Eliot
Coleman and Joel Salatin and Jerome Lange are engaging and down-to-earth and chock full of specifics on how to go about raising your own food. But Gene Logsdon is a treasure, because without neglecting the specifics he provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of the life of a small-scale farmer—the requirements, the challenges, the joys, the tangible benefits, and the connectedness to creation and to community.
(To order all three of Logsdon's books, choose the Gene Logsdon Collection.)
I especially like Logsdon because he came to his current thinking in a roundabout way. Raised in a farming family, he put in his time as a conventional farmer and writer for industrial farming magazines. In time he began to understand that modern agricultural practices were deeply flawed, and propped up by an intricate web of lies propagated by corporations, government agencies, and universities who were benefiting hugely from those practices, at the expense of small farmers. His articles on farming, well represented in Living at Nature's Pace, became increasingly indignant, and increasingly brave, as the years went by.
Meanwhile, Logsdon continued to work his thirty-acre Ohio farm, growing most of his own food, with an emphasis on developing sensible