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The Accidental Farmers: An Urban Couple, A Rural Calling And A Dream Of Farming In Harmony With Nature (2000)

by Tim Young(Favorite Author)

3.62 of 5 Votes: 4

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English

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review 1: I waffled between 3 and four stars but settled on three for a few reasons. The author is a type A personality that had spent most of his life in business, so he is very much the kind of person who gets the gist of things, llots a general course, asks himself if it's feasable and plows ahead. That outlook affected the writing of the book, in that it could have used a good editor. Not that there were many errors (I only caught three) but in the shifts of time, insertion of blog posts, and overall repetition could have improved the book quite a bit. In some places there is exacting detail (like the making of cheddar cheese) and in others questions were left unanswered (was an answer for the chickens pecking each other figured out? How was it stopped?) as well as a bit o... moref hypocrisy in the form of lamb being a-ok to eat, but calves weren't even though they would produce an important by-product for cheese making. (not saying that they should be treated like veal calves, but there's quite a spectrum here). I'm just really glad they realized that their efforts to force their own fertility was at complete odds with how they were trying to live. (that it never seemed to cross the author's mind that the world has plenty of humans in it already and overpopulation is dragging the health of this planet down at a terrific rate seems odd to me, it's a hard fact to ignore if you're preservation-minded)This shouldn't stop you from reading the book, after all there's some good tidbits in there and it could be inspiring to those thinking of making changes, even if they aren't as extreme as the author's. I won't be reading this again, but I'm not sad I got through it.
review 2: I wish I could have rated this book with 2.5 stars - there were some parts that I did like, but overall it was just OK. Tim Young describes he and his wife's journey from typical suburbanites with high stress lives to rural farmers. They initially started their journey by learning more about the industrial food system and how terrible it is for everyone involved - the animals, the people working with the animals, and the consumers. Because they had fairly high paying jobs they were able to purchase farmland with savings and eventually built a house there and started purchasing animals to raise for food. They are VERY honest about the hardships of farming - especially pasture-based organic meat farming. One thing that I found interesting was the struggles they had with popular industrial farming breeds who had been genetically modified to the point where they don't have any "natural instincts" anymore. "Whether it's a chicken, pig, turkey or cow, we have all, by virtue of encouraging cheap food at any cost, participated in reshaping the genetic makeup of all farm animals to the point where virtually no species can thrive in a natural setting." (p.166-7)The reason I didn't rate this book higher was the writing style. It just wasn't written very well and there was one chapter on cheese making where Young wrote the entire chapter in 3rd person referring to himself as "the farmer" which just grated on me and it wasn't done anywhere else in the book! Overall, I just didn't enjoy the writing much, but the content wasn't bad. They definitely show how hard farming is, but that it is worth it all in the end (in their opinion). At the end of each chapter was an excerpt from former blog posts. In one Young is talking about a conversation he had with an industrial chicken farmer. Here is a quote I really like:"And this is when I realized who the enemy was. It's certainly not this farmer. He was a nice man who genuinely seemed to like his job and the chickens. I didn't sense any cruelty in him, or any awareness of cruelty. No, he was just making a living by supplying what the market - his customer - asked for. Cheap, fast, food. His customers are, of course, all of us. We who go to supermarkets or restaurants, grab what's on sale without asking, knowing, or worst of all, wanting to know where our meat came from, how it was treated or what it was fed. As long as that continues, feedlots, broiler houses, pigs in confinement and battery cages will continue." (p.15) less

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