’s family and have visited his farm in Maine.
[Read more…] about The Living Soil Handbook: & The No-Till Organic Vegetable Farm:

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