Really, I’d give this book 3 1/2 stars. Grace Olmstead has so much that’s important and fascinating to say about family farms, using her own great-grandfather’s farm in Emmett, ID as an example. Olmstead explores how her great-grandfather, “Grandpa Dad,” started his farm, his stewardship of the land, and the trials he faced; not incidentally, his role in the community served as a model of the “stickers,” people who put down roots and stay in a community. She contrasts these rooted people with the “boomers,” people admittedly like herself who move on once they come of age, in search of a different kind of life. Olmstead examines the many forces making it increasingly difficult for farming families to remain on the land: falling commodity prices and land development pressures, the lure of easier 9-5 lives, the trend toward global food markets. But she also finds numerous Emmett and Treasure Valley farmers who are bucking the trends by growing trendier crops or involving the community through CSA’s or u-pick farms. She describes seed crops, which I’d never read about before, but gives short shrift to problems of irrigation. The chapters on local farming and her family’s history were insightful and moving, but then in the last three chapters, she incorporates a politics of virtue that lost me, especially since her depiction of progressives was just wrongheaded: capitalists need to acknowledge the damage they’ve done to community institutions, but progressives need to reject individualism and come back to the community?! Odd.

Note to publisher: this book desperately needed at least one map—and I bet the author told you that—even if it’s just on the flyleaf. Don’t be cheap—add it to the paperback edition.