The Dirty Life

For a non-fiction book, this one was incredibly interesting. It's sort of a biography - Ms. Kimball is a writer from New York who interviews a farmer who is trying to do a CSA model farm. CSA = community supported agriculture - basically a farm that provides everything necessary for the surrounding community. While doing the interview, Kimball falls in love with the farmer ("Mark"), and they decide to start a new farm. However, for this new farm, their dream is to provide an entire subsistence for the community (not just vegetables, but meat, dairy, grains, everything.

They begin a new 500 acre farm. The book largely chronicles their decision to do so, and the first year on the farm. The author takes you through delivering a calf from a mother cow, to how to properly plow a field. The couple decided to do the farm with the least amount of machinery possible. They had a tractor, but it was for backup. They mostly operated using a pair of draft horses (think "Budweiser ads" and you'll know what sort of horses those are).

The author, being a writer, used a plethora of books to learn different parts of farming. She references several of these books, which makes it even more interesting. I finished the book, and almost immediately put most of the books she mentioned on my wishlist.

One of my favorite quotes from the book:

"Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war. The farmers are
continually fighting to keep nature behind the hedgerow, and nature is
continually fighting to overtake the field. Inside the ramparts are the
sativas, the cultivated plants, soft and vulnerable, too highbred and civilized
for fighting. Aligned with nature, there are the weeds, tough foot
soldiers, evolved for battle. As we approached the solstice, both sides
were at full tilt, stoked by rain and abundance of sun. Every morning,
Mark and I would look out over the fields at first light and see a fresh haze of
green. For every one of ours, there were a hundred, a thousand, ten
thousand of theirs, wave after wave, unending."

A fun book to read.