First Generation Farming
$34.99
A blueprint for coordinated, cooperative agribusiness that will get you on the land and keep you there for generations. This book is a culmination and synthesis of everything I've learned in my ten years as a first-generation farmer.
(E-book, 172 pages.)
This book discusses all the things I wish I knew when I got into the business as a first generation farmer:
The order in which to develop the different elements of your farm and agribusiness.
How conventional agriculture and agribusiness operate
How high a mountain we have to climb to compete with incumbent agribusiness; how to find partners to set up an agribusiness with better ethics
How agribusinesses and cooperatives leverage economies of scale
Where and how these organizations are plugged into the local vs. global economy
How career paths are frustrated in both conventional and alternative agriculture
The difficulties posed by everything from volunteer farm labor to agricultural non-profits
It also helps you unlearn some of the bad ideas that may have already found their way into your head from the farm-to-table influencer corps:
The supremacy of small-scale farming
The locavore principle
The idea that treating your farm like any other business is a bad thing
Euphoric ideas about regenerative agriculture’s potential to solve all the world’s problems
That farming is a spiritual salve for trauma and a substitute for therapy
The idealization of farming as a family inheritance
The obsession with landownership
The idea that every single thing about “big agriculture” is irredeemably corrupt and useless.
Above all, First Generation Farming aims to save you from years of mistakes, fortunes lost, relationships frayed and, in so doing, to save us all from a continued want of real, rather than imagined, progress on the food sovereignty front.