organic farming

If you have any doubt that growing clean food, and sustainable farming takes a special person, Kimball will set you straight. Especially since she didn’t start out a passionate grower. She was, in fact, a New Yorker. A Manhattanite even. A vegetarian Manhattanite living in a shabby cool exposed-brick apartment.

“And [she] fell in love . . . over a deer’s liver”. She met Mark on assignment and got to know him while researching a piece on young farmers bucking the industrial agricultural complex by growing organic food. During her stay, Mark shot, killed and butchered a deer that had been

In many ways, I love Pritchard’s story of rebuilding his family farm. Against the advice of pretty much everyone, Pritchard takes up farming the land that his parents could never make a living off of. Gaining Ground is his amazing journey. He starts off with crushing debt, little help, and no plan. Through trial and error, trial and error, and then a little more trial and error, Pritchard finds a way to make the farm not only his own, but profitable for the first time in many years.

Yet, as Pritchard waxes poetic about saving the family farm, he omits even the significant details of his

For me, the novelty of year-long project books wore off long before A.J. Jacobs dulled my enthusiasm with The Year of Living Biblically and Gretchen Rubin killed my tolerance completely with The Happiness Project. Happily, I didn’t notice from the sub-title that The Quarter-acre Farm is one of these very projects.

In 2008, amidst mad-cow disease, sky-rocketing fuel costs, salmonella outbreaks and news reports of genetically altered food and pesticide risks, Spring Warren announced to her family that she would transform their suburban lawn into a garden from which they would eat. And thus, a