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The New Farm: Our Ten Years on the Front Lines of the Good Food Revolution by [Brent Preston]

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Brent Preston

The New Farm: Our Ten Years on the Front Lines of the Good Food Revolution Kindle Edition

by Brent Preston (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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This “must-read” memoir of human-scale agriculture offers an insider’s view of today’s food system by a leading voice in sustainable farming (Daniel Boulud).

After years of working at the ends of the earth in human rights and development, Brent Preston and his wife were die-hard city dwellers. But when their second child arrived, the shine came off urban living. In 2003 they bought a hundred acres and a rundown farmhouse, determined to build a farm that would sustain their family, nourish their community, heal their environment—and turn a profit.

The New Farm is Preston’s memoir of a decade of toil and perseverance. Farming is a complex and precarious business, and they made plenty of mistakes along the way. But as they learned how to grow food, and to succeed at the business of farming, they also found that a small, sustainable, organic farm could be an engine for change, a path to a more just and sustainable food system.

Today, The New Farm supplies top restaurants, supports community food banks, hosts events with leading chefs, and grows extraordinary produce. Told with humor and heart, The New Farm is a joy, a passionate book by an important new voice.

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292 pages
Language

English
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ABRAMS Press
Publication date

March 27, 2018
File size

2054 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Brent Preston and his partner, Gillian Flies, are like the super supportive, always revered and forever humble god-parents of the new good food movement in Ontario. Brent’s book is as inspiring (and funny!) as he is and tells the story of his move into agriculture and what it takes to run The New Farm, one of Ontario’s favourite farms. It’s a beautiful, thoughtful book. If you love food as much as we do, you’ll love it.” —Ontario Culinary Tourism Alliance

“Preston’s book speaks to how quickly the foodscape has changed and where it may be headed. The memoir is both a book about the food system and a tell-all of his journey. . . . The ups, and mostly downs, he describes might have been a trial but they do make for a good read. Preston and Flies are strongly committed to being not just farmers, but sustainable farmers.” —The Globe and Mail

“A refreshingly honest, beautifully crafted story of family life on the front lines of the good-food economy, serving double duty as a handbook for those who dream of leaving the rat race. You will be inspired.” —Alisa Smith, co-author of The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating

“It's one thing to dream of leaving behind your career to follow a more sustainable path, but how many of us have the courage to actually make that leap? Brent Preston uses brilliant storytelling and brutal honesty to describe what it takes to create both a viable organic farm and a more meaningful life for himself and his family. The New Farm is the kind of book that will inspire people to make positive change.” —Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post and founder and CEO of Thrive Global

“This is a hilarious, deeply honest memoir, with profound insight into the ways in which small-scale agriculture can be a viable alternative to our havoc-wreaking current system. Now more than ever we need such wise and inspiring stories to guide us as we seek to build a more just and healthy world. I dare you to read this book and remain unmoved about the urgency for change.” —Nick Saul, president and CEO of Community Food Centres Canada

“This book has timely and important things to say about food and farming and building a more sustainable future, but it’s also a fantastic story about the new economy, a textbook case of doing well by doing good. The New Farm should be required reading for every Canadian entrepreneur.” —Arlene Dickinson, businesswoman, author, former co-host on Dragon’s Den

“Reading Brent’s book was as satisfying and as entertaining as learning the origin story of a favourite superhero. Delicious food starts with the best ingredients, and no one sets a higher standard for the food they grow than The New Farm. I hold Brent and Gillian in the same esteem as the best chefs I’ve worked with because they have forever changed the way I cook.” —Carl Heinrich, winner of Top Chef Canada --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

BRENT PRESTON worked as a human rights investigator, aid worker, election observer and journalist on four continents before finding his true calling as a farmer. In 2003 he and his wife, Gillian Flies, abandoned successful careers in Toronto, packed up their two young children, and moved to a run-down farm outside Creemore, Ontario. Since then, they have built The New Farm into a thriving business and a leading light in the good food movement, providing organic vegetables to some of the best restaurants in Canada. Preston speaks often on food and farming issues, and writes for the Huffington Post. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PROLOGUE

EUTHANASIA FOR DUMMIES

All happy chickens are alike; each unhappy chicken is unhappy in its own way.

It all has to do with the coop. If a chicken’s coop is too small, the chicken will be pecked and harassed by its coop-mates. If its coop is too damp, it might catch the flu and die. If its coop is too cold, it will get frostbite on its comb and the comb will start bleeding. Worst of all, if a chicken’s coop isn’t properly sealed, varmints will slip in during the night and tear it to pieces. But when I woke on that fine July morning back in 2005, I wasn’t worried about any of that. I had built a beautiful coop. I knew my chickens would be happy.

It was a Saturday, and still early. Gillian and the kids were asleep, so I got up quietly and eased myself down our squeaky stairs. Outside it was cool, calm and silent, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. In the backyard I stopped and surveyed my domain: flat, green farmland stretching off in every direction, an unbroken ring of forest on the horizon. I had that feeling I sometimes get when I’m up by myself in the early morning, that I’m lucky to be in this place, at this moment. We had been living on the farm for almost a year, and I was suddenly struck by the wondrous realization that we actually owned this place, that all this land was ours—a realization that struck me on a regular basis back then, and sometimes still does.

In a single year Gillian and I had gone from being relatively normal urban professionals living in downtown Toronto to owners of a hundred-acre farm outside the village of Creemore, about a two-hour drive northwest of the city. We had been taken by the aspirational dream of living in the country, but like many actual dreams, this dream was fuzzy and vague and didn’t make a whole lot of sense if you thought about it too much. We wanted to raise our own food, to have animals and a big garden, but we didn’t really know what we were doing. We were enthusiastic and idealistic and profoundly naive. If our current selves could meet the people we were back then, we would look on ourselves with a mixture of pity and amusement.

I had woken up early that morning in a state of excited anticipation. Our chickens had just spent their first night in their new coop, a structure that I had spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about, designing and building. I had spent so much time that the coop wasn’t finished when our chicks arrived, so they spent their first week of life in our bathtub, in the bathroom next to the kitchen.

I didn’t know anything about chickens when we first moved to the farm. But we wanted livestock, and chickens seemed like the obvious place to start. I had to learn a whole chicken nomenclature in the beginning. Chickens bred to lay eggs are “layers” or “laying hens.” Chickens bred for meat—“broilers” or simply “chickens”—are very different animals. We had been persuaded by the hatchery’s website to order Special Dual Purpose chickens that supposedly combined the best attributes of layers and broilers. The website told us that White Rock broilers, the overwhelmingly dominant meat chicken variety, had been bred into such freakishly efficient gainers of weight that they couldn’t walk properly and were susceptible to all sorts of diseases if raised without antibiotic-laden feed (a claim that we later found to be false). If we were aiming for free-range and organic, we were assured, the Special Dual Purpose was the bird for us.

Our batch of day-old chicks, fifty of them, arrived at our local feed store in a very small cardboard box. I began learning new things about chickens at a rapid rate. Day-old chicks are tiny and fluffy yellow and incredibly cute, but they are also very loud, mobile and assertive. They chirped loudly when the kids picked them up or when they were hungry (which was pretty much all the time) or seemingly just for the hell of it, all day long. We put down wood shavings in the bathtub and hung a three-hundred-watt heat lamp over them to keep them warm. It occurred to me that many chickens’ lives are bookended by heat lamps. Even Special Dual Purpose chickens have been bred to rapidly put on weight, so the chicks had an insatiable appetite. From day one they would frantically climb over each other to get at their food, and they also drank a lot of water. I would fill up their little feed trough immediately before going to bed, but they would eat it all during the night. Our bedroom was on the second floor, but their manic chirping was loud enough to wake me before dawn.

Any animal with such a rapid metabolism produces a lot of waste. Our chicks were shit-producing machines (birds don’t urinate, another thing I learned early on). The bathroom rapidly became very hot, very humid and indescribably smelly. It was like some sort of dystopian sauna in there, and the stench began to pervade the whole house. Gillian let it be known that my coop construction should be expedited. It takes about ten minutes on gravel roads to drive from our farm to Hamilton Brothers, considered by many (or at least by me) to be the greatest retail establishment on the face of the earth. Hamilton Brothers is a farm and building supply store, but it sells almost everything. I once left there with some plumbing supplies, a box of ammunition, 250 feet of bungee cord and a flat of eggs. I kept the handwritten receipt as a souvenir. It’s also the place where I bought my coop-making materials.

To say Hamilton Brothers is old school would be a serious understatement. I have never seen a computer anywhere on the premises, though I think they might have one in a back office somewhere, because the statements I receive in the mail appear to be created on a dot-matrix printer. Its many separate buildings and yards make up about half of the tiny village of Glen Huron, tucked under a dam at the head of the narrow Mad River valley. The river still powers the Hamilton Brothers feed mill, a five-storey steel-clad building filled with cobwebs, wooden chutes and giant drive belts that towers over the building supply store and the main lumberyard. Across the street is the farm supply building, and behind that is the welding shop and a big hangar where they keep the sheet metal, concrete mix and drywall. Around the corner and past a few houses is another building with tongueand-groove flooring and fence posts, and across from that is a second lumberyard, for all the pressure-treated stuff. When you call Hamilton Brothers, you have to ask for either the building side or the farm supply side, depending on what you’re looking for. The gas and diesel pumps are on the farm supply side. The staff sometimes travel from building to building by bicycle.

When I first started making trips to buy coop supplies, I was accustomed to the anonymity of big-box building supply stores, where I would pile everything I needed onto a giant cart and haul it out to my car without speaking to anyone. But at Hamilton Brothers, not much is self-serve, and I was forced to interact with the guys at the counter. These were all middle-aged men who evidently knew a lot about everything. They would ask me questions about my order that I often couldn’t answer. “What size chicken wire?” or “Ardox nails or regular?” or the one that always struck me with fear, “What you doing with all this stuff?” It seemed they were running my order through a vast mental database and determining that there was nothing known to humanity that could be built properly with the list of items I wanted. I was terrified of looking like an idiot, so I would blurt out an answer and end up back at the farm with the wrong thing, and be forced to return the next day.

After dozens of trips, one of the guys finally took pity on me and took me under his wing. Ivan is a giant of a man, probably six foot five, with massive hands and a huge head. I confessed to him that I was building a chicken coop but had no clue what I was doing. Ivan took me up into the loft above the store where the chicken wire was kept and helped me choose from the surprising range of options—rolls of different lengths and widths, with different size holes and different gauges of wire. After a while he would break into a broad grin whenever he saw me come in. “That must be some chicken coop you’re building!” he’d say. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B078W6M33R
Publisher ‏ : ‎ ABRAMS Press; Illustrated edition (March 27, 2018)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 27, 2018
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2054 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 292 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,087,146 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #173 in Agriculture Industry (Kindle Store)
- #257 in Biographies of Environmentalists & Naturalists (Kindle Store)
- #687 in Agriculture Industry (Books)

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Brent Preston

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Brent Preston worked as a human rights investigator, aid worker, election observer and journalist on four continents before finding his true calling as a farmer. In 2003 he and his wife, Gillian Flies, abandoned successful careers in Toronto, packed up their two young children, and moved to a run-down farm outside Creemore, Ontario. Since then, they have built The New Farm into a thriving business and a leading light in the good food movement, providing organic vegetables to some of the best restaurants in Canada and raising over half a million dollars to make local, organic food accessible in low income communities. Brent’s first book, The New Farm: Our Ten Years on the Front Lines of the Good Food Revolution, was published by Abrams Press in March.

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79 global ratings

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Amazon Customer

Good read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 1, 2021

Verified Purchase

I hated to put this book down. I found it very real and down to earth view about the challenges of starting a small farm. It was a very interesting read!

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TobyF

Read then bought for aspiring farmer

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 7, 2020

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Very easy entertaining read with such an honest perspective on running a small farm. Gave to my 15 yo who has wanted to be a farmer since she has been 6. She remains undeterred and is now even more inspired!

2 people found this helpful

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Dorothy

Well written small farm memoir

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

I loved this book. Very well written and easy to follow along chronologically. The only thing I questioned was how this family could continue farming when they were losing money year after year. They also always had money when they wanted to buy a big ticket item, like a house for interns to stay in. It might give people the idea that they can lose money year after year without their lights getting shut off or the bank foreclosing.

4 people found this helpful

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Larry's Dad

Inspring and fun to read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 7, 2020

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I've always dreamed of having a farm and this book was perfect for me. It didn't glamorize it but also clearly demonstrated how much beauty there is in this hard, unforgiving work. Fans of the slow food movement will also really enjoy this.

One person found this helpful

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Paul Deaton

Valuable example of a successful non-traditional farmer

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 15, 2019

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Recommend for anyone who operates a community supported agriculture project.

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Amazon Customer

Excellent and inspiring!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 14, 2018

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This story proves that bigger is not always better and that each of us can play a part (and must participate) in an effort to nourish ourselves to health, and collectively change the trajectory of our planet and future sustainability. Funny and honest..

One person found this helpful

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Nico0157

Farming ain't easy

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 26, 2018

Verified Purchase

Great read. Brent Preston did an amazing job of combining the struggles of beginning a farm, great ideas and humor that literally made me laugh out loud. I couldnt put it down.

One person found this helpful

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Fred Satoris

Highly Recommend

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 13, 2018

Verified Purchase

Well written first hand in-depth look at the Good Food Revolution from the perspective of a new organic farmer in Canada. Check it out.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

JRJ

An excellent and inspiring read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 24, 2019

Verified Purchase

Very well written and peppered with amusing anecdotes, this book caters for all audiences. For those more serious about going into farming it won't provide all the answers they are looking for but will provide am aspiring success story to build from

Margaret Adamson

True Story of Perseverance to making farming a successful business, while giving back to others

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 14, 2022

Verified Purchase

I loved this book, because it was so well written, funny and all the while I had an increasing admiration for the author and his wife. They met famous chefs, intergrated into the local farming community and formed working relationships with various other connections like CRAFT. They became an integral part of the good food movement. The chapters about pesticides in fruit and vegetable production was interesting as well. At the end I wanted to get into my car and drive Creemore to meet Brent Preston and Gillian Flies. I will continue following The New Farm.

Marilyn

Enlightening and enjoyable read

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 12, 2017

Verified Purchase

An excellent treatise on small organic farming in Ontario. If you think you would like to start a small farm this book is priceless. Leaving no stone unturned Brent Preston provides full details of every aspect of organic farming. Even if you have no interest in farming it is an amazing book, almost a page turner. I couldn't put it down and finished it in one day. I feel greatly privileged to have found this book and had the opportunity to read it. It has enriched my life! Thank you Brent and Gillian.

One person found this helpful

BookBabe65

Outstanding.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 14, 2017

Verified Purchase

Inspiring, on so many levels. I couldn't put it down. In fact, I read it twice and then went out and bought a Farm Share at our local Organic Farm. Not only will we have organic vegetables until winter but they raise free-range chickens (eggs!!!), beef and pork. Once a week we get to go out to the farm to pick up our stuff. (We'll get a list emailed to us every week of what's in season and get to choose what we want.) It's a true old-fashioned farm that doesn't depend on oceans of toxic spray, which is good for us and good for the environment.

One person found this helpful

Nana

It's a wonderful read that's sometimes really funny

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 6, 2017

Verified Purchase

This tells of the successes and failures of a couple with two children who leave very urban lives to start an organic farm. It's a wonderful read that's sometimes really funny, sometimes serious, and always worth reading. Whether you're interesting in farming or not, this is a wonderful book. Get it.

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