Here are 96 books that The Farm That Feeds Us fans have personally recommended if you like
The Farm That Feeds Us.
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I grew up in a farming community where everyone understood where our food comes from; we were all either farmers or related to farmers. I’ve since discovered that is not the case everywhere. Many kids honestly believe our food comes from grocery stores. Those that have been told our food is grown, are still unfamiliar with the extent of our reliance on agriculture—not just for food, but clothing; building and cleaning supplies; sports equipment; fuel; and so much more! They also don’t understand the amount of time and hard work (even technology) required to grow, harvest, and process the plants used to create their favorite foods. Hopefully these books—mine included—will help.
Not really a farm-to-table book, but I love the inspirational message of this story—that anyone can grow a plant, anywhere that they are.
“For an anywhere farm, here's all that you need: soil and sunshine, some water, a seed.” The author goes on to inspire readers (in rollicking rhyme) to plant their “farms” in any type container they can find—an empty lot, a box or bucket, a shoe, or even a horn.
Again, not exactly accurate, but a wonderful way to spark creative discussions about growing a garden to make our world a greener and more beautiful place. For, “with soil and sunshine and water and care, one day all our anywhere farms anywhere might turn into an everywhere farm everywhere.”
Anywhere can be a farm - all it takes is one small seed, and someone to plant it.
In this celebration of green fingers and the thrill of nurturing new life Phyllis Root delivers a read-aloud rhyming mantra for planting your very own farm, while G. Brian Karas's joyful city illustrations sprout from every page. You might think a farm means fields, tractors and a barnyard full of animals. But you can plant a farm anywhere you like! A box or a bucket, a boot or a pan - almost anything can be turned into a home for growing things.…
The Real Boys of the Civil War
by
J. Arthur Moore,
The Real Boys of the Civil War is a research about the real boys who served during the war, opening with a historiography research paper about their history along with its 7-page source document. It then evolves into a series of collections of their stories by topic, concluding with a…
I grew up in a farming community where everyone understood where our food comes from; we were all either farmers or related to farmers. I’ve since discovered that is not the case everywhere. Many kids honestly believe our food comes from grocery stores. Those that have been told our food is grown, are still unfamiliar with the extent of our reliance on agriculture—not just for food, but clothing; building and cleaning supplies; sports equipment; fuel; and so much more! They also don’t understand the amount of time and hard work (even technology) required to grow, harvest, and process the plants used to create their favorite foods. Hopefully these books—mine included—will help.
This book uses the structure of A House That Jack Built to show readers how pumpkins grow—from seed to orange fruit—and introduce science concepts like photosynthesis and pollination.
I'm not usually a fan of cumulative stories, but this one is exceptionally well-written, a joy to read aloud. The author holds reader interest by varying the phrases each time they appear without disrupting the established rhyme pattern. I love that each of her variations uncovers another aspect of the scientific processes involved in growing plants.
Using "The House That Jack Built" rhyme scheme and beginning with the planting of a single seed, the journey of bringing a pumpkin to harvest comes to life for young readers. Under Molly's watchful eye and care, each stage of growth--from the seed to the sprout to the leaves to the final fruit on the vine--is showcased. And at the end, Molly's lovely pumpkin is turned into a delicious pie for one and all to share in a celebration of gratitude. All from the seed that Molly sowed. Back matter includes fun facts about pumpkins, the important pollinators who help…
I grew up in a farming community where everyone understood where our food comes from; we were all either farmers or related to farmers. I’ve since discovered that is not the case everywhere. Many kids honestly believe our food comes from grocery stores. Those that have been told our food is grown, are still unfamiliar with the extent of our reliance on agriculture—not just for food, but clothing; building and cleaning supplies; sports equipment; fuel; and so much more! They also don’t understand the amount of time and hard work (even technology) required to grow, harvest, and process the plants used to create their favorite foods. Hopefully these books—mine included—will help.
A hands-on, child’s-eye-view of what it takes to grow your own food in which the main character, a young girl, works to prove to her parents that she is ready for the responsibility and hard work of gardening.
The author uses a combination of prose and diary entries to tell this story of perseverance, entrepreneurship, and agriculture—all big words described in a very child-friendly way. But it’s the illustrations that sell this book. I love the bright, scrapbook style. They add tons of humor and kid appeal while perfectly complimenting the writing.
I imagine kiddos spending hours pouring over the art's details, and using the illustrations as inspiration to create their own writing notebooks.
Jolie LOVES strawberries - and she’s on an unstoppable (and hilarious) mission to grow her own food from seedling to table in this colorful introduction to the joy of growing the popular perennial.
Through Jolie’s comical scrapbook-style journal entries, young readers will learn how she convinces the “old people” (aka her parents) to let her grow her own strawberries. Growing strawberries is a lot of work and responsibility, but Jolie is ready with the help of her faithful rabbit Munchy! Together they find out just how delicious, rewarding, and sometimes complicated it can be to grow your own food.
