At Nature's Pace

Gene Logsdon farms in north-central Ohio, on ground his family has worked for generations, and the essays come from there. The quarrel running through them is with the agricultural establishment — the institutions that fund, teach and report on farming — which he holds to have spent decades serving agribusiness while treating the moderate-sized family farm as something on its way out. Pantheon published the collection in 1994; it came back in 2000 as Living at Nature's Pace.

What he sets against that is not argument but example. He lays out more than one working model of a farm that pays, and reserves his highest regard for the small operations run on the Amish pattern — men making a living on acreages the establishment counts as unviable, and holding their soil while they do it. The arrangement he keeps returning to is the small diversified farm run without debt and without bought chemicals, which he treats as the durable form rather than the nostalgic one.

It reads best for someone who has ground, or wants some. The reservation is that it is a collection and behaves like one: the same points come round several times, the pieces do not build on each other, and the evidence is almost entirely anecdote, which is persuasive as description and thin as economics. It is also thirty years old, and the policy landscape it argues with has moved on, even where the argument has not.