Start Your Farm ― The Authoritative Guide to Becoming a Sustainable 21st Century Farmer

A totally modern, all–purpose handbook for today’s agricultural dreamers—covering the challenges and triumphs of launching any successful farm—from two leading lights in sustainable farming

Combining nearly five decades of experience from two of America’s pioneering sustainable farmers, Start Your Farm is the perfect introduction to the ever-growing ranks of people who dream of starting their own successful operation. Written in straightforward yet engaging language, rich with anecdotes, practical examples, and sprinkled throughout with rural humor, Start Your Farm is a must-read primer and practical business guide for any aspiring farmer, regardless of enterprise. The book offers essential step-by-step advice, as well as useful charts and diagrams.

From vegetables to livestock, from small-scale plots to large acreages, from West Coast to East, authors Polishuk and Pritchard have not only lived the farming dream, they have succeeded at it. Now, new farmers can benefit from their wealth of experience, finding valuable information specifically organized and tailored for them. Broad in scope but thorough in detail, Start Your Farm is a book that can be read straight through, cherry-picked for individual chapters, and kept as a handy ongoing reference.

Forrest Pritchard is the New York Times–bestselling author of Gaining Ground, A Story of Farmers’ Markets, Local Food, and Saving the Family Farm, as well as Growing Tomorrow, Behind the Scenes with 18 Extraordinary Sustainable Farmers Who Are Changing the Way We Eat, a 2015 finalist for independent-press cookbook of the year. A graduate of the College of William & Mary with degrees in English and Geology, Pritchard is also a full-time organic livestock farmer and seventh-generation producer, serving weekly markets in the Washington DC metro area. He is a popular public speaker, regularly delivering keynotes for colleges and universities, policy groups and consumer audiences, and maintains an active national lecture schedule. His books have been named top reads by NPR, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and many more.

Ellen Polishuk is a first-generation sustainable vegetable farmer, holding a degree in Horticulture from Virginia Tech. A self-described “compost queen,” Ellen grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC in the 60s and 70s. She was born loving plants, collecting houseplant “pets” by age seven, and renting a garden plot at age ten. By age sixteen, a summer farming job marked the beginning of her agricultural career. Ellen worked for several years in the vegetable seed business in California. In 1992, with five farm seasons?under her belt, she was hired by Potomac Vegetable Farms to manage their satellite farm in Virginia, fifty miles west of DC.?After twenty-five years at Potomac Vegetable Farms, where she was a co-owner, she now consults and teaches full-time, specializing in sustainable agriculture, vegetable growing practices, and increasing farm profitability.?Ellen and Forrest are longtime colleagues at Arlington Farmers Market.
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