American Farming

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased 40 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans - an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the Black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of Southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed.

For over 100 years, the Mockett family has owned a 7,000 acre wheat farm in Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but foresworn it. At the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical wheat harvesters through the heartland as they follow the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho.

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.

More than a decade after Michael Pollan's game-changing The Omnivore's Dilemma transformed the conversation about what we eat, a combination of global diet trends and corporate interests have put American agriculture into a state of 'quiet emergency', from dangerous drought in California - which grows more than 50 percent of the fruits and vegetables we eat - to catastrophic topsoil loss in the 'breadbasket' heartland of the United States.

Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.

After a Sioux attack on her wagon train, and being the only survivor, Dori is faced with having to deal with Wild Wind, a Sioux Warrior she had wounded, but refused to kill. He, in turn, insists he owes her because she did not kill him. Having once been an Army scout, he speaks English and he offers to escort her to Oregon, and make sure she gets there safely, even though she refuses his help. Now, she can’t get the warrior out of her life or out of her mind.

"Western Whispers" takes place in a time when the West was still wild and untamed, and the clash between progress and tradition was at its peak. In a small, isolated town nestled amidst the golden waves of wheat, a battle ensues between the hardworking farmers and the relentless forces that threaten to destroy their way of life. As tension rises and loyalties are tested, our protagonist finds himself torn between his commitment to his community and his yearning for adventure and freedom. With each page, Ken Cannon masterfully weaves a tale of suspense, passion, and the resilience of the ...

Germans, either by nationality or ethnicity, made their mark on the United States in the late Ninteenth and early Twentieth Centuries in the two decades leading up to World War I. Taking up mostly agricultural pursuits, some settled in Southwestern Michigan, and Berrien County in particular. Where did they come from? How did they get to Michigan? What difficulties did they face? Emma Waldheimer and Freddie Fenstermacher were of the first generation born in the United States. They grew up in German farming families. A chance meeting at a fruit market near the beginning of the Great ...