Home food production & self-sufficiency was Joann Grohman’s lifelong enthusiasm. With a young, hungry family of eight children, she started milking cows by hand and did so until she was almost 90 years old. She simply could not imagine life without a family cow, a remarkable animal that makes grass into nutritious milk and cream that can feed people, pigs, and chickens, as well as provide manure to grow vegetables. When asked if having a cow means feeling stuck on the farm, she countered that a cow supports a beautiful life that can be found in no other way.
I wrote
Keeping a Family Cow: The Complete Guide for Home-Scale, Holistic Dairy Producers
This book sounds the alarm on an often overlooked and misunderstood aspect of modern agriculture: the cost and availability of fertilizer. Our soils have become severely depleted by overuse, but the artificial fertilizers that have kept them going for the last 70 years are running out.
This leaves animal "waste" as an option, but serious problems exist due to the modern system of confining and feeding animals in remote feeding pens. Mr. Logsdon's back-to-the-future solution seems like the only one available, but one wonders if it can be implemented quickly enough.
In his insightful 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…
A highly innovative book on the why and how of keeping chickens and other poultry without dependence on buying chicken feed from the feed store.
There is nothing new about keeping chickens to process your weeds and leftovers into human food—people have relied on them for thousands of years—but purchasing large volumes of expensive feed to produce eggs is not sustainable or practical. This book will solve that problem for you.
The first edition of The Small-Scale Poultry Flock helped thousands of small-scale farmers and smallholders adopt a practical model for working with chickens and other domestic fowl based on natural systems.
In this expanded and thoroughly revised edition, readers will find plenty of all-new material. Author Harvey Ussery introduces readers to his new favorite breed of chicken, Icelandics; describes how he manages his breeding flock using a clan mating system; presents detailed information on the use of trapnests and record-keeping spreadsheets for evaluating breeding hen performance; and provides step-by-step instructions for construction of an ingeniously designed mobile poultry shelter.
Joann considered the chapter "Your Child Has the Right to Be Beautiful" one of the most important essays ever written. It shows the relationship between diet, bone structure, and beauty. At a time when she had five children under five, this book completely changed her approach to nutrition and motherhood. It turned her into the iconoclast she very much became, known for putting all accepted wisdom through the crucible of common sense.
For instance, despite the conventional wisdom of the ’50s and ’60s, she was one of the very earliest to challenge the idea that you should eat margarine in preference to butter. She never believed that processed food was a healthier choice. Many of Joann’s strongly held and fiercely defended convictions about the positive health effects of unprocessed grains, fats, and whole milk and cream have been vindicated, and it all started with this book.
The well-known nutritionist provides dietary advice for preventing difficult pregnancies and insuring a healthy existence for children throughout their years of growth
This book was important to Mom's evolution of her thinking about cows. Originally, she emphasized the milk cow's importance as a kingpin of farm life (the original title of Keeping a Family Cow was The Cow Economy) and, of course, milk was a kingpin of family health.
After reading this book, she came to see cows as a critical center of the problem of carbon sequestration. The grass is our best way of capturing excess carbon in the atmosphere, but the sequestration process requires that the grass be grazed, fertilized with dung, and trampled. The last several years of her life were spent writing articles to alert people to the concept.
In Cows Save the Planet, journalist Judith D. Schwartz looks at soil as a crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises.
Schwartz reveals that for many of these problems-climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, droughts, floods, wildfires, rural poverty, malnutrition, and obesity-there are positive, alternative scenarios to the degradation and devastation we face. In each case, our ability to turn these crises into opportunities depends on how we treat the soil.
Drawing on the work of thinkers and doers, renegade scientists and institutional whistleblowers from around the world, Schwartz challenges much of the conventional thinking about global warming…
This book has had a huge impact in the UK, kickstarting a revolution in land management. Ms. Tree's husband inherited a very large estate in southern England, and they tried hard to continue farming in the usual way, raising grain. After a series of failures, economic and otherwise, they finally decided that something radically different would have to be tried and took on the challenge of allowing their land to revert to nature.
The book has been described as 'thrilling, inspiring, and deeply moving,' and it's all of that and a real page-turner.
'A poignant, practical and moving story of how to fix our broken land, this should be conservation's salvation; this should be its future; this is a new hope' - Chris Packham
In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the 'Knepp experiment', a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope.
Winner of the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Book Shop Literary Prize.
Nearly forty years after its first publication, this book remains the go-to inspirational manual for raising a family milk cow. Keeping your own family cow can be magical, providing food, health, and companionship, but it can also be disastrous and difficult.
Joann Grohman has compiled a lifetime of practical experience keeping cows on a small farm into one volume that is an introduction and ongoing reference for prospective cow owners.
I’ve become passionate about telling parents how to raise happy, resilient, creative, confident, entrepreneurial children who are doing something that gives them joy. So many young people are unhappy; parents don’t understand how to help. They think their children should follow their path, but that no longer works for many. For the last 10 years, I’ve been speaking to parent groups; I was an Advisor to EQ Generation, an after-school program that gives children the skills to succeed; on the Advisory Board of MUSE School, preparing young people with passion-based learning; and on the Board of Spark the Journey, mentoring low-income high school students to achieve college and career success.
This book shakes longstanding assumptions of parenting.
Through 99 stories of people who are now changing the world, it shows how to raise creative, confident, resilient children who are filled with joy and purpose. Based on interviews with top entrepreneurs and their parents, it guides you to help your children identify their passion and figure out how they can spend their professional lives doing something they love.
Parents' well-intentioned efforts often boomerang. By ignoring their children’s skills and interests, parents can inadvertently create pressure and anxiety, thwarting their children's ability to excel and find happiness. Too often, following your heart…
Raising an Entrepreneur: How to Help Your Children Achieve Their Dreams - 99 Stories from Families Who Did
Learn how successful entrepreneurs were raised! Could your children start a company that disrupts existing industries? Or a non-profit that helps people around the world? Or follow their passion as an artist or activist? And most important, lead a life of joy and purpose, to be happy and fulfilled? Margot Machol Bisnow, mother of two thriving entrepreneurs, reveals how to raise creative, confident, resilient, fearless kids who achieve their dreams, through 99 stories of families who did it.
Read stories from 70 families who raised true game changers. See family photos of these thriving entrepreneurs, both when they were young…
