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

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

review by Jack Kittredge

This is the book written 6 years ago by Angela Miller about her decision to move from a successful career as a literary agent in New York City to become a goat cheese maker in Vermont (while still dabbling as literary agent via telecommuting). It is, I know, relevant to many in NOFA who have chosen to change from what our culture would consider a career with high status or income or both to an agricultural or food-based livelihood which may have nei-ther. All for love of the work.

The authors (Miller is happy to acknowledge the role of Ralph Gardner in helping with this book) do a good job of giving the reader a lively, real-time sense of Angela, her life and loved ones, and how she juggles her careers — one in the fast lane in Manhattan and one in the slow Vermont fields once owned by Consider Bardwell and family where she has built an artisanal farm-based food business.

This is as direct and honest a story as you are likely to get from anyone who runs a company. Angela is people-centered and doesn’t seem to need to inflate herself. She talks about her employees as if they were family. She remembers details of triumphs and tragedies equally, and treats them all as significant but not determinative events in her life.
[Read more…] about Hay Fever: How Chasing a Dream on a Vermont Farm Changed My Life

review by Bob Banning

Gary Paul Nabhan has seen people collaborate to heal their land, food systems, and communities, and he wants us to see what he sees. He imagines many more people doing the same joyful, hopeful work, and he wants us to imagine with him the further spread of this work. He continues to work with old friends, new friends, and friends-to-be to bring about further healing, and he invites us, if we’re not already so engaged, to take up this work.

In the introduction, Nabhan, a celebrated environmental writer and, according to the dust jacket, “recognized as the father of the local food movement,” evokes the joy of working to restore one’s own local food system—“conservation you can taste,” as he calls it. However, he’s concerned that environmentalism, which “began [in the 1970s] as a nonpartisan effort to protect our planet[,] has become one of the most perniciously divisive issues in public life.”
[Read more…] about Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities

review by Lucia Stout Huebner, grass farmer, Beechtree Farm, Hopewell, New Jersey

The question of how meat is raised deserves much more discussion and examination. A lucid writer and a thorough researcher, Nicolette Hahn Niman’s 241 page book serves both as an excellent nonfiction reading and reference book on the subject of raising cattle and eating beef. The footnotes she includes on each chapter are worth the price of the book alone.  Niman delves into the science behind her arguments but also weaves in her personal voice, which holds the reader’s attention and keeps the subject from becoming too dry.
[Read more…] about Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production

review by Jack KIttredge

Obach, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is a student of social movements who has also written about the labor and environmental movements. As any scholar would, he starts with a history of the organic movement, beginning with Jerome Irving Rodale and his concerns about synthetic fertilizers, already used in agriculture in 1942 when “Organic Farming and Gardening” was first published, and the proponents of natural and spiritual approaches to farming such as Albert Howard, Rudolf Steiner, Eve Balfour and Ralph Borsodi. Come the nineteen sixties and seventies, of course, the advent of Rachel Carson and Cesar Chavez’ indictment of agricultural chemicals and the growth of the counterculture seeking an alternative to a cor-rupt commercial society came together to create the back-to-the-land movement of food coops and communal farms.

Organic sales, going from the insignificant output of a fringe movement in 1971, when NOFA began, to a still small but obviously growing market worth $1 billion in 1990, not only selected for hardworking and business oriented farmers but also was attracting the attention of outsiders. At first denouncing organics as a ‘food fad’ and threat to good nutrition, establishment figures such as Cornell’s Kenneth Beeson and Harvard’s Jean Mayer and Frederick Stare (whose self-interest in extensive ties to the food industry Obach neatly exposes) were quick to rail against the movement as ‘anti-science’.
[Read more…] about Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States

By Bill Duesing
I’ve been studying about, working with and excited by soil for over 40 years, yet Kristin Ohlson’s book, The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet produced a number of exciting a-ha moments.

Published just this year, it is a very interesting book about an extremely important topic. Understanding her message and putting it to work in our farming, gardening and grazing should provide many important benefits for us and the planet.
[Read more…] about The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet

Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2015, sunstonepress.com
$26.95, paperback, 229 pages
about 70 photos, some color and some black and white
reviewed by Bob Banning

Dr. John Peirce, veteran veterinarian, would like you to listen to the perspective of conventional beef producers. So would I. But I would also appreciate it if he himself spent more time listening. To see what I mean, read on.

