The Dirty Life chronicles the first year of this ambitious farming endeavour. I have a feeling they wouldn’t have listened to me.

If they mastered that one thing, and only then should they add another one thing. Had I met Kristin and Mark in one of my crop planning workshops, I would have given them the solid advice to simplify their operations and focus on one thing.

(I might have skipped some of their desired offerings.)Īnd they were going to do this using draft horses. Their goal was to produce all the meat, vegetables, grains, beans, and maple syrup that their clients would eat in a year. Here were Kristin and Mark Kimball, two first generation farmers who wanted to start a farm that would provide a fully local diet for their clients. When I started The Dirty Life, I assumed this was this type of book. It does not represent my reality as a farmer or the realities of so many of the farmers I know. I have read and enjoyed a number of these books but I’ve also felt such frustration with that underlying defeated perspective of agriculture. The climax of these farm stories is the the realization that the author invested all their best energy and life into a venture that left them broken and broke, but that they should have expected this because “Hey that’s farming.” There are a lot of farming memoirs out there. With, The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball

I’m going to present my Top 10 in order of publication. This is my personal Top 10 farm books of the decade.

The dirty life farm