The intersection of food, people, and the land has produced some of the most positive and vibrant writing of today. One of our favorites in the recent crop of good books is Farm Together Now: A Portrait of People, Places, and Ideas for a New Food Movement by Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker. The authors visited twenty farms over the course of a single summer. Each farm is profiled with extensive interviews, along with beautifully evocative photographs. The farms are innovative in different ways, but most are dedicated to missions of sustainable agriculture, food justice, and the strengthening of their local food systems.
Here’s just three of the inspiring farm projects featured in Farm Together Now, along with links to each organization’s websites:
—City Slicker Farms: bringing fresh, healthy food to the inner city neighborhoods of Oakland, California.
—Anarchy Apiaries: a one-man operation in New York’s Hudson River Valley, with the mission of raising honeybees in a natural way, in the hopes of reducing Colony Collapse Disorder among the hives.
—The Acequiahood of the San Luis Peoples Ditch: founded in 1852, this cooperative farm organization manages the common ownership of water in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The ditches (acequias) delivers the water, and also ties together the entire community.
All twenty farm projects have inspiring tales to tell. The authors of Farm Together Now returned from their travels with this thought:
“By understanding how these individuals are creating solutions for their lives and the lives of those whom they care about, we feel more optimistic about our future. We present their stories here because we know that a new food system can only emerge if the diversity and complexity that these folks embody are part of the discussion.”
For more on Farm Together Now, be sure to visit farmtogethernow.org.
Also featured above: Lisa Hamilton’s Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness. With the ease of a born storyteller, Lisa Hamilton profiles three farmers bucking the agribusiness establishment — a Texas dairyman, a New Mexico rancher, and a North Dakota farmer. The Land Library strongly recommends Deeply Rooted, along with books such as these:
Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community by Thomas A. Lyson, Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture by Darrin Nordhal, and Mark Winne’s Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture. A few years back, Mark Winne joined us for a wonderful Rocky Mountain Land Series presentation, and he is the subject of one of our earlier posts.
For more good books on this rich topic, click here, and explore!
Rocky Mountain Land Library 
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