Product Description

For decades, Logsdon and his family have run a viable family farm. Along the way, he has become a widely influential journalist and social critic, documenting in hundreds of essays for national and regional magazines the crisis in conventional agri-business and the boundless potential for new forms of farming that reconcile tradition with ecology.
Logsdon reminds us that healthy and economical agriculture must work “at nature’s pace,” instead of trying to impose an industrial order on the natural world. Foreseeing a future with “more farmers, not fewer,” he looks for workable models among the Amish, among his lifelong neighbors in Ohio, and among resourceful urban gardeners and a new generation of defiantly unorthodox organic growers creating an innovative farmers-market economy in every region of the country.
"To love farming—real farming—in this day and time requires what a lot of people like to call crankiness but is in fact courage. . . . I have been reading Gene Logsdon for many years, and I have always taken courage from him. I thank him, and I shake his hand."
—Wendell Berry
Nature knows how to grow plants and raise animals; it is human beings who are in danger of losing this age-old expertise, substituting chemical additives and artificial technologies for the traditional virtues of fertility, artistry, and knowledge of natural processes. This new edition of Logsdon’s important collection of essays and articles (first published by Pantheon in 1993) contains six new chapters taking stock of American farm life at this turn of the century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #339926 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this collection of essays reprinted from a variety of farm journals, a fourth-generation farmer in north-central Ohio looks at the current state of the family farm with cautious optimism. But Logsdon is sharply critical of agricultural education, charging that land grant colleges pay more attention to agribusiness and technology than to the moderate-size family farm. In one essay, he explores the relationship between farming and nature, tracing a cowpat full cycle to show how pastures and livestock complete the food web. The author talks to Amish farmers who illustrate exemplary care of the land; he describes small specialty farms, urban gardeners and organic farmers. He advocates a traditional farm with mixed livestock, crops, garden and orchard. Readers who garden or farm will be heartened by these essays.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Logsdon is a farm writer and keen observer of the trends in American agriculture. In this collection of essays, written over a 12-year period (1980-92), he identifies the factors responsible for the decline of American agriculture and the demise of rural communities. Using his native Ohio as an example, he holds farmers, land grant colleges, farm organizations, and government officials accountable for sacrificing the long-term good in favor of short-term gains by operating farms that are labor- and chemical-intensive and economically and environmentally unsound. He predicts a rebirth of small-scale, profitable farms around the country using sustainable practices that will change the nation's attitudes concerning agriculture. Logsdon spent time observing an Amish community and was impressed by their formula for survival--a mixture of self-sufficiency, sustainable farming business acumen, and family life. Recommended for all readers who long for a return to traditional farming practices. --Irwin Weintraub, Rutgers Univ. Libs., Piscataway, N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Logsdon is as impersonal as a politician seeking office in these essays on the small commercial farmer. The operant word is commercial, for Logsdon is no gentleman farmer. Although he writes about the spiritual rewards of farming, he always counterposes to them the thoroughly material woes suffered by the small "food and fiber producer"--his term for farmer. Such attention to terminology bespeaks Logsdon's resistance to the conventional wisdoms of the agribusiness executive, the noble ecological farmer, and even his constituency, the vanishing commercial farmer. It indicates, too, three pervasive features of his writing: tough-mindedness, historical perspective, and close attention to particularities. Thus, when he discusses the decline of the small commercial farmer, he invokes not some vague urban alienation but the changing curriculum in the department of agriculture at Ohio State; and when he writes about small farmers, he describes in detail--skillfully enough to shame most professional ethnographers--extended conversations in the Pour House restaurant. So we take seriously his prophecy that small farming will revive. Even should it fail, his writing documents with rare honesty and perspicacity a calling that has become all but invisible to most of us. Roland Wulbert

Customer Reviews

The garden at the center of the universe
The volume titled "At Nature's Pace" is an earlier edition of the better-known one released several years later, with a half-dozen or so additional essays, under the title "Living at Nature's Pace." Not having read the latter yet, I can't comment on what the extra essays added to the ones originally collected. But I can say that I'm definitely looking forward to reading them.

Gene Logsdon is, in his way, just as "revisionist" as many of the historians I've found myself reading lately. He challenges many of the orthodoxies of the "farm crisis" we city folk have been hearing about for decades, arguing that in fact most of the farms succumbing to economic pressure are large-scale "factory farms" that have been uneconomically overextended from the very beginning. Small, family-owned farms that resist the lure of going into debt to purchase more land, more chemicals, and more expensive machinery tend, he argues, to do just fine. Logsdon's prime example of this is the Amish farms of his native Ohio, whose owners have grown positively rich (especially by their own standards) by keeping their farms to manageable size.

Another of Logsdon's key points, especially worth thinking about, concerns the misleading nature of economic calculation as it is frequently applied to farming. Is raising livestock, as well as crops, and using the manure to fertilize your fields a cost, or a cost-savings, relative to using expensive chemicals? What is the value of working with your family on a small farm versus hiring hands to work a larger one? Logsdon raises many questions about "cost" versus "value" that are worth contemplating, even by those of us in the suburbs.

The book begins with contrary, sometimes (by his own admission) angry essays about the economics of farming and the general uselessness of university agricultural-education programs. But they soon transition into portrayals of farming life that are both idyllic (in the original sense) and subtly instructive. The three closing essays ("closing" in this edition; they're toward the middle in "Living at Nature's Pace"), "A Woodcutter's Pleasures," "The Pond at the Center of the Universe," and "My Wilderness," are all deeply moving.

This was my first exposure to Gene Logsdon's work, but it definitely won't be my last. I'm planning on tracking down his many other titles as well. As a third (or more) generation child of the suburbs, my connection to the farm is somewhat attenuated. But Logsdon's writing makes me feel closer to it nonetheless, and it's a feeling I find myself really appreciating.

Wendell Berry in a raspberry patch. Wonderful!
This book introduced me to Logsdon work. I've since read it over several times. He speaks what he thinks with no varnish of correctness. Incredibly refreshing these days. Covers apsects of rural society in the modern world. For an outsider that wishes to gain some perspective on the "problem" and the promise of rural America this is a great place to start and finish up.

He's mad as hell and writes straight-from-the-shoulder
Gene Logsdon, The Contrary Farmer, is that rare prolific writer who continues to delight me with the breadth of his subject knowledge. He knows modern American farm life as it really is, not only its hard-wrought joy but its deep, dark underbelly. Here he exposes the sad facts of crop subsidies and their effect on people who before political propaganda and intervention had the common sense to farm on a family scale and enjoyed the satisfaction that derived therefrom. Tractors that cost more than a farm should cost. Soil death by toxic chemicals and erosion. The criminal collusion (my words, not Logsdon's) of land grant agriculture colleges, equipment companies, chemical companies and politicians. The stupidity of laws that put Amish minister Henry Hershberger in jail for building a superior house but without a permit because of his religious beliefs. Logsdon also shows what works. The Kemp farm of Jerusalem, Ohio, with only 140 acres but a carefully built herd of cows whose pedigree commands value nationwide. A Berkeley, California, "farm" of one-third acre that grosses more than $300,000. The Amish farmers, whose success embarrasses agribusiness practitioners. Logsdon cares about people and nature. He is mad as hell and speaks plainly. He also has vision. "If we want to remake an agriculture that is technically correct for sustainability, we must make sure it is also culturally correct, or the effort will not succeed."