Growing Up On The Farm

In each of these poems, Gill Davies has captured a moment in childhood, a little spot in time, as Anna grows up with her brother Jack.

With nearly 100 vintage images and personal stories, [this book] relives the era [1930-1970] of this major agricultural revolution and takes the reader on a journey that will define a time of momentous change.

In Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl, Carol Bodensteiner tells the stories of a happy childhood growing up on a family-owned dairy farm in the middle of America in the 1950s, a time when a family could make a good living on 180 acres.

At Clay Bottom Farm, author Ben Hartman and staff practice kaizen, or continuous improvement, cutting out more waste--of time, labor, space, money, and more--every year and aligning their organic production more tightly with customer demand. Applied alongside other lean principles originally developed by the Japanese auto industry, the end result has been increased profits and less work. In this field-guide companion to his award-winning first book, The Lean Farm, Hartman shows market vegetable growers in even more detail how Clay Bottom Farm implements lean thinking in every area of their work, including using kanbans, or replacement signals, to maximize land use; germination chambers to reduce defect waste; and right-sized machinery to save money and labor and increase efficiency. From finding land and assessing infrastructure needs to selling perfect produce at the farmers market, The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables digs deeper into specific, tested methods for waste-free farming that not only help farmers become more successful but make the work more enjoyable. These methods include: Using Japanese paper pot transplanters Building your own germinating chambers Leaning up your greenhouse Making and applying simple composts Using lean techniques for pest and weed control Creating Heijunka, or load-leveling calendars for efficient planning Farming is not static, and improvement requires constant change. The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables offers strategies for farmers to stay flexible and profitable even in the face of changing weather and markets. Much more than a simple exercise in cost-cutting, lean farming is about growing better, not cheaper, food--the food your customers want.

Focuses on a thirteen-year-old boy who works on his family's farm, caring for livestock, harvesting hay, and preparing to manage the farm himself one day.

As the United States transformed itself from an agricultural to an industrial nation, thousands of young people left farm homes for life in the big city. But even by 1920 the nation’s heartland remained predominantly rural and most children in the region were still raised on farms. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg retells their stories, offering glimpses—both nostalgic and realistic—of a bygone era. As Riney-Kehrberg shows, the experiences of most farm children continued to reflect the traditions of family life and labor, albeit in an age when middle-class urban Americans were beginning to redefine childhood as a time reserved for education and play. She draws upon a wealth of primary sources—not only memoirs and diaries but also census data—to create a vivid portrait of midwestern farm childhood from the early post–Civil War period through the Progressive Era growing pains of industrialization. Those personal accounts resurrect the essential experience of children’s work, play, education, family relations, and coming of age from their own perspectives. Steering a middle path between the myth of wholesome farm life and the reality of work that was often extremely dangerous, Riney-Kehrberg shows both the best and the worst that a rural upbringing had to offer midwestern youth a time before mechanization forever changed the rural scene and radio broke the spell of isolation. Down on the farm, truancy was not uncommon and chores were shared across genders. Yet farm children managed to indulge in inventive play—much of it homemade—to supplement store-bought toys and to get through the long spells between circuses. Filled with insightful personal stories and graced with dozens of highly evocative period photos, Childhood on the Farm is the only general history of midwestern farm children to use narratives written by the children themselves, giving a fresh voice to these forgotten years. Theirs was a way of life that was disappearing even as they lived it, and this book offers new insight into why, even if many rural youngsters became urban and suburban adults, they always maintained some affection for the farm.

"Eloquent and detailed...It's hard to have hope, but the organized observations and plans of Hoffman and people like her give me some. Read her book -- and listen." -- Jane Smiley, The Washington Post In her late 40s, Beth Hoffman decided to upend her comfortable life as a professor and journalist to move to her husband's family ranch in Iowa--all for the dream of becoming a farmer. There was just one problem: money. Half of America's two million farms made less than $300 in 2019, and many struggle just to stay afloat. Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth's eyes. She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. Growing oats is good for the environment but ends up being very bad for the wallet. And finding somewhere, in the midst of COVID-19, to slaughter grass finished beef is a nightmare. If Beth can't make it, how can farmers who confront racism, lack access to land, or don't have other jobs to fall back on hack it? Bet the Farm is a first-hand account of the perils of farming today and a personal exploration of more just and sustainable ways of producing food.

Growing Up is about the formative years of four children who grew up on a dairy and tobacco farm in southwest Wisconsin in the 1930s and 1940s. They took their first innocent childhood steps in the security of a loving family. As they grew toward adolescence, the world was no longer a storybook land, as they had imagined in grade school, but a whole new world of different people and strange surroundings. It always seemed, though, as they grew from puberty to young adulthood, that what they learned in Sunday school and from their parents came to the surface when they were faced with making hard decisions in an adult world. The difference between right and wrong, instilled in them from earliest childhood, stayed with them all their lives. All parents want their children to have a better life than their own, and their parents did everything they could to convince them to get a more complete education. Tom did not go to college like his sister and brothers, but attended a vocational school in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he learned auto mechanics and welding. After one year, he was drafted into the Army and served in Korea. The war had just ended, so he did not see battle. Come join this wonderful family on a trip down memory lane.