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

published by Monthly Review Press, 2020, $27 paperback, 214 pages plus 88 more of references and index
review by Jack Kittredge

This book is a historian’s dream. It takes a vitally important current subject, subjects it to an erudite analysis illuminating many crucial aspects not widely discussed, and enables us, the readers, to understand how the subject fits into a much broader context.

Horne demonstrates how, during what he calls the “long 16th century”, slavery was transformed from a practice of selling captives of any race into bondage (with antecedents going back to ancient Mesopotamia in 3500 BC) to one of white supremacy specifically enslaving non-white Africans and Indigenous Peoples as a way of building settler colonialism and, ultimately, capitalism.
[Read more…] about The Dawning of the Apocalypse:

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

reviewed by Craig Soderberg

The material in this book is eye-opening. For more than 4,000 years, Asian farmers worked the same fields repeatedly without sapping the land’s fertility and without applying artificial fertilizer! How they accomplished this miraculous feat is described by author Franklin Hiram King, a former official to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. King traveled to Asia in the early 1900s to learn how farmers in China, Korea, and Japan were able to achieve successful harvests century after century without exhausting the soil — one of their most valuable natural resources. This book is the result of King’s research.

Containing more than 200 photographs, this book represents a valuable resource for organic gardeners, farmers, and conservationists.
[Read more…] about Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan

review by Bob Banning

This book is well worth your while. It is likely to teach and delight you, and may sometimes provoke you.

As many readers of The Natural Farmer no doubt know, in 1975 Japanese farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka (1913–2008) published a book that would become an international best-seller and change how many people thought about and practiced farming. The book acquired much of its influence through the English translation made of it by Larry Korn with the assistance of Korn’s friend Chris Pearce and of Wendell Berry (1978); eventually it was translated into 25 languages. The book was entitled The One-Straw Revolution.
[Read more…] about One-Straw Revolutionary: The Philosophy and Work of Masanobu Fukuoka

review by Elizabeth Henderson

How are we going to manage to farm in the increasingly chancy conditions of global warming and advanced imperialist capitalism? We are bombarded by products, causes, marketing schemes and advice. How to choose? Here are two books that will help you design or redesign your farm to make it more resilient in these parlous times. Lengnick’s book suggests a method for resilience planning based on climate change predictions and the experience of sustainable farmers. Van der Ploeg provides principles and values from the lives of peasant farmers to ground your decisions.
[Read more…] about Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate

review by Eli Rubin

While there are many books about the history of draft horse farming in the past, this 320 page book is about the practical application of farming with horses today. Intended for the organic, or ecologically minded, grower this book covers more than the basics of growing crops, with over 100 pages on market vegetables.  The author draws both from his own experience of over 20 years of growing organic produce and from a collection of other respected minds in the fields. The result is a beautiful blend of information from farms (mostly in the northeast) each with their own way of solving the riddles of commercial organic production, all compiled and told in one concise voice.
[Read more…] about The New Horse-Powered Farm: Tools and Systems for the Small-Scale Sustainable Market Grower

review by Jack Kittredge

André Leu, an Australian tropical fruit farmer, is a leader in the organic movement and president of IFOAM, the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements. He has occasionally written articles we reprint in The Natural Farmer, and I am glad to have a chance to review his book on the pesticide threat.
[Read more…] about The Myths of Safe Pesticides

reviewed by Jack Kittredge

I have long enjoyed Gene Logsdon’s writing – the humor, the self-effacement, the simple Midwestern (if Ohio is Midwestern) lack of pretension, the prac-tical tips and ideas. Gene’s core message is pretty much the same in every book he writes – you can live a happy life on a few acres of land. Don’t get all preoccupied by the money, it may not pan out that you can support a family that way. But you surely can raise a good one, tending to a few chores and reaping the healthy food that will result.

Gene calls his idea of this heavenly life the “Garden Farm” and quotes Robert Rodale, longtime editor-in-chief of Organic Farming and Gardening Maga-zine, that ‘In the future, most farms will be just very big gardens.’ He contrasts this message with that of Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture. Butz advised farmers to ‘get big or get out’. Logsdon, however, says: ‘get small and stay in’.
[Read more…] about Letter to a Young Farmer: How to Live Richly without Wealth on the New Garden Farm

review by Jack Kittredge

Benjamin Lorr is a terrific author who has taken on a substantial project – to expose the underside of the American grocery business. This project took him several years, during which he experienced some of the least desirable jobs the industry offers – cleaning the 38-foot fish counter at Whole Foods and removing the layers of ice, fish manure, rotting fish guts, pieces of cracked shells, and other 2-month old detritus, gagging at its reek of decay and preparing it for another go tomorrow, traveling the Interstate Highway in a refrigerated 18-wheeler with a blonde Amazon while she tends her 2 beagles and fends off drunk male drivers, managing to get the load to the warehouse on time most of the time, and riding a shrimp trawler as it scrapes the seafloor off Thailand with its huge nylon nets, like bulldozers bringing up everything and obliterating the remains of any ecosystem there, while listening to the story of documentless, regularly beaten and illegally trafficked Asians who are literal slaves, unwillingly laboring aboard such ships for up to 5 years.

In the meantime he gets to tell a few more palatable stories – the origin of Trader Joe’s at a disastrous Friday afternoon Hollywood bar meeting when Joe Coulombe learns a most important lesson, Ben’s discovery of Slawsa, the bright yellow condiment that will change your life accompanied by Julie, the woman who is bringing it through the maze of regulations, marketers, Fancy Food Fairs and tastings required to get it needed shelf space in grocery stores to prove itself, and two training sessions, one to be an “associate” at Whole Foods in which we learn about the corporate psychology which drives this particular company, and one with a motivational behavior expert who understands the consumer need for ethical sourcing and how that translates, very very loosely, into product certification.
[Read more…] about The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of an American Supermarket

review by Jack Kittredge

I have often hears of David Mas Masumoto, the California peach and grape grower on 80 organic acres who is a frequent and thoughtful writer of essays and books on matters agricultural and philosophical. But I had never read anything by him, assuming his location and farming scale must make his expe-riences quite different from my own. I finally took a book by him with me on vacation, and I am glad I did.

In this book David relates a little of his history. His grandfathers, both second sons and thus destined for poverty, left their families’ small Japanese rice farms seeking a better future in America. His family was agricultural laborers, just having saved enough over the years to think about buying some land when they were interned in 1942 along with 110,000 others Japanese Americans. His father, however, was assumed to be loyal enough to be drafted into the Army and his uncle was killed serving in France. After his discharge, his father and grandparents worked long hours until finally able to buy a small piece of land with lots of hardpan and rocks.
[Read more…] about Changing Season: A Father, A Daughter, A Family Farm

review by Jack Kittredge

When I saw the ad for “Eliza the Pig” that Alexandra sent to promote her book in this issue, I asked if she would send a copy to me. I wanted to try read-ing it to our 7 and 9 year-old grandkids, Sammy and Anya, to see if they liked it.

The story is that of a typical Nebraska farm town which experiences the introduction of a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) for hogs. The smells, wind blown sprays of liquid manure which spatter passing cars, and traffic, versus the lure of jobs and taxes come to divide the previously contented town.
[Read more…] about Eliza the Pig