Everyone in Angelina's big family has a story to tell.
The Yesterday Dress is a story for seven to nine-year olds about family connections and how learning about the past gives us a stronger sense of where we come from, who we are and how we fit into our world.…
I grew up in a farming community where everyone understood where our food comes from; we were all either farmers or related to farmers. I’ve since discovered that is not the case everywhere. Many kids honestly believe our food comes from grocery stores. Those that have been told our food is grown, are still unfamiliar with the extent of our reliance on agriculture—not just for food, but clothing; building and cleaning supplies; sports equipment; fuel; and so much more! They also don’t understand the amount of time and hard work (even technology) required to grow, harvest, and process the plants used to create their favorite foods. Hopefully these books—mine included—will help.
I first discovered Time for Cranberries when looking for comparative titles for my own book.
But where mine follows the growth and harvest cycle of pecans, Lisl’s follows the harvest process for cranberries—from field to Thanksgiving table (though like my book, hers is not a holiday title). Like me, Lisl, wrote her story from personal experience, and includes all the sights and sounds of the cranberry harvest.
I love that she includes the child narrator in the process in a way that is both authentic and safe, and uses a refrain to tie the narrative together—boy, I didn’t realize just how comparative our stories were until just this moment! Maybe, someday the two of us can meet in person.
From the cranberry bog to the Thanksgiving table, join Sam and his family as they harvest a classic American fruit.
When the vines hang heavy with berries that the autumn winds have turned deep red, it's time for cranberries, and Sam is finally old enough to help with the harvest! This charming, lyrical picture book follows Sam and his family as they raise the water in the bog, pick the cranberries, and gather the fruit for processing. It's a story of modern family farming in action, showing readers where their food comes from but mostly delighting them along the way.
As a child, I lived outside as much as possible, finding joy in the company of trees and animals. So naturally, my reading tastes bent in the direction of the natural world; I loved to read about treacherous journeys, wonder-filled meditations, or stories of survival. To this day, I still gravitate toward books that feature the environment as a kind of character, providing it with a voice and a presence. Both on the page and off, my connection with nature remains multi-faceted, heartening, and sustaining.
Wendell Berry writes in multiple forms—poetry, essays, novels—and also practices sustainable farming in rural Kentucky. The World Ending Fire is a compilation of essays spanning over fifty years of his work and displays his wide-ranging intellect and care for the natural world. He emphasizes individual responsibility and stewardship of the earth, but his tone never becomes pedantic or preachy. Instead, his passion and conviction are contagious, and I always feel a sense of gratitude and clarity when I read his words.
'He is unlike anybody else writing today ... After Donald Trump's election, we urgently need to rediscover the best of radical America. An essential part of that story is Wendell Berry. Few of us can live, or even aspire to, his kind of life. But nobody can risk ignoring him' Andrew Marr
'Wendell Berry is the most important writer and thinker that you have (probably) never heard of. He is an American sage' James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life
Wendell Berry is 'something of an anachronism'. He began his life as the old times and the last of the…
I grew up on the wild island of Tasmania. I saw the Vietnam War on TV, then went to a farm my father was ‘developing.’ It felt like war. The natural beauty that I’d once played in was destroyed by machines, poisons, and fire. During agricultural college in mainland Australia, I recognized an absence of reverence for Mother Nature. Women were missing from the rural narrative that increasingly held an economics-only mindset when it came to food. I’m a co-founder of Ripple Farm Landscape Healing Hub–a 100-acre farm we’re restoring to natural beauty and producing loved meat and eggs for customers. And I’m a devoted mum, shepherd, and working dog trainer.
I loved the audio version because of author Will Harris' wonderful Georgia accent that brought the book to life. He’s a rancher who saw a broken food system and saw into his own heart and changed things. He said no to chemicals on his farm.
He said no to sending his young cattle to feedlots (a hellish prison for cattle), and he said no to off-farm slaughter. And he said yes to nature thriving and yes to his daughters! The farm and community are now thriving. It has become my number one recommendation for folks stuck in the industrial farming mud… and he’s inspired me to keep leading change for the better.
"If I could have one wish it is that every eater in America would read this book." —Ruth Reichl
From a pioneer of the regenerative agriculture movement, a memoir-meets-manifesto on betting the farm on a better future for our food, animals, land, local communities, and our climate
Raised as a fourth-generation farmer, when Will Harris inherited White Oak Pastures he was a full-time commodity cowboy who played hard and fast with every tool the system offered – chemicals, antibiotics, steroids, and more. His ancestors had built a highly profitable, conventionally-run machine, but over time he found himself disgusted with the…
Did you know you can survive being swallowed by a whale? Or that octopus wrestling used to be an actual sport? Or, that once a town in Oregon didn't know what to do with a whale carcass that washed up on their beaches, so they...BLEW IT UP?
