The Contrary Farmer

The Contrary Farmer PDF Author: Gene Logsdon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Offers the practical advice of a manual for the cottage farmer as well as meditation in praise of work and pleasure.

The Contrary Farmer

The Contrary Farmer PDF Author: Gene Logsdon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Offers the practical advice of a manual for the cottage farmer as well as meditation in praise of work and pleasure.

Letter to a Young Farmer

Letter to a Young Farmer PDF Author: Gene Logsdon
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 160358725X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
"In his final book of essays - completed just weeks before he died - self-described "contrary farmer" Gene Logsdon addresses the next generation of small-scale "garden farmers" seeking a better way of life."--

Holy Shit

Holy Shit PDF Author: Gene Logsdon
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603583106
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In his insightful new book, Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, contrary farmer Gene Logsdon provides the inside story of manure-our greatest, yet most misunderstood, natural resource. He begins by lamenting a modern society that not only throws away both animal and human manure-worth billions of dollars in fertilizer value-but that spends a staggering amount of money to do so. This wastefulness makes even less sense as the supply of mined or chemically synthesized fertilizers dwindles and their cost skyrockets. In fact, he argues, if we do not learn how to turn our manures into fertilizer to keep food production in line with increasing population, our civilization, like so many that went before it, will inevitably decline. With his trademark humor, his years of experience writing about both farming and waste management, and his uncanny eye for the small but important details, Logsdon artfully describes how to manage farm manure, pet manure and human manure to make fertilizer and humus. He covers the field, so to speak, discussing topics like: How to select the right pitchfork for the job and use it correctly How to operate a small manure spreader How to build a barn manure pack with farm animal manure How to compost cat and dog waste How to recycle toilet water for irrigation purposes, and How to get rid ourselves of our irrational paranoia about feces and urine. Gene Logsdon does not mince words. This fresh, fascinating and entertaining look at an earthy, but absolutely crucial subject, is a small gem and is destined to become a classic of our agricultural literature.

Living at Nature's Pace

Living at Nature's Pace PDF Author: Gene Logsdon
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603580492
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
For decades, Logsdon and his family have run a viable family farm. Along the way, he has become a widely influential journalist and social critic, documenting in hundreds of essays for national and regional magazines the crisis in conventional agri-business and the boundless potential for new forms of farming that reconcile tradition with ecology. Logsdon reminds us that healthy and economical agriculture must work "at nature's pace," instead of trying to impose an industrial order on the natural world. Foreseeing a future with "more farmers, not fewer," he looks for workable models among the Amish, among his lifelong neighbors in Ohio, and among resourceful urban gardeners and a new generation of defiantly unorthodox organic growers creating an innovative farmers-market economy in every region of the country. Nature knows how to grow plants and raise animals; it is human beings who are in danger of losing this age-old expertise, substituting chemical additives and artificial technologies for the traditional virtues of fertility, artistry, and knowledge of natural processes. This new edition of Logsdon's important collection of essays and articles (first published by Pantheon in 1993) contains six new chapters taking stock of American farm life at this turn of the century.

The Contrary Farmer's Invitation to Gardening

The Contrary Farmer's Invitation to Gardening PDF Author: Gene Logsdon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Gene Logsdon breaks down the garden walls and celebrates the side of gardening that isn't a finicky, style-obsessed, and expensive hobby but rather a hilarious, sensual, and endlessly satisfying way of life. The borders of the contrary garden are limited only by the imagination. Why should "crops" be merely common vegetables? Why not wheat? Why not the pigeons on the rafters of the barn, or bluegills and edible cattails from your own homestead pond? This is Gene Logsdon at his provocative best. Frequently irreverent, but always optimistic and practical, he uses the tools of good humor and common sense to smash conventional gardening to smithereens.

