Book Review: The Dirty Life - on farming, food and love

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Dirty Life does not try to glamorize the farming lifestyle. When Kristin Kimball, a freelance writer living in Manhattan, meets a dynamic farmer with an outrageous hat, she finds herself chucking her city lifestyle and moving with him to a decrepit house on some muddy land in upstate New York. The next year is an outrageous experience in learning to farm (for Kristin) and putting to practical use previous skills (her farmer) while constantly learning new ones. The couple not only wants to create a farm out of the boggy land they are loaning, they want to only use draft horses (no tractors) which requires finding horses, learning how to drive them, and learning how to fix the antique equipment needed to farm this way.

There are blizzards,  run-away pig disasters, experiments in organ meat eating and cheese making, and a whole lot of dirt. Somehow, by the end of the book, Kristin and her farmer end up not only married, but running a “whole diet” CSA for 100 people - enough dairy, vegetable, grains, meat and fat to supply the entire diets of these families. A good read, if a bit perplexing at times (how do they NEVER sleep and not kill each other), The Dirty Life is a glimpse into a very ambitious, and now successful, farming experiment.