Living at Nature's Pace: Farming and the American DreamFor decades, Logsdon and his family have run a viable family farm. Along the way, he has become a widely influential journalist and social critic, documenting in hundreds of essays for national and regional magazines the crisis in conventional agri-business and the boundless potential for new forms of farming that reconcile tradition with ecology. Logsdon reminds us that healthy and economical agriculture must work "at nature's pace," instead of trying to impose an industrial order on the natural world. Foreseeing a future with "more farmers, not fewer," he looks for workable models among the Amish, among his lifelong neighbors in Ohio, and among resourceful urban gardeners and a new generation of defiantly unorthodox organic growers creating an innovative farmers-market economy in every region of the country. Nature knows how to grow plants and raise animals; it is human beings who are in danger of losing this age-old expertise, substituting chemical additives and artificial technologies for the traditional virtues of fertility, artistry, and knowledge of natural processes. This new edition of Logsdon's important collection of essays and articles (first published by Pantheon in 1993) contains six new chapters taking stock of American farm life at this turn of the century. |
Contents
| 3 | |
For Amber Waves of Green | 27 |
Our Hidden Wound | 48 |
The Failure of Agricultural Education | 56 |
Traditional Farming | 77 |
Knowing Ones Place | 100 |
More Farmers Not Fewer | 106 |
An Ecologically Sane Farm | 121 |
Not So Friendly Persuasion | 163 |
A Patriarch Passes | 170 |
A Woodcutters Pleasures | 176 |
The Pond at the Center of the Universe | 188 |
My Wilderness | 201 |
Im Glad Im Not a Real Farmer | 209 |
Going to Market on a Warm Day in November | 216 |
Looking for a Midwestern Culture | 227 |
Amish Economics | 130 |
A Horsedrawn Economy | 141 |
The Barn Raising | 154 |
The Folly of Trying to Repress the Agrarian Impulse | 235 |
The Wheel of Life Turns Round and Round | 246 |
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