Peirce wants his readers to know “what they don’t tell you” about the U.S. beef industry. “They” are the industry’s “critics,” “you” are consumers who object to how the industry operates, and what you need to know that they don’t tell you is accurate information about how conventional beef is produced, information that the author believes will lead you to view the industry more sympathetically, maybe even to admire those who work in it.
[Read more…] about The Beef Industry:

review by Anna Muhammad
Farming While Black is a great resource that provides both ‘how-to’ for the new and novice farmer while giving historical context to injustice and theft of lands from Black farmers and farmers of color.

In Farming While Black, Leah Penniman provides historic notes and clear explanation on the damage that white supremacy and racism has done to Black farmers and farmers of color. At the same time, Leah provide resources for farmers to plan the farming enterprise in detail, look for funding (there are listings of crowdfunding organizations, USDA farm financing agencies and other organizations can provide funding for new farmers.) Leah also gives a clear description of the road that she took to establish her farm and the community drive that encourage her to take on such a great task. Her story and the book provide real world examples of the pitfalls, mistakes and missteps that slow down any new farmer.
[Read more…] about Farming While Black

published by Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT
2017, 256 pages
review by Julie Rawson

As the wife of the editor I see all the books that come in for review – and I get to cherry pick the ones I want to review. When I saw this title, and its author, I knew it would be well worth my while. Thank you, Michael, for your dedication to Jerry Brunetti — “You walked the walk with cows and herbs in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania. Your green insights and cheerful tenacity will long be appreciated. Godspeed brother.” Jerry Brunetti became a good friend and colleague of mine. His far-reaching vision, and his insights regarding soil, animal and human health have informed much of what NOFA/Mass does today.

Phillips has a playful, poetic style, and he anthropomorphizes soil micro-organisms. At times I found this style confusing, but in large part I enjoyed his light touch. He succeeds in disseminating complex scientific information in a manner that kept me attentive and often chuckling. Take, for example, his first sentence: “Mycorrhizal fungi have been waiting a long time for people to catch on.” It turns our usual interaction with soil on its head. I have walked away from this book with my thinking inherently changed; I can’t walk anywhere now without considering the ones under our feet who really run the show — if we let them. I look forward to this spring, to work with the mycorrhizal fungi and all the others living down there.
[Read more…] about Mycorrhizal Planet:

Review by Jack Kittredge

This is an intriguing book. Of course that is not a remarkable thing to say about a work by Michael Pollan. He has established a reputation, at least among folks I know and respect, for thoughtful analysis of important questions. Prior books like “A Botany of Desire” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” have secured a place for him as a person who asks the right questions and probes far enough below the surface to reach answers that truly satisfy.

Even so, this is a new direction for him. As an intellectual, he rightly prizes his mind, gravitates toward scientific explanations of phenomena, and readily admits he doesn’t think he has ever had a ‘spiritually significant’ experience. As he puts it: “My default perspective is that of the philosophical materialist, who believes that matter is the fundamental substance of the world and the physical laws it obeys should be able to explain everything that happens.”

So why is he investigating something that flies in the face of his background, training, and comfort zone?
[Read more…] about How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, De-pression, and Transcendence

review by Elizabeth Henderson

In the great cauldron of ideas that stew in our brains, mix Resilient Agriculture with New Peasantries. It may seem far-fetched to bring in peasants, but I urge you to set aside whatever bias you may have about peasants as backwards and primitive, and focus on what you can learn from land-based people who have survived for millennia. After all, organic farming as most of us know it in the NOFA world, grew out of peasant practices in Europe and India. Sir Albert (one of Rodale’s teachers) and Rudolf Steiner (inspiration for Biodynamics) both studied peasant farming, Sir Albert in India and Rudolf in Austria. Most likely, none of the farmers Laura Lengnick interviewed for her book would identify as peasants, yet the practices they use and the changes they are making on their farms to better adapt to climate change follow from the peasant principles and design ideas as delineated by van der Ploeg.
[Read more…] about The New Peasantries: Struggle for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization

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: