PerpetualPlanet

If your business is growing food or garden stock or you farm for a hobby, you should read Living at Nature’s Pace, by Gene Logsdon. Those folks interested in Permaculture will love it too. Logsdon takes us inside the operations of successful small-scale farms and convincingly challenges the inevitability of their demise. The best passage in the book describes a barn raising in an Amish community that begins with bare ground in the morning and concludes with animals eating hay in their new home that evening — all without power tools. In his P&L for the typical Amish farm, it turns out buying a tractor is a poor alternative to a horse-drawn plow and using pesticides would beg financial doom. Someone selling produce to McDonald’s might not get it, but if you define your success to include your family’s development and sustainability as well as profitability, then some of the techniques described are optimizations rather than compromises.