Gene Everlasting

Gene Everlasting PDF Author: Gene Logsdon
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603585400
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Author Gene Logsdon—whom Wendell Berry once called “the most experienced and best observer of agriculture we have”—has a notion: That it is a little easier for gardeners and farmers to accept death than the rest of the populace. Why? Because every day, farmers and gardeners help plants and animals begin life and help plants and animals end life. They are intimately attuned to the food chain. They understand how all living things are seated around a dining table, eating while being eaten. They realize that all of nature is in flux. Gene Everlasting contains Logsdon’s reflections, by turns both humorous and heart-wrenching, on nature, death, and eternity, all from a contrary farmer’s perspective. He recounts joys and tragedies from his childhood in the 1930s and ‘40s spent on an Ohio farm, through adulthood and child-raising, all the way up to his recent bout with cancer, always with an eye toward the lessons that farming has taught him about life and its mysteries. Whether his subject is parsnips, pigweed, immortality, irises, green burial, buzzards, or compound interest, Logsdon generously applies as much heart and wit to his words as he does care and expertise to his fields.

The Man who Created Paradise

The Man who Created Paradise PDF Author: Gene Logsdon
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 9780821414071
Category : Farm life
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
Gene Logsdon’s The Man Who Created Paradise is a message of hope at a time when the sustainability of the earth appears to many to be hopeless. The fable, inspired by a true story, tells how young Wally Spero looked at one of the bleakest places in America—the strip-mined spoil banks of southeastern Ohio—and saw in it his escape from the drudgery of his factory job. He bought an old bulldozer and used the machine to carve patiently, acre by acre, a beautiful little farm out of a seemingly worthless wasteland. This charming story is the purest distillation yet of what Gene Logsdon has been writing as a journalist and author through the course of some twenty books of nonfiction and hundreds of magazine articles. Environmental restoration is the task of our time. The work of healing our land begins in our own backyards and farms, in our neighborhoods and our regions. Humans can turn the earth into a veritable paradise—if they really want to.Noted photographer Gregory Spaid retraced the trail that Logsdon traveled when he was inspired to write The Man Who Created Paradise. His photographs evoke the same soulful yearning for wholeness, for ties to land and community, that infuses the fable’s hopeful, poetic prose. Seldom have words and images complemented each other so well.

The Pond Lovers

The Pond Lovers PDF Author: Gene Logsdon
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820329543
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
To his legions of readers, Gene Logsdon is best known as the Contrary Farmer. This is Logsdon's ode to the watery microcosms all around, from the half-acre farm pond to the suburban garden pool. Readers looking for hands-on experience will find plenty of pond-keeping do's and don'ts.

The Last of the Husbandmen

The Last of the Husbandmen PDF Author: Gene Logsdon
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821444271
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
“Nan turned to see Ben’s faceturn as hard and white as asauerkraut crock. When he didnot respond, Nan figured thathe was just going to back offas he usually did, the shy andretiring husbandman. She didnot know her history. She didnot know that shy and retiringhusbandmen have been knownto revolt against oppressionwith pitchforks drawn.” — The Last of the Husbandmen In The Last of the Husbandmen, Gene Logsdon looks to his own roots in Ohio farming life to depict the personal triumphs and tragedies,clashes and compromises, and abiding human character of American farmingfamilies and communities. From the Great Depression, when farmers tilledthe fields with plow horses, to the corporate farms and government subsidyprograms of the present, this novel presents the complex transformation of alivelihood and of a way of life. Two friends, one rich by local standards, and the other of more modest means,grow to manhood in a lifelong contest of will and character. In response tomany of the same circumstances—war, love, moonshining, the Klan, weather,the economy—their different approaches and solutions to dealing with theirsituations put them at odds with each other, but we are left with a deeper understanding of the world that they have inherited and have chosen. Part morality play and part personal recollection, The Last of the Husbandmen is both a lighthearted look at the past and a profound statement about the present state of farming life. It is also a novel that captures the spirit of those who have chosen to work the land they love.

The Farmer's Magazine

The Farmer's Magazine PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description