My Family's Corn Farm

My Family's Corn Farm
Author: Katie Olthoff
Publisher:
Total Pages: 32
Release: 2022-09-20
Genre:
ISBN: 9781948898072

Meet Presley - a farm girl who narrates the busy life of a modern, working corn farm in this fun and informative picture book about a family growing one of the top crops of American agriculture There's a lot of jobs to do on the family farm! Presley and her farm family work on planting corn, watching for pests, monitoring rain fall so plants get the right amount of water, harvesting the corn, exploring how corn is used in many products, and learning how to be more sustainable farmers. My Family's Corn Farm is a picture book that includes the life cycle of the corn plant, parts of the corn plant, what a corn plant needs to grow, different types of corn and their uses, how farmers work to prevent erosion with cover crops, and how farmers are continuously learning how to be better stewards of the land. The book also showcases farm vehicles and technology such as a tractor, combine, grain bin, and planter. Readers also see how corn can be used for many types of products from ethanol to corn chips, corn syrup, corn starch and more. Easy to read glossary defines the following: acre, bushel, combine, crops, ethanol, farmer, feed, fuel, harvest, kernel, livestock and nutrients. My Family's Corn Farm is a great way to teach about plant life cycles, farm families, and American agriculture. About the publisher: Feeding Minds Press is a project of the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture whose mission is to build awareness and understanding of agriculture through education. We focus on helping young readers understand where their food comes from, who grows it, and how it gets to them and believe in cultivating curiosity about food and farming and how agriculture plays a role in our daily lives. All books from Feeding Minds Press have accompanying lessons, activities, and videos to further learning available on their website, www.feedingmindspress.com

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.

My Family's Soybean Farm

My Family's Soybean Farm
Author: Katie Olthoff
Publisher:
Total Pages: 32
Release: 2022-09-13
Genre:
ISBN: 9781948898089

Meet Alexander and Charlie - the farm boy and his helpful dog who narrate the busy life of a modern, working soybean farm in this fun and informative picture book about a family growing one of the top crops of American agriculture The busy days and many jobs of a farm family, the life cycle of a soybean plant, and its life as a crop getting to market are all detailed in My Family's Soybean Farm, a picture book on what it takes to grow soybeans, and how the crop becomes the many products we use every day. Each spread walks readers through the many steps of planting and growing the crop throughout the seasons, with extensive text features placed beside the story offering range of additional information for readers, from STEM concepts to illustrations of farm equipment, diagrams, and more. The family's working together is highlighted throughout, across traditional roles and with modern-day tech: Alexander watches as Mom drives the tractor in a modern cab complete with GPS technology, and later, he and Dad check the crop both with age-old techniques like walking the fields ("crop scouting") and by using the latest drone technology, too. Detailed drawings show the life cycle of the soybean crop, as well as diagrams on larger concepts, like how soybeans are alternated with corn for soil preservation. Illustrations and information about literally every farm vehicle and other vehicles involved in growing soybeans and getting them to market are also here - including tractor and planter, sprayer, wagons and grain bins, processors, and finally, even barges and trains to get the crops to markets both domestic and around the world. Spreads also show how soybeans are used in a range of products, from Charlie's bowl of dog food, to foods like soy sauce, feed for farm animals, and more. About the publisher: Feeding Minds Press is a project of the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture whose mission is to build awareness and understanding of agriculture through education. We focus on helping young readers understand where their food comes from, who grows it, and how it gets to them and believe in cultivating curiosity about food and farming and how agriculture plays a role in our daily lives. All books from Feeding Minds Press have accompanying lessons, activities, and videos to further learning available on their website, www.feedingmindspress.com.

Turn Here Sweet Corn

Turn Here Sweet Corn
Author: Atina Diffley
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2012-04-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1452939179

When the hail starts to fall, Atina Diffley doesn’t compare it to golf balls. She’s a farmer. It’s “as big as a B-size potato.” As her bombarded land turns white, she and her husband Martin huddle under a blanket and reminisce: the one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds; the eleven-inch rainfall (“that broccoli turned out gorgeous”); the hail disaster of 1977. The romance of farming washed away a long time ago, but the love? Never. In telling her story of working the land, coaxing good food from the fertile soil, Atina Diffley reminds us of an ultimate truth: we live in relationships—with the earth, plants and animals, families and communities. A memoir of making these essential relationships work in the face of challenges as natural as weather and as unnatural as corporate politics, her book is a firsthand history of getting in at the “ground level” of organic farming. One of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest, the Diffleys’ Gardens of Eagan helped to usher in a new kind of green revolution in the heart of America’s farmland, supplying their roadside stand and a growing number of local food co-ops. This is a story of a world transformed—and reclaimed—one square acre at a time. And yet, after surviving punishing storms and the devastating loss of fifth-generation Diffley family land to suburban development, the Diffleys faced the ultimate challenge: the threat of eminent domain for a crude oil pipeline proposed by one of the largest privately owned companies in the world, notorious polluters Koch Industries. As Atina Diffley tells her David-versus-Goliath tale, she gives readers everything from expert instruction in organic farming to an entrepreneur’s manual on how to grow a business to a legal thriller about battling corporate arrogance to a love story about a single mother falling for a good, big-hearted man.

This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm

This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm
Author: Ted Genoways
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2017-09-19
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0393292584

Winner of the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize 2019 selection for the One Book One Nebraska and All Iowa state reading programs "Genoways gives the reader a kitchen-table view of the vagaries, complexities, and frustrations of modern farming…Insightful and empathetic." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, and yet its future is in peril. Rick Hammond grew up on a farm, and for forty years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation homestead in Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their family farm—and their entire way of life—are under siege on many fronts, from shifting trade policies, to encroaching pipelines, to climate change. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores the rapidly changing world of small, traditional farming operations. He creates a vivid, nuanced portrait of a radical new landscape and one family’s fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.

Bet the Farm

Bet the Farm
Author: Beth Hoffman
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 164283159X

"Eloquent and detailed...It's hard to have hope, but the organized observations and plans of Hoffman and people like her give me some. Read her book -- and listen." -- Jane Smiley, The Washington Post In her late 40s, Beth Hoffman decided to upend her comfortable life as a professor and journalist to move to her husband's family ranch in Iowa--all for the dream of becoming a farmer. There was just one problem: money. Half of America's two million farms made less than $300 in 2019, and many struggle just to stay afloat. Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth's eyes. She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. Growing oats is good for the environment but ends up being very bad for the wallet. And finding somewhere, in the midst of COVID-19, to slaughter grass finished beef is a nightmare. If Beth can't make it, how can farmers who confront racism, lack access to land, or don't have other jobs to fall back on hack it? Bet the Farm is a first-hand account of the perils of farming today and a personal exploration of more just and sustainable ways of producing food.

The Fate of Family Farming

The Fate of Family Farming
Author: Ronald Jager
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2004
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781584650270

A penetrating look at the condition of family farming--yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

The Life and Times of Corn

The Life and Times of Corn
Author:
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 40
Release: 2009
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780618507511

Facts and illustrations tell the story of corn, the giant of grains.

American Harvest

American Harvest
Author: Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1644451166

An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

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.