Cutting Hill: A Chronicle of a Family Farm

by Alan Pistorius

Overview

This is the true story of how you get your milk. And because this is the story of a family dairy farm in Vermont it is also the true story of how you get delicious, Grade A maple syrup. Author Alan Pistorius embedded with the Treadway family for a year, recording four seasons of milking, fixing, plowing and syrup making. Pistorius' careful observations make for a powerful meditation on farming, business and family.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781891053436
Publisher:	Garrett County Press
Publication date:	10/31/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	279
File size:	616 KB

About the Author

Alan Pistorius is a writer and naturalist living in Leicester, Vermont. He received his A.B. from the State University of Iowa and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Country Journal Book of Birding and Bird Attraction, co-author of several books, and co-editor of Treasury of North American Birdlore. He is also the author of numerous magazine articles and reviews.

Editorial Reviews

In a book reminiscent of Richard Rhodes's Farm , Pistorius ( The Country Journal Book of Birding ) takes us through four seasons on the 350-acre Vermont dairy spread of Dick and Joan Treadway and their four children. Dairying, as we're shown graphically, is more than milking cows--fences must be mended, animals moved from barn to pasture, milking equipment cleaned regulary. Summer is haying; cutting, baling and storing require machinery, which needs frequent repair. There is deep concern about weather and taxes. During the year covered, family and beasts alike have medical problems; a cow dies and a calf is born. At sugaring time, the Treadways hang 1300 sap buckets, but the harvest proves disappointing. With fitting admiration Pistorius acquaints us with folk of grit, a family that in the tradition of its forebears tenaciously holds fast to its farm. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Comparable to Richard Rhodes's Farm ( LJ 10/1/89; ``Best Books of 1989,'' LJ 1/90, p. 54), this book tells the story of the Treadways, a farm family struggling to preserve a way of life that is too rapidly disappearing. To research this book, Pistorius lived for one year in the family's Vermont household. He shared their work and play, their joys, their worries, and their disappointments. We see them planting in the spring, baling in the summer, harvesting corn in the fall, and hanging sap buckets in the winter. Throughout the book, the reader is given a feeling for the rhythms of life on a farm and is quickly drawn into that life. Recommended for most libraries.-- Randy Dykhuis, OCLC, Dublin, Ohio

Library Journal