I’m a writer who grew up in the Midwest, moved away for a while, and has now raised my own kids here. I love reading other writers' takes on what kinds of stories they see unfolding here. As I get older, I realize that great stories can grow out of the ground anywhere, with the right amount of sunshine, darkness, and water.
I still remember reading this book, which takes place on a farm in Iowa. It was my first glimpse of the idea that something so epic could be set in a place that I thought of as so boring.
Smiley's retelling of King Lear is one for the ages and a good lesson that greatness is only limited by your imagination, not your geography.
This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare's King Lear centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm among his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will, which sets in motion a chain of events that brings dark truths to light. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, A Thousand Acres spins the most fundamental themes of truth, justice, love, and pride into a universally acclaimed masterpiece.
Throughout my life I found the trick to getting through rough patches meant isolating dark thoughts. I got them out by creating something (artworks, poems, stories), and looked forward to new horizons, though these works could easily be misinterpreted by those around me. When I was fifteen, after my father died and we were forced off the farm, I created a series of disturbing drawings that won the school's art prize and were displayed at graduation. A friend of my mother saw the exhibit and said, “Oh Dorothy, I’m so sorry.” It gave us a laugh later when Mother realized this method of cleansing beat finding a psychiatrist, and the cost couldn’t be beat.
This exquisitely written, dark saga of family intrigue is worth reading over and over, and I do.
The protagonist’s devotion to family and the land that feed her, both physically and emotionally, is rich and consuming.
Events are seen from her point of view and her antagonist’s, giving opposing slants that generate an exquisite tension throughout the book.
This story was instrumental in my education as a writer, as was the author, both showing the use of deep interiority in every character, and a setting that made me live within the story.
Enidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, who has never wanted more than the land she works and the animals she raises on it with her husband, Frank. But for the deeply religious Mary, farming is an awkward living and at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary creates a clean and orderly home life for her stormy husband, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation…
Growing up in a Kentucky coal-mining community, I enjoyed reading about the lives of other people and how their experiences differed from mine. I read biographies of famous people, such as Paul Revere or Stephen Foster, and an occasional memoir, such as Harlan Ellison writing about infiltrating a juvenile gang or David Gerrold revealing how he came to write forStar Trek. Fiction also took me to places that I had never seen. But something about a coming-of-age tale especially resonated with me and I hope these recommendations will help you make that same connection with how others have navigated the magic and miseries of childhood.
My only fiction pick, this classic novel set in Florida in the 1870s is about 12-year-old Jody Baxter and his friendship with a fawn. I became familiar with this coming-of-age tale in an unusual way. In seventh grade, I was on a school speech team, and one of the other kids competed in the storytelling competition using an excerpt fromThe Yearling. That excerpt included the moment when Jody’s father talks to him about becoming a man: “What’s he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.” That phrase stuck with me, and was even more powerful years later when I read the novel in its entirety and learned all that Jody had gone through by the time he and his father reached that moment.
The Yearling is a novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published in March 1938. It has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian and 22 other languages. It won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. Rawlings's editor was Maxwell Perkins, who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other literary luminaries. She had submitted several projects to Perkins for his review, and he rejected them all. He advised her to write about what she knew from her own life, and The Yearling was the result.
The Stormy Night is the first in a series of nine children's books for ages 8-12. The stories follow two dogs–a senior, disabled dog and a newly adopted puppy–as they learn to become friends and family.
The Adventures of Lucky and Mr. Pickle series are chapter books, not picture books.…
As a teenager, I visited my uncle, who farmed rice in southern Haiti. I met a community that helped me understand that food is not just about dollars and cents—it’s about belonging, it’s about identity. This experience inspired me to become an aid worker. For the last 20+ years, I have worked to mend broken food systems all over the world. If we don’t get food right, hunger will threaten the social fabric.
I read this novel in a single day when I was in high school. It is about a struggling farming community in Haiti that comes together against all odds to build a better future. This book is lively and told with compassion.
I found Roumain’s exploration of the Haitian psyche in this book revealing; it taught me much about rural Haitian culture. Reading this book at a young age put me on the path to becoming an aid worker focusing on food security. In fact, I dedicated my first book to the Masters of the Dew.
A new English-language edition of this novel, which tells of the traditional rural life and people of Haiti, dominated by the natural world. This is a deeply powerful story of the harsh existence of peasant farmers struggling in a world both beautiful and unforgiving. The tale begins with the return of Manuel, a prodigal son, to his aging parents homestead and the realities of subsistence agriculture in a drought-stricken region. He brings new ideas, with the potential to transform the lives of people in the community. He encounters old feuds and resistance to change but he persists, and his determination…
