I had a short period of wanting to be a farmer as a kid, and it was because of this book. Of course, I realised fairly quickly that it was a highly romanticised view of farm life and that I didn't really want to be up at 5am to milk cows, or to spend my days scraping chook droppings off the floor, but at the time it sounded very briefly wonderful - especially the chapter on working in the dairy. To this day I still have a yen to make my own butter.

Romanticised or not, it's still a great book. Even three decades later I still have my copy and take it off the shelves every so often for another read. It's kind of comforting in its relentless enthusiasm for manual labour...