• This Blessed Earth

  • A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm
  • By: Ted Genoways
  • Narrated by: Christopher Solimene
  • Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
  • 3.8 out of 5 stars (49 ratings)

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This Blessed Earth

By: Ted Genoways
Narrated by: Christopher Solimene
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Publisher's summary

The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, and yet its future is in peril. Rick Hammond grew up on a farm, and for 40 years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife's fifth-generation homestead in Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their small family farm - and their entire way of life - are under siege.

Beyond the threat posed by rising corporate ownership of land and livestock, the Hammonds are confronted by encroaching pipelines, groundwater depletion, climate change, the fickle demands of the marketplace, and shifting trade policies.

Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores the rapidly changing world of small, traditional farming operations. He creates a vivid and nuanced portrait of a radically new landscape and one family's fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.

©2017 Ted Genoways (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Narrator might as well be a computer

I am about 20% through and not sure I can finish. this Narrator is miserable. If interested, I would recommend the Kindle version.

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8 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Ugh

I have to get through this for my book group, and as the leader I can't cheat. I also don't have time to pick the book up, I need to listen to it. I hope I am able to get something I can discuss about the book, because the reader is so dreadful I can't concentrate on the content.

I have listened to over 300 books, so this isn't my first bad reader, but he is by far the worst. He reads like a fourth grader, pausing after each word, injecting absolutely no conversationality or rhythm to the work. Furthermore, he mispronounces words. If you are getting paid to read a book you might take a little time to look up the words you don't know. Why the producers and sound mixers didn't tell him he was doing it wrong amazes me.

For the record, he mispronounced "Morrill" and somehow managed to correctly pronounce, "Zoucha."

I did some research about the reader, after thinking about his performance. This is what others have to say about Christopher Solimene: "Monotone, horrendous, dreadful, computer voice, robotic, woeful, synthesized, terrible, AI, Siri, ruined, robot, kindergarten, unlistenable, horrible, sucks, ruined it, sickly, droning, and my all time favorite 'a bit of a goober.'"

With reviews like this, I can't believe they are still hiring him to record audiobooks.

So I gave up and sped read the book to the point where I gave up on the reader. Here is the review of the book.

The 2019 One Book One Nebraska selection is “This Blessed Earth: a year in the life of an American Family Farm” by Ted Genoways. Genoways followed the Hammonds from eastern Nebraska through a year of farming. Rick Hammond is ready to start the process of passing the family farm to his daughter and her soon-to-be husband.

Rather than a day by day accounting of what goes on, Genoways shows up for harvest, then planting and so on, describing the farming process through the year then taking a detour through how farming got to where it is now from the turn of the century at each point. Told in the vein of Michael Pollen, the author explores tangents on the Homestead Act, development of pivot irrigation, and how Henry Ford promoted the growth of soybeans for use in biofuels as well as plastics. All of these side tracks help provide context to the current story.

Honestly? I have some mixed feelings about this book. The author is clearly from Nebraska, as he thinks Valentine is in the northwest corner of the state (p.122) [getcha a map out, turn to Nebraska and find the northwest corner of the state, ya see Valentine? no? That's cuz it's smack in the middle of the state, on the north border.], and Hamilton County (Aurora) is in the center part of the state [on yer map, it will be shortly west of Lincoln on the interstate]. I recognize that is a pet peeve of mine, but the research he did in Scottsbluff was slipshod at best. He indicated that the Wildcat Hills are irrigated, he confuses acres with acre-feet and also gives some inaccurate information about the Tri-State and Gering Ft Laramie Canals (p.180-182). In the final chapter he claims the Bayard sugar factory closed due to a monoculture of corn in our area (p. 217).

In this quote, Genoways is talking about how by 1912, the sugarbeet had transformed our area, “The beets themselves were reliable and profitable... The byproducts of sugar refining...could be processed into feed for cattle, stabilizing the beef industry and creating jobs on ranches and bringing packing-houses into towns along the railroad. And the manure from the ranches could be used to enrich irrigated soil to grow a greater diversity of crops-most notably soybeans, alfalfa, and eventually corn.” I am reluctant to trust farming information from someone who can’t tell soybeans from dry edible beans, and who thinks beets were here before corn.

Genoways has written a cultural biography with science and history thrown in. I suspect the eastern Nebraska portion (99% of the book) is better researched, so if you want to learn more about where your food comes from and aren’t too worried about details, this book gives a good overview of farming in eastern Nebraska.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

An eye-opening look into the realities of farming today

I appreciated the historical narrative woven into this experience of life for a modern multi-generational farm family. Important information for anyone who eats, drinks, or breathes. The narration was challenging (odd pauses, emphases, and pronunciations) and I wondered multiple times if it was done using reading software instead of recorded by a person. I read the paper copy when I could and filled in with the audiobook.

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

hate speach

has antisemitism in the first 10 minutes when money counting Jews are referenced. I would avoid it.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Informative insight into agricultural policies

Overall a good narrative on Family Farming. Narrator sounded like a robot. learned a lot.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Not what I expected

I was expecting a book about life on farms and how it changed, While the book was some of this it was more about history, technology and policy, topics that weren't very interesting. I would not recommend this book.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

A real lesson in modern farming

Learned more than I expected about the work of farming. Daunting. The reader did not impress me much—mispronounced names.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars
  • K.
  • 08-12-19

love the book, narrator might not be the best fit

great book, I just wish it would have been narrated by someone with a different cadence to their voice. some of this material can be very new to city readers and the narration interfered with me fully absorbing it a bit I think. I imagine the narrator does great with other subjects/writing styles, this just didn't seem like a 100% good fit for them.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Good Read, Bad Audio

As a fourth generation Nebraska farmer, I appreciated the information presented and the story of a family with whom I can identify. Many July evenings while my husband was still in the field, I sat on the porch of our 1920s farm house looking up at the southwest sky, praying the hail didn't come or worse, a tornado. One storm, one worm, one tariff can wipe out months of hard work and the investment of life savings. The story the author conveys could in many ways be my own family; the history of corporate and government involvement in agriculture concurs with my own research and understanding.

Unfortunately, the narrator is dreadful. I finally tried turning up the play speed to help, but it still resembled a first grader reading Dick and Jane--no expression, long "A"s, mispronunciations (Kearney, Beatrice, hay mow to cite a few). I highly recommend the book, but not the Audible edition.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

The book is good if you can get past the narration

I am typically very tolerant of narration, but in this case Alexa could put more heart into the narration. I saw the other reviews, and figured it couldn't be that bad, because I've seen those comments many times before. The narrator reads like he is reading a long series of statements rather than a flowing book with sentences and paragraphs.

I learned a lot about farming and ranching in Nebraska, and the struggles a farmer in the Midwest goes through on a daily and annual basis.

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