 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com A century of industrialization has left our food system riddled with problems, yet for solutions we look to nutritionists and government agencies, scientists and chefs. Lisa M. Hamilton asks: Why not look to the people who grow our food?
Hamilton makes this vital inquiry through the stories of three unconventional farmers: an African-American dairyman in Texas who plays David to the Goliath of agribusiness corporations; a tenth-generation rancher in New Mexico struggling to restore agriculture as a pillar of his crumbling community; and a modern pioneer family in North Dakota who is breeding new varieties of plants to face the future’s double threat: Monsanto and global warming. Threads of history and discussion weave through the tales, exploring how farmers have been pushed to the margins of agriculture and transformed from leaders to laborers.
These unusual characters and their surprising stories make the case that in order to correct what has gone wrong with the food system, we must first bring farmers back to the table. |
Average Customer Rating:  Any library catering to agriculture students will find this holds much material for debate and consideration Our food system holds many problems, yet answers are commonly sought away from the growers and in the hands of government agencies and scientists. DEEPLY ROOTED: UNCONVENTIONAL FARMERS IN THE AGE OF AGRIBUSINESS uses the stories of three unconventional farmers to examine agricultural leaders and how these three make efforts to correct food issues. Any library catering to agriculture students will find this holds much material for debate and consideration. Keenly observant view of three fascinating Americans The book profiles three very different people who have chosen to try to make it as independent farmers in today's America. Despite the fact that they could have gone with the mega-farm flow, they have tried to remain true to themselves, their respective heritages, and their desires to produce true quality products, and have chosen the roads less travelled on. Their various paths to success are fascinating, and an inspiration to the farmers of the future, as well as to the consumers who want them to succeed. If you care about the food you eat, you will want to read this book! Traveling the middle of the country with a great writer I tore through this book in just a couple days, and when I was done I only wanted more. I've been watching Lisa Hamilton's writing and photography in Orion and her book is even better: great characters brought to life before my eyes. What a treat. We can only hope that this is the first in a long line of books from her, and that she keeps going to places we don't usually go and bringing back characters like these farmers. Highly recommended, if you care about food, or farming, or just good stories from the heart of America.
Bonus: you can see some photos of the farmers in the book on her website, something I wish more non-fiction authors would do.
My only beef, small as it may be, is that the people at my local bookstore in LA didn't know about this book. Is Counterpoint hard to track down? I bought a second copy as a gift through Amazon, but I can't decide who to give it to.
Much praise From the first pages of the introduction in North Dakota I know I have hit the exact source of a deeply wounded beauty belonging to traditional agriculture and the author who will stitch it together for us and give us the voice that often gets stuck in our own throat and is not easily pieced together from broken up memory. These chapters immediately make us familiar to the survivors, and all of the history we need to make sense of them. How does a 1950s style dairy farmer live on his principles that stem from a traditional land consciousness? How does a New Mexican stockman navigate ancestral lands where two distinct systems of old and new world property ownership have clashed and left him some impossible dream? In a sea of bio engineered and chemically dependent conventional crop fields, how does one North Dakota farmer feed his family using only natural methods?
It is not by a matter of methods that these men survive, though the methods are important, it is their convictions and their character that lead them to independence. Harry Lewis understands that prosperity isn't something you create, prosperity is the form of our green earth; and true prosperity is received through shepherding our earth. Virgil Trujillo understands that "fitness" is "survival of the fittest" as he adapts to the cultural, political and economic forces that gash his land and his history. David Podoll has a deep spiritual sense of what is right and what is wrong, he knows that tilling massive acres of earth is a wasteful proposition if done in the conventional manner of which maximization for profit is the only god.
It's also a perfect travel narrative, with a painted scenic view and a conversational style that offers absorption into the mindset and the reality of remarkable individuals. It is details that quicken the heartbeat, like the art of Georgia O'Keefe's sun bleached bones and mountains of Abiquiu, New Mexico where a surviving ejido (a form of community land ownership granted by the Spanish Crown in the 18th century) still exists in a tenuous position of holding off the government Forest Service and paying taxes. It is preparing cattle for winter rangelands and weighing in the stock, and dealing with the holier than thou environmentalists that drip in the gates to "save" the land. - Take for example the cattle in the scrubby desert, we have too often heard that cattle rampage all the vegetation and create desiccation, but as Virgil Trujillo has proven, grazing cattle in imitation of the bison using a rotational manner, may actually improve the conditions for scrub growth rather than harm them permanently. To know the land you have to be there working it.
Perhaps the best vibes from this book is that we should all want to crave being as adventurous in our work and unstoppable for the truth as the embracing Lisa Hamilton has been introducing us to these unique men and women who live honorably. If we can't drive out to North Dakota, we can certainly do a little searching in our own hometowns. I may look no further than the nearest pumpkin patch run by the last farmer in the township, or the old cider mill that has pressed for nearly 140 years.
As a side bar here that is personally relevant to me - I thank the author for the small-minded quote taken from the Chairman of the House Agricultural Committee -Collin Peterson (D-Minnesota) - This quote exposes the extent of his wisdom.
Sadly, Monsanto pays him for those kinds of opinions.
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