Gene Logsdon - Letter to a Young Farmer: How to Live Richly without Wealth on the New Garden Farm

Other Books by Gene Logsdon

Fiction:

Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food

The Last of the Husbandmen

The Lords of Folly

The Man Who Created Paradisea fable

Nonfiction:

Gene Everlasting

A Sanctuary of Trees

Holy Shit

Small-Scale Grain Raising

The Mother of All Arts

All Flesh Is Grass

The Pond Lovers

Good Spirits: A New Look at Ol Demon Alcohol

You Can Go Home Again

The Contrary Farmers Invitation to Gardening

Living at Natures Pace

The Contrary Farmer

The Low-Maintenance House

Money-Saving Secrets: A Treasury of Salvaging Bargaining Recycling & Scavenging

Gene Logsdons Practical Skills

Wildlife in the Garden

Organic Orcharding: A Grove of Trees to Live In

Getting Food from Water: A Guide to Backyard Aquaculture

Trees for the Yard, Orchard, and Woodlot

The Gardeners Guide to Better Soil

Successful Berry Growing

Homesteading: How to Find New Independence on the Land

Two-Acre Eden

Wyeth People: A Portrait of Andrew Wyeth as Seen by His Friends and Neighbors

Copyright 2017 by The Estate of Gene Logsdon.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover illustrations by Vladimir Yudin / 123RF Stock Photo ( top ) and istock.com/blue67sign ( bottom )

Project Manager: Alexander Bullett

Project Editor: Benjamin Watson

Copy Editor: Angela Boyle

Proofreader: Helen Walden

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Page Composition: Abrah Griggs

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing February, 2017.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 18 19 20 21

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Logsdon, Gene, author.

Title: Letter to a young farmer : how to live richly without wealth on the

new garden farm / Gene Logsdon.

Other titles: How to live richly without wealth on the new garden farm

Description: White River Junction, Vermont : Chelsea Green Publishing, [2017]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016050357| ISBN 9781603587259 (hardcover) | ISBN

9781603587266 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Agriculture--United States--Anecdotes. | Farm life--United States--Anecdotes.

Classification: LCC S521.5.A2 L64 2017 | DDC 338.10973--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050357

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, VT 05001

(802) 295-6300

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In honor of my friends,

Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, David Kline, and Maury Telleen,

whose words and actions have so much influenced

the blossoming of the garden farm.

In the future, most farms will be just very big gardens.

Robert Rodale ,

at the time publisher of Rodale Press and editor-in-chief of Organic Gardening and Farming magazine, talking with the author in 1978

Contents

FOREWORD

Letter to a Young Farmer is Gene Logsdons valedictory statement, written during what he knew was his final illness, finished at virtually the last minute of his working life. To his friends and devoted readers, those circumstances alone would make this a remarkable book and, moreover, a triumph in keeping with his character.

But this book is as variously remarkable as Gene himself was. By inheritance and conviction he was a holdout, an agrarian. He was, to use one of his favorite terms, a contrary farmer. By that name he distinguished himself and others of like mind from virtually all the kinds of modern ambition and success. The only diploma I have on my wall is a printed certificate naming me a member of The Contrary Farmers of America. It is signed by Gene.

What are contrary farmers contrary to? By the testimony of this book, they are contrary to getting big at any cost, to buying everything new and expensive that is recommended by experts, to dissolute economic and social behavior, to the fanatical pursuit of more and better, and to farming as territorial aggression or surface mining. This is a contrariness that has no doubt of its proper Earthly place or of the validity of its cultural tradition.

Among the ranks of the liberals and conservatives, you will find no contrary farmers hot-eyed and chanting slogans. Contrary farmers at times have had political representation. Some have at times been politicians. But this book is unlikely to be read at present, much less quoted, by any candidate for national office. Contrary farmers now are represented by no party. But they are a partyor a party of sortsto the extent that a good many of them still exist, are likely to recognize one another, have much to say to one another, and by nature or second nature are resistant to sales talk and expert advice.

And so, perfectly in keeping with the character of its author, this is a radical book. It is quietly, bravely, intelligently, amiably, and gleefully radical, intended, as Gene wrote in the Preface,

as fingers-crossed recognition of the decline of the Industrial Revolution, at least as it relates to farming, and the rise of a new decentralized agriculture based on home economy, not the so-called cheap food economy.... I mean to celebrate the rise of the smaller-scale, bio-intensive, environmentally friendly garden farm, a place where food quantity and food quality merge to bring about food sufficiency guaranteed by human self-sufficiency.

Gene is proposing, in short, to replace get big or get out, the conservative slogan of Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson in the 1950s, with another slogan that is truly conservative and far more democratic: get small and stay in. Beyond that, the opportunity for contrariness becomes pretty scarce.

This is also an eminently generous book, conceived and understood as part of the long conversation about farming, which has no beginning that we know and no end that we can foresee. In it an old farmer is talking to a young farmer, who will become an old farmer talking to a young farmer. This conversation is not just an interesting artifact or a good idea. It obeys the law of human culture, on which the life of the Earth depends, as it depends on the laws of nature.