The New Farm: Our Ten Years on the Front Lines of the Good Food Revolution by Brent Preston.

4/5 rating. 280 pages.

Book #34 of 2022. Read August 11, 2022.

This is Brent’s story of how his wife and him moved from Toronto to start an organic farm.

I enjoyed Brent’s statement early in the book about him not being someone who moved onto a farm for a short time in order to write about it and move back to the city. Instead, he and his wife, Gillian, were looking to have an impact on the world. With the sad state of the industrial food system, they were looking to escape the rat race and help the world become more anti-fragile, less chemical-laced, and to bring healthy food to everyone.

Brent basically goes chronologically by season for most of the book. This especially highlights the idea that FARMERS DON’T MAKE MONEY! The farm was hemorrhaging money for the first three years or so. Because of their later success, it’s possible for Brent to look back at this time with a little humor about their naivety and how little they knew.

This was a great book showing that small organic farms are a viable option financially and as a path – obviously only if you’re willing to pour your heart into it and go all in. Being interested at least in a small garden/farm at some point in the future, I enjoyed Brent’s candid path through the difficulties and ups and downs of the small-farm life.

Quotes:

“We had been taken by the aspirational dreams of living in the country, but like many actual dreams, this dream was fuzzy and vague and didn’t make a whole lot of sense if you thought about it too much.”

“Here was an opportunity to create a business that expressed our values and ideals, that allowed us to stay on the farm and still make money.”

[W]hen in doubt, plant more. You can’t sell it if you haven’t planted it. If you plant it, they will come.”

“Tony and Fran had built everything with their own hands – their house, their barn, their farm, their business – but more importantly, they had built a satisfying, meaningful life for themselves and their family.”

“And we decided to enjoy what we had already achieved, rather than always looking to the future and worrying about what’s next. It was a beautiful, life-changing day. A world of possibilities opened up to us. I couldn’t stop smiling.”

“When you remove the profit motive and do something because it’s fun and cool and important, everyone wants to help.”

“The more we paid our employees, the more money we raised for other organizations, the more we built places for hanging out and entertaining our friends and community members – in short, the more we focused on things other than making money – the more financially stable and profitable our business became.”

“Our farm, and many others like it, prove that an alternative model is viable, that you can farm in a way that enriches the soil, cleans the atmosphere and strengthens community, and not just get by but make a good living.” 

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