Kristin Kimball was a freelance writer living in New York when, at the age of 31, she went to interview an idealistic young organic farmer in Pennsylvania, “a lanky, loquacious, sharply intelligent and ridiculously energetic man”. They “clicked together like a pair of magnets” and took on a run-down farm nestling between mountains and a lake in the majestic landscape of Adirondack Park, on the rural north-eastern edge of New York State.
United by an “atavistic love for working the land”, their business model at Essex Farm is radical in every sense. Rather than growing one or two crops, they sell “memberships” so that local people can eat the way farmers used to two generations ago: “a whole diet, year-round, unprocessed, in rhythm with the seasons, from a specific piece of land, with a sense of both reverence and abundance”. For an annual fee, they supply their 200 or so members with beef, pork, chicken, eggs, vegetables, fruits, dairy, grains and flours, as well as extras such as sauerkraut, jam, maple syrup and soap. Sustainability is at the core of their approach: “feed people, be nice, don’t wreck the land”. They even use horses for farm work. As an arts graduate who had never grown a thing in her life, Kimball admits that she didn’t “know enough about farming to be afraid of it”. But as her beautifully written book shows, farming is not for the faint hearted.
The basic idea of a farm is quite simple: “catch the sunlight, hold it … and use it to meet human need”. But translating sunlight into edible cabbages and corn requires immense skill and hard work at the best of times. Kimball describes what happens when everything starts to fall apart.
Some seven years into their farming life they faced both extreme weather (the wettest spring for a century) and injury: Mark, her “tall oak of a husband”, did his back in. Without warning, the responsibility for managing their 500-acre farm was hers alone. As well as looking after her husband, there was also a baby and a three-year-old daughter to care for. The arrival of an unexpected (and unpayable) tax bill suddenly revealed to Kimball the fragility of all they had worked so hard to achieve. Kimball began to question whether she wanted her children to grow up sharing “this crazy, dirty, brutal life”. And as she and Mark grow older, can they even cope with 16-hour days, rising before dawn to milk the cows and clearing snow off the greenhouse roof in the middle of winter nights?
When he recovered, her husband brusquely dismissed her anxieties: “Worry is your choice. I’m always going to be like this.” As the farm (and her children) grew, she slowly rediscovered her passion for farming, won over by Mark’s optimism, the “sheer deliciousness of our food even in the worst year we could have imagined”, and by an almost Amish sense of work as a form of worship.
With considerable understatement, Kimball reckons “a farm will give you grit and perseverance”. Their achievement at Essex Farm is heroic, and this book is a vivid and inspiring account of alternative agriculture, filled with a visceral feeling for the earth and a love of seasonal, organic food. But Kimball doesn’t gloss over the back-breaking labour and heartache that is needed to turn sunlight into delicious natural produce, without ruining the earth for future generations. This is a remarkable celebration of the “alchemical combination of sun, earth, and physical effort” that is at the heart of truly sustainable farming.
• Good Husbandry is published by Granta (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshopcom. Free UK p&p over £15.
