Rick Prelinger sez, "Our friends at The Greenhorns, a national organization of young farmers, just published the first (and hopefully not the last) edition of their New Farmer's Almanac, which they call "an entertaining collection of practical advice for farmers and other patriots." Its 300 pages are full of surprises — field notes from new farmers in city and country, archival tidbits from 200 years of agricultural bulletins and magazines, deep thoughts on land use in America, puzzles, meat-cutting charts and reproducible labels for your own homemade cheese. It's much more than a patchwork, though — this book is at once radical and traditionalist, a generous handful of dispatches from the DIY movement that aims to fix our broken food system and relocate the center of innovation and idea-making from city to country. Ben Franklin would love this book. Purchase it, if you like, and increase the chances that it will become an annual publication as regular as the seasons.
"Quote from page 30: 'An almanac is a little book hiding an encyclopedia within its covers. Its job is to offer proverbs that turn into projects, household hints that help harvests flourish, facts that keep animals healthy and plants straight on their stems.'"
(Thanks, Rick!)
