Start Your Farm

by Forrest Pritchard and Ellen Polishuk

Combining nearly five decades of experience from two of America's pioneering sustainable farmers, Start Your Farm is the perfect introduction to the ever-growing ranks of people who dream of starting their own successful operation. Written in straightforward yet engaging language, rich with anecdotes, practical examples, and sprinkled throughout with rural humor, Start Your Farm is a must-read primer and practical business guide for any aspiring farmer, regardless of enterprise. The book offers essential step-by-step advice, as well as useful charts and diagrams.
From vegetables to livestock, from small-scale plots to large acreages, from West Coast to East, authors Polishuk and Pritchard have not only lived the farming dream, they have succeeded at it. Now, new farmers can benefit from their wealth of experience, finding valuable information specifically organized and tailored for them. Broad in scope but thorough in detail, Start Your Farm is a book that can be read straight through, cherry-picked for individual chapters, and kept as a handy ongoing reference.

• ISBN10: 1615194894
• ISBN13: 9781615194896
• Publish Date: 10 September 2018
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: The Experiment LLC
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Start Your Farm is an interesting new volume aimed at people looking to become farmers or who want to re-evaluate their business philosophy and direction for their farming work. Released 10th Sept 2018 by The Experiment, it's 272 pages and available in paperback, ebook, and audio formats. Authors Forrest Pritchard and Ellen Polishuk are well known business farming experts.

There are a lot of people who are keen gardeners (and some pure dreamers) who want to increase their connection to the land and either be or become more self-reliant and sustainable. This book aims to speak to that wish and help the dreamers and wishers seriously evaluate whether they're capable physically and mentally to become farmers and for those who are committed, how to get from dreaming to planning and finally to fulfilling those dreams.

This could have been a very depressing book. Farming is a physically and mentally demanding job. The realities of dealing with weather uncertainty, mechanical equipment failure and repair, costs, bookkeeping, regulations, to name just a few, are daunting at best. This book manages to be quite realistic whilst also being supportive and encouraging. There's a lot of experience detailed in the authors' narrative. I was impressed with the level of detail included about realistic expectations, problem solving, finding motivation, navigating uncertainty and unexpected costs and a lot more.

There's an old chestnut of a farming joke. How do you make a small fortune farming? Start with a large fortune! Seriously though, the authors manage to encompass satisfaction and lifestyle change as a tangible reward. It doesn't have a monetary value but living the life that suits you certainly has value (huge value).

This is a very personal book. It's not full of photographs of lush countryside and fluffy ducklings and lambs. It might be that some readers' takeaway from the book will be that farming is not in their future, and that's a good and valuable thing to know before staking said future on becoming a farmer.

This fills a vacant niche in the farming library. Think of it as philosophy of farming and a good in-depth job description.

Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.