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From the Farm to the Table: What All Americans Need to Know about Agriculture
Gary Holthaus
A ground-level portrait of American farming built from the voices of the people who do it. Gary Holthaus interviewed more than forty farm families and lets them explain, in their own words, how their lives and communities have changed under globalization, federal policy, and the economics of scale. The result is neither a polemic nor a nostalgia trip but a working reckoning with soil, animals, debt, and the myths Americans tell themselves about where food comes from. Published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2006 as part of its Culture of the Land series, it argues that agriculture is too important to leave to abstractions. It speaks to readers curious about the new agrarianism and the real texture of rural life.
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The author
Gary Holthaus is a poet and essayist of the American West whose books include Wide Skies: Finding a Home in the West, Circling Back, and Unexpected Manna. He has spent decades in humanities and cultural work across the West and Alaska, and he brings a listener's ear rather than an agronomist's clipboard to this subject.
The book
Published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2006 in its Culture of the Land series, the book is built on interviews with more than forty farm families. They describe the push and pull between traditional practice and market pressure: healthy soil and animals versus federal policy, foreign competition, misconceptions about subsidies, GMO crops, and the economics that squeeze small operations.
How it has aged
Well. The tensions Holthaus documented have only sharpened, and the questions he raises about consolidation, food security, and who gets to farm remain live. Because it foregrounds people over statistics, it reads less like a dated policy brief and more like durable oral history.
For more context
It sits alongside Wendell Berry's agrarian essays and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma as part of the early-2000s conversation about food and land.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Gary Holthaus
- Publisher
- University Press of Kentucky
- Place of publication
- Lexington
- Year
- 2006
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Nature
- Location
- Colorado