Living at Nature's Pace: Farming and the American Dream

by Gene Logsdon, Wendell Berry (Foreword by)

Overview

For 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781603580496
Publisher:	Chelsea Green Publishing
Publication date:	02/01/2000
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	257
File size:	829 KB

About the Author

Over the course of his long life and career as a writer, farmer, and journalist, Gene Logsdon published more than two dozen books, both practical and philosophical, on all aspects of rural life and affairs. His nonfiction works include Gene Everlasting, A Sanctuary of Trees, and Living at Nature’s Pace. He wrote a popular blog, The Contrary Farmer, as well as an award-winning column for the Carey, Ohio, Progressor Times. Gene was also a contributor to Farming Magazine and The Draft Horse Journal. He lived and farmed in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, where he died in 2016, a few weeks after finishing his final book, Letter to a Young Farmer.

Table of Contents

Foreword / Wendell Berry
1. Green Fields, Red Ink
2. For Amber Waves of Green
3. Our Hidden Wound
4. The Failure of Agricultural Education
5. Traditional Farming
6. Knowing One's Place
7. The Future: More Farmers, Not Fewer
8. An Ecologically Sane Farm
9. Amish Economics
10. A Horse-drawn Economy
11. The Barn Raising
12. Not So Friendly Persuasion
13. A Patriarch Passes
14. A Woodcutter's Pleasures
15. The Pond at the Center of the Universe
16. My Wilderness
17. I'm Glad I'm Not a "Real" Farmer
18. Going to Market on a Warm Day in November
19. Looking for a Midwestern Culture
20. The Folly of Trying to Repress the Agrarian Impulse
21. The Wheel of Life Turns Round and Round

Editorial Reviews

"To love farming--real farming--in this day and time requires what a lot of people like to call crankiness but is in fact courage. . . . I have been reading Gene Logsdon for many years, and I have always taken courage from him. I thank him, and I shake his hand."--Wendell Berry

From the Publisher