First Farm in the Valley

First Farm in the Valley
Author: Anne Pellowski
Publisher: Bethlehem Books
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2008-09-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1932350241

Six-year-old Anna Pellowski’s older siblings, Jacob, Franciszek, Barney, Mary and Pauline are exposed to English at school, but only Polish is spoken at home. The younger children—Anna, Julian, Anton barely know a word of their new country’s language, but then neither do many of their neighbors. When the family goes to town to celebrate the 100th birthday of the United States, the speaker gives his speech in a mix of German, Polish, Bohemian and Norwegian! Some years before, in the mid 1800’s, Anna’s mother, father and brother Baby Jacob had come from Poland to live in a tiny sod house in Western Wisconsin and establish the very first farm in the entire Latsch Valley. Now the growing family lives in a real house, with neighbors on every side, and the world for quietly curious Anna is filled with fascinating possibilities—as well as lots of hard work. Sometimes she dreams of going back to the Poland she is always hearing about, but increasingly she realizes that life in Latsch Valley, with its rich cultural rhythm of work, play and religious faith, holds everything she could possibly want.

Winding Valley Farm

Winding Valley Farm
Author: Anne Pellowski
Publisher: Bethlehem Books
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2009
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1932350292

A young girl shares pleasures and disappointments with the other members of a large Wisconsin farm family in the early twentieth century.

Life on a Rocky Farm

Life on a Rocky Farm
Author: Lucas C. Barger
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2013-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438446020

A folksy look at farm life in rugged Putnam Valley just as it was being transformed by industrialization and mechanization.

Betsy's Up-and-Down Year

Betsy's Up-and-Down Year
Author: Anne Pellowski
Publisher: Bethlehem Books
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2014-08-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 193235025X

This is the fifth and final book in the Latsch Valley Farm series, recounting the lives of four generations of a Polish-American extended family, living in neighbouring homesteads in Wisconsin. A sequel to Willow Wind Farm, we follow Betsy Korb, now aged eight going on nine, as she learns the lessons of sharing, making up after quarrels, running errands and broadening her experiences within her large and loving family, under the firm and wise direction of Mom and Dad and underpinned by their Catholic faith. Told in a highly readable style, the author, Betsy’s aunt, has carefully observed the triumphs and disasters in the life of the inquisitive and independent-minded Betsy as she grapples with the ups and downs of growing up, setting them in the warm context of family life—the Korbs’ own life and the bigger one that seems to fill Latsch Valley and spill out into the world beyond.

A Walk at the Farm

A Walk at the Farm
Author: Michèle Dufresne
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Domestic animals
ISBN: 9781584533009

Kenny and Amber take some of the farm animals for a walk.

Farm, Shop, Landing

Farm, Shop, Landing
Author: Martin Bruegel
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2002-04-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780822328490

DIVBruegel shows how the development of a market economy created historical change in a parochial community./div

The New Farm

The New Farm
Author: Brent Preston
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1683353021

This “must-read” memoir of human-scale agriculture offers an insider’s view of today’s food system by a leading voice in sustainable farming (Daniel Boulud). After years of working at the ends of the earth in human rights and development, Brent Preston and his wife were die-hard city dwellers. But when their second child arrived, the shine came off urban living. In 2003 they bought a hundred acres and a rundown farmhouse, determined to build a farm that would sustain their family, nourish their community, heal their environment—and turn a profit. The New Farm is Preston’s memoir of a decade of toil and perseverance. Farming is a complex and precarious business, and they made plenty of mistakes along the way. But as they learned how to grow food, and to succeed at the business of farming, they also found that a small, sustainable, organic farm could be an engine for change, a path to a more just and sustainable food system. Today, The New Farm supplies top restaurants, supports community food banks, hosts events with leading chefs, and grows extraordinary produce. Told with humor and heart, The New Farm is a joy, a passionate book by an important new voice.

Gaining Ground

Gaining Ground
Author: Forrest Pritchard
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2013-05-21
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0762794380

With humor and pathos, Forrest Pritchard recounts his ambitious and often hilarious endeavors to save his family’s seventh-generation farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Through many a trial and error, he not only saves Smith Meadows from insolvency but turns it into a leading light in the sustainable, grass-fed, organic farm-to-market community. There is nothing young Farmer Pritchard won’t try. Whether he’s selling firewood and straw, raising free-range chickens and hogs, or acquiring a flock of Barbados Blackbelly sheep, his learning curve is steep and always entertaining. Pritchard’s world crackles with colorful local characters—farm hands, butchers, market managers, customers, fellow vendors, pet goats, policemen—bringing the story to warm, communal life. His most important ally, however, is his renegade father, who initially questions his son's career choice and eschews organic foods for the generic kinds that wreak havoc on his health. Soon after his father’s death, the farm becomes a recognized success and Pritchard must make a vital decision: to continue serving the local community or answer the exploding demand for his wares with lucrative Internet sales and shipping deals. More than a charming story of honest food cultivation and farmers’ markets, Gaining Ground tugs on the heartstrings, reconnecting us to the land and the many lives that feed us.

Our Time at Foxhollow Farm

Our Time at Foxhollow Farm
Author: David Byars
Publisher: Excelsior Editions
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781438462813

Our Time at Foxhollow Farm is a remarkable pictorial history of an eminent Hudson Valley family in the early decades of the twentieth century. Illustrated with the family's extensive collection of personal albums compiled during the nascent years of photography, it provides a fascinating insight into the regional, social, and architectural history of the era. In 1903 Tracy Dows, the son of a successful grain merchant from Manhattan, married Alice Townsend Olin, whose Livingston forebears had settled in the Rhinebeck, New York, area in the late 1600s. Dows purchased and combined several existing farms to establish his estate, Foxhollow Farm, next to Alice's ancestral home. He commissioned Harrie T. Lindeberg, a sought-after architect trained under Stanford White, to design the family home and other buildings on the property, and the Olmsted Brothers to landscape its rolling hills. The Dowses raised their three children on the estate, and led a busy social life of tennis tournaments, weddings, dinners, and dances with such friends and neighbors as the Roosevelts and the Astors. Tracy Dows devoted himself largely to the pursuit of agricultural and civic affairs at home and in the Rhinebeck community. Olin Dows, Tracy and Alice's son, became a notable painter active in President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. Our Time at Foxhollow Farm follows the Dows family from 1903 through the 1930s, documenting their life at home, social activities, and travels in America and Europe. An enthusiastic amateur photographer, Tracy Dows took many of this book's photographs himself, offering a vivid and warmly intimate perspective on privileged early twentieth-century American life.

The Resilient Farm and Homestead

The Resilient Farm and Homestead
Author: Ben Falk
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2013
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 1603584447

The Resilient Farm and Homestead is a manual for developing durable, beautiful, and highly functional human habitat systems fit to handle an age of rapid transition. Ben Falk is a land designer and site developer whose permaculture-research farm has drawn national attention. The site is a terraced paradise on a hillside in Vermont that would otherwise be overlooked by conventional farmers as unworthy farmland. Falk's wide array of fruit trees, rice paddies (relatively unheard of in the Northeast), ducks, nuts, and earth-inspired buildings is a hopeful image for the future of regenerative agriculture and modern homesteading. The book covers nearly every strategy Falk and his team have been testing at the Whole Systems Research Farm over the past decade, as well as experiments from other sites Falk has designed through his off-farm consulting business. The book includes detailed information on earthworks; gravity-fed water systems; species composition; the site-design process; site management; fuelwood hedge production and processing; human health and nutrient-dense production strategies; rapid topsoil formation and remineralization; agroforestry/silvopasture/grazing; ecosystem services, especially regarding flood mitigation; fertility management; human labor and social-systems aspects; tools/equipment/appropriate technology; and much more, complete with gorgeous photography and detailed design drawings. The Resilient Farm and Homestead is more than just a book of tricks and techniques for regenerative site development, but offers actual working results in living within complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the "great thinkers" in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with "unlikely" farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what's possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.