Farm Memoir

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers is the son of White farmers living through that country's long and tense transition from postcolonial rule. He escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure and excitement in Europe and the United States. But when Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe launched his violent program to reclaim White-owned land and Rogers' parents were caught in the cross fire, everything changed.

Farming has been in John Connell's family for generations, but he never intended to follow in his father's footsteps. Until, one winter, after more than a decade away, he finds himself back on the farm. Connell records the hypnotic rhythm of the farming day - cleaning the barns, caring for the herd, tending to sickly lambs, helping the cows give birth. Alongside the routine events, there are the unforeseen moments when things go wrong: when a calf fails to thrive, when a sheep goes missing, when an argument between father and son erupts and things are said that cannot be unsaid.

Amanda Owen loves her traditional life on her hill farm alongside her nine children and husband Clive. And, as listeners of her previous best sellers will know, every day at Ravenseat brings surprises. In Adventures of the Yorkshire Shepherdess Amanda takes us from her family’s desperate race to save a missing calf to finding her bra has been repurposed as a house martin’s nest and from wild swimming to the brutal winter of 2018 that almost brought her to her knees. As busy as she is with her family and flock though, an exciting new project soon catches her eye....

Peter Brandt, a litigator at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), has been at the forefront of some of the toughest cases of animal abuse in the last 10 years - including supervising a team of lawyers working to protect the interests of farm animals. In this revelatory and often surprisingly funny memoir-cum-manifesto, Brandt describes his growing awareness of the extent of the cruelty of animals in concentrated animal feeding operations (a.k.a. factory farms) and the manifold harms to human health, local communities, and the environment for those who live near them. 

Farms have fences. People have boundaries. Mine began crumbling the day I knelt behind a male sheep, reached between his legs, and squeezed his testicles. This took place one blustery November day when I joined other shepherd-wannabes for a class on the basics of raising sheep. I was there with my partner Melissa, the woman I'd lived with for 12 years, because we were going to start a farm.

Deep River uncovers layers of history - both personal and regional - that have accumulated on a river-bottom farm in west-central Missouri. It traces generations of Native Americans, frontiersmen, settlers, and farmers over the past two centuries. While the family story remains central, slavery and the Civil War in the 19th century, and Native American history in the centuries before that become major themes as well. The resulting portrait is both personal memoir and informal history, brought up from layers of time, the compound of which forms an emblematic American story.

Jo McDougall brings a poet's sensibility to memoir. Recounting five generations of Delta rice farmers, through family archives and oral histories, she traces how the clan made their way into the fabric of America, beginning with her Belgian-immigrant grandfather, a pioneer rice farmer on the Arkansas Delta at the turn of the 20th century. As John Grisham has for a 1950s Arkansas cotton farm, McDougall illuminates an Arkansas rice farm in the 1930s and 1940s.

God is good, all the time. Jim Wilson was born in 1927 and raised in a Depression-era farming family. At the age of 16, at the height of World War II, he became the primary breadwinner for his parents and four younger siblings. At age 17, eager to fight for his country, he enlisted in the Navy. Germany surrendered while he was in the recruiting office, and the war was over by the time he entered boot camp. But God had a plan for Jim Wilson in the US Navy.

Discover the riveting tale of youthful idealism, adventure, and survival with "Rosebud Farm: The Journey of Young Idealists" by Louella Bryant, skillfully narrated by Butch Bryant. This gripping audiobook takes you back to 1970, where a group of young American ex-pats from wealthy families abandons their conventional lives to establish an ideal society at Rosebud Farm in Far North Queensland. Join Charlie Dean, a headstrong resident of the farm, as he decides to leave the comforts of his new home to explore Southeast Asia.

Sally Urwin and her husband, Steve, own High House Farm in Northumberland, which they share with Mavis the sheepdog, one very fat pony and many, many sheep. Set in beautiful, wild landscape, and in use for generations, it's the perfect setting for Sally's (sometimes brutally) honest and charming account of farming life. From stock sales to lambing sheds, and out in the fields in snow and on hot summer days, A Farmer's Diary reveals the highs, lows and hard work involved in making a living from the land.

I discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them?

From poverty to lucky in love, Belle found her happy ending with a man named Mads…or so everyone thought. But when the wealthy Mads died a mysterious death, Belle collected the life insurance policy and remarried…only for her new husband to drop dead. With things going from strange to sinister, more men mysteriously die or go missing around Belle.

As a teenage Mennonite girl, Amanda lives with her close-knit family in south central Pennsylvania. Life revolves around hard work, faith, and commitment to the family. She doesn't question the daily routine; it's the only life she's known. Her father talks about buying a farm out west with a lot of land in one block. Not only will the family farm there together, but the parents hope to begin a new Mennonite community. To a 15-year-old girl, this move begins as an exciting adventure.

Set in the Dust Bowl of the American West, this true account of a child coming of age on a 1920s Nebraska farm recaptures an era. Young Lucille Marker experiences survival during the Depression, one of the worst dust storms in history, and finally the disintegration of the close-knit community in which she grows up.  

The philosophy found in this work is the product of a childhood on a tobacco and cattle farm in central Kentucky, education at various schools, and a three-decade career in the US Navy while simultaneously contributing as a husband, father, and grandfather. The remainder of this book will be separated into phases reflective of the major changes in my life: the farm, schooling, and a navy career continuum from junior officer through flag officer. The lessons learned in earlier phases were often exported and applied later.

The book begins by biographically following the couple's small town Kansas courtship. Autobiographical comments are added from Tommy Johnson, now 94, as he reflects back on his romance with Margaret, his wife of 50 years. The letters shift from college to entering the fight after Pearl Harbor, then flight school, naval training, and eventually to his dive bombing missions in the South Pacific. Until, at last, the final letter that he is gratefully coming home to drive her around town in a Buick convertible.

Meet a pygmy goat who rides on top of a pony, marvel at flying lizards delivering messages, participate in a bloody rock-fight, sleep in a nudist colony cardboard box for two, witness the resurrection of a guinea pig, experience rattlesnake jewelry made before your very eyes, behold how a dead seal can save a family from a watery death.... But wait, that's not all. Ducks, dogs, cats, tortoises, horses, chickens, two best friends, two siblings, and two parents complete the picture, and, lest you think it was all fun and games: thousands and thousands of flies.

Tom Rivers, a reporter for The Daily News in Batavia, wrote a first-person series about farm work in 2008 that won state and national awards. Now the series, with more background and other information, has been compiled in a newly released audiobook, Farm Hands: Hard Work and Hard Lessons from Western New York Fields. Rivers worked at a dozen farms in Orleans and Genesee counties, trying to find out why so few local residents are willing to work on farms. He discovered the work requires many skills, enormous willpower and physical strength.

Learn the magic that happens behind the scenes when the doors suddenly open and unforeseen opportunities arise in the big city. In a half century of innovative ventures, the brash New Yorker never let dyslexia slow his creative mind and penchant for free thinking and deal making, even though he was functionally unable to read until he was in his fifties. Discover how he created the greatest men’s fashion development of the era—the leisure suit—and how it subsequently fell off a cliff.

Suzy Lowry Geno walks the hills and creek side of Old Field Farm seeking a simpler peace-filled life like those of her grandparents and great-grandparents, who worked those acres before her. But as she finally began to rest in the true joys of faith, family, and slower living, she was forced back into the realities of the world of technology in the struggle to save her husband's life. Join her in Simple Times at Old Field Farm as she emerges triumphantly on the mountainside "keeping her hands busy and her heart open."