A Farm Dies Once a Year

November 25, 2013
Stuck, restless, and desperate for change, 31-year-old Crawford leaves his aimless lifestyle in Cambridge, Mass., for a season at New Morning, his family’s 75-acre vegetable farm in rural Pennsylvania, where he grew up. Set against a backdrop of pastoral landscapes and backbreaking work, Crawford returns home to chronicle his father’s risky “back-to-the-land” decision 40 years earlier, while searching for his own sense of purpose through life on the farm. As Crawford reckons with his ambivalent relationship to his family’s legacy, he weaves through past and present with memories of rough neighbors, accounts of seasonal weather difficulties, and an investigation of a friend’s murder. Still, the many responsibilities of running a farm are never far away—they serve as a constant reminder that farm work isn’t simply a job, it’s a lifestyle. While portraits of the land and its inhabitants are painted with care, Crawford’s revelations feel trite: “The farm was his livelihood, but his love for me always felt steady and clear.”

February 15, 2014
A down-to-earth account of life on New Morning Farm, to which Crawford, the rather aimless son of the owners, returned for one season, searching for some direction in his own unsatisfactory life. When he was 31, Crawford, who grew up on the family's 75-acre organic vegetable farm in Pennsylvania, gave up his administrative job at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, arriving at New Morning in late May. After a shaky beginning, the author joined the other farm workers in their physically demanding daily chores. "The place had always made me a little anxious," he writes. "It was so isolated and lonely, and the work there was so intense." Woven into this almost-coming-of-age narrative are Crawford's memories of growing up on the farm and what he has learned about his parents' early days there. For part of the season, his amiable girlfriend, who seemed somewhat more challenged by farm life than he, joined him, sharing a rude shelter he single-handedly built for them some distance from the main farmhouse. In his spare time, Crawford looked into the murder of a neighboring farmer that occurred nearly 20 years before. Crawford's account of the work on the farm is matter-of-fact and clear, and his portraits of his hardworking, middle-aged parents are sharp. When he looks inward, however, the picture is more opaque. In the fall, his girlfriend left the farm for San Francisco, and shortly after Christmas, he joined her there, working in a natural foods store, still not sure where his life was going or even where he wanted it to go. "I still hadn't solved the problem of what I wanted to do with my life," writes the author. "I was coming to the realization that it would probably be with me forever, and that it was a problem that I likely shared with every other person on earth." Most interesting to aspiring organic farmers.

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February 15, 2014
Back in the mid-1970s, when the notion of eschewing mainstream society and living off the land was still very much in vogue, Arlo Crawford's parentshis father a long-haired Vietnam vet and his mother a self-described hippiepurchased 75 acres in southern Pennsylvania they quickly dubbed New Morning Farm after a Dylan song and devoted themselves to growing and selling organic vegetables. Four decades later, Crawford, now in his thirties, became disenchanted with his city lifestyle and decided to revisit the still thriving farm where he grew up, committing himself to working there through at least one growing season. This alternately charming and sobering memoir of his year toiling alongside his parents, apprentices, and the girlfriend who reluctantly joined him describes the challenges his parents faced in the early years as well as his own in getting reacquainted with the rural, crop-centered routine. Anyone who has ever wondered about the origin of organic produce will get the inside story in this beautifully written and intimate portrait of life on a modern family farm.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)