Berry, Wendell. The Mad Farmer Poems. CounterPoint Press, 2014.

During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell Berry has become “Mad” at what contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open-ended sequence he’s found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts.

Kurlansky, Mark. Milk! Bloomsbury, 2018.

Today, milk is a test case in the most pressing issues in food politics, from industrial farming and animal rights to GMOs, the locavore movement and advocates for raw milk, who controversially reject pasteurization. Profoundly intertwined with human civilization, milk has a compelling and surprisingly global story to tell, and historian Mark Kurlansky is the perfect person to tell it. Tracing the liquid's diverse history from antiquity to the present, he details its curious and crucial role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics, and economics.

Dougherty, Beth. The Independent Farmstead: Growing Soil, Biodiversity, and Nutrient Dense Food with Grassfed Animals and Intensive Pasture Management. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016.

Twenty years ago, when authors Shawn and Beth Dougherty purchased the land they would come to name the Sow’s Ear, the state of Ohio designated it “not suitable for agriculture.” Today, their family raises and grows 90% of their own food. The Independent Farmstead is a resource for new and prospective farmers and homesteaders.

Kimball, Kristen. The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love. Scribner/Simon and Schuster, 2010.

When Kristin Kimball left New York City to interview a dynamic young farmer named Mark, her world changed. On an impulse, she shed her city self and started a new farm with him on five hundred acres near Lake Champlain. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of the couple’s first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through their harvest-season wedding in the loft of the barn. Kristin and Mark’s plan to grow everything needed to feed a community was an ambitious idea, and a bit romantic. It worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, over a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the “whole diet”—beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables—produced by the farm.

Horn, Miriam. Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland.W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Unfolding as a journey down the Mississippi River, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman tells the stories of five representatives of this stewardship movement: a Montana rancher, a Kansas farmer, a Mississippi riverman, a Louisiana shrimper, and a Gulf fisherman. In exploring their work and family histories and the essential geographies they protect, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman challenges pervasive and powerful myths about American and environmental values.

Logdon, Gene. Letter to a Young Farmer: How to Live Richly Without Wealth on the New Garden Farm. Princeton Architectural Press, 2017.

For more than four decades, the self-described “contrary farmer” and writer Gene Logsdon has commented on the state of American agriculture. In Letter to a Young Farmer, his final book of essays, Logsdon addresses the next generation―young people who are moving back to the land to enjoy a better way of life as small-scale “garden farmers.” It’s a lifestyle that isn’t defined by accumulating wealth or by the “get big or get out” agribusiness mindset. Instead, it’s one that recognizes the beauty of nature, cherishes the land, respects our fellow creatures, and values rural traditions. It’s one that also looks forward and embraces “right technologies,” including new and innovative ways of working smarter, not harder, and avoiding premature burnout.

Logsdon, Gene. The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming LIfe. Ohio University Press, 2008.

From the Great Depression, when farmers tilled the fields with plow horses, to the corporate farms and government subsidy programs of the present, this novel presents the complex transformation of a livelihood and of a way of life. Two friends, one rich by local standards, and the other of more modest means, grow to manhood in a lifelong contest of will and character.

Gass, William H. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. 1968. NYRB Classics, 2014.

First published in 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established William Gass as one of America’s finest and boldest writers of fiction, and nearly fifty years later, the book still stands as a landmark of contemporary fiction. The two novellas and three short stories it contains are all set in the Midwest, and together they offer a mythical reimagining of America’s heartland, with its punishing extremes of heat and cold, its endless spaces and claustrophobic households, its hidden and baffled desires, its lurking threat of violence. Exploring and expanding the limits of the short story, Gass works magic with words, words that are as squirming, regal, and unexpected as the roaches, boys, icicles, neighbors, and neuroses that fill these pages, words that shock, dazzle, illumine, and delight.

Gibbons, Stella. Cold Comfort Farm. Penguin Classics, 2006.

When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. At the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the doomed Starkadders: cousin Judith, heaving with remorse for unspoken wickedness; Amos, preaching fire and damnation; their sons, lustful Seth and despairing Reuben; child of nature Elfine; and crazed old Aunt Ada Doom, who has kept to her bedroom for the last twenty years. But Flora loves nothing better than to organize other people. Armed with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the family in hand.

Apps, Jerry. In a Pickle. University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.

The year is 1955. The H. H. Harlow Pickle Company has appeared in the small town of Link Lake, using heavy-handed tactics to force family farmers to either farm the Harlow way or lose their biggest customer—and, possibly, their land. Andy Meyer, the owner of a half-acre pickle patch, works part-time for the Harlow Company, a conflict that places him between the family farm and the big corporation.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. Penguin Books, 2002.

At once naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, is perhaps the most American of American classics. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation during the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. From their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of this new America, Steinbeck creates a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity.

Hodge, Deborah. Up We Grow: A Year in the Life of a Small, Local Farm. Toronto, Canada: Kids Can Press, 2010.

Heartwarming photos invite children into the world of a small, co-operative farm over four seasons. Readers will get to know the hardworking farmers who plow, plant, compost, mulch, harvest and market fruits and vegetables, and care for animals. Rarely has the important work of a farm been so lovingly presented in photos and text. The book focuses on production as well as the human interaction that makes up small-scale, local farm culture.

Martin, Jacqueline Briggs. Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table. Readers to Eaters, 2013.

Will Allen is no ordinary farmer. A former basketball star, he’s as tall as his truck, and he can hold a cabbage, or a basketball, in one hand. But what is most special about Farmer Will is that he can see what others can’t see. When he looked at an abandoned city lot he saw a huge table, big enough to feed the whole world. No space, no problem. Poor soil, there’s a solution. Need help, found it. Farmer Will is a genius in solving problems.

Peterson, Cris. Clarabelle: Making Milk and So Much More. Boyds Mills Press, 2007.

By featuring a single cow and her calf on a large Wisconsin dairy farm, Cris Peterson describes all the latest technology that enables farmers to create by-products from their herds. And yet none of the modern-day machinery matches the miracle of production that is the cow herself.

Stiefel, Chana. Cows on the Family Farm. Enslow Publishing, 2013.

An introduction to life on a farm for early readers. Find out what a cow eats, where it lives, and when calves are born.

Creech, Sharon. Moo. Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2016.

When Reena, her little brother, Luke, and their parents first move to Maine, Reena doesn’t know what to expect. She’s ready for beaches, blueberries, and all the lobster she can eat. Instead, her parents “volunteer” Reena and Luke to work for an eccentric neighbor named Mrs. Falala, who has a pig named Paulie, a cat named China, a snake named Edna—and that stubborn cow, Zora.

Larson, Kirby. Hattie Big Sky. Delacorte Press, 2006.

For most of her life, sixteen-year-old Hattie Brooks has been shuttled from one distant relative to another. Tired of being Hattie Here-and-There, she summons the courage to leave Iowa and move all by herself to Vida, Montana, to prove up on her late uncle's homestead claim. Under the big sky, Hattie braves hard weather, hard times, a cantankerous cow, and her own hopeless hand at the cookstove on her quest to discover the true meaning of home.

Murdock, Catherine Gilbert. Dairy Queen. Houghton Miflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers, 2007.

Darlene Joyce Schwenk lives on a farm in Red Bend, Wisconsin. A star athlete in basketball and volleyball, an injury to her father’s hip forces her to inherit the responsibilities of the dairy farm.

Alexander, Jill S. The Sweetheart of Prosper County. Square Fish, 2010.

This year, Austin Gray is going to wave to the crowd from the hood of a shiny pickup truck in the annual No-Jesus Christmas Parade, and finally show the town bully that she's got what it takes to be the Sweetheart of Prosper County! Austin will do almost anything to become Sweetheart, including joining the Future Farmers of America and raising an animal―a rooster with an attitude named Charles Dickens. She has lots of support: her oldest friend, Maribel, her new FFA friends (including the reigning Sweetheart and a very cute cowboy), a mysterious Cajun outcast, and an evangelical Elvis impersonator. But will her momma ever stop being overprotective, and start letting Austin live her own life?

The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry

If you haven’t read anything by Wendell Berry yet, please do. In this book, he argues that farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline, while exploring how deeply estranged we as a nation have become from the land at the hands of agribusiness.

The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg

A lyrical, observational account of living within the seasons and rhythms of a farm. Klinkenborg has a way of writing about rural living that will take you there too. 

Raw Milk Revolution by David E. Gumpert

Beginning in 2006, the agriculture departments of several large states-with backing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration-launched a major crackdown on small dairies producing raw milk. This book goes behind the scenes and chronicles some of the government’s bizarre and occasionally brutal intimation tactics toward farmers, and we see just how political the dairy industry has become.

The Omnivores Dilemma, Michael Pollan

This book is in-depth look at the commercial side of food from a journalist's point of view and shines a light on the problems with the modern food industry. It’s an entertaining and critical exploration of the food choices we make and the profound consequences those choices have on ourselves and the natural world.

Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, edited by Vandana Shiva

This collection of essays, edited by Vandana Shiva, a scholar, environmental activist, and food sovereignty advocate. The book lays out practical steps for working toward creating a food system that is more socially and ecologically sustainable.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Written with a whole lot of wit and curiosity, this book chronicles a year of back-to-the-land living in Appalachia, in which Barbara Kingsolver and her family attempt to eat exclusively what they grow themselves. Kingsolver explores far reaching issues with the broken system at home, in the garden and kitchen. 

The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living by Scott and Helen Nearing

This is an iconic “back to the land” book about the Nearings journey of ditching the city life and creating a life of self-sufficiency, social justice, and peace for themselves. It became a manifesto to generations of back-to-the-landers. 

Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice

Written by an accomplished chef and food activist, Jessica Prentice, this book celebrates ethically grown foods and traditional cooking methods. The book follows the thirteen lunar cycles of an agrarian year, diving deeply into narratives of environmental and social justice through food.

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon

A cookbook and deep dive into traditional food ways and how to create a healthier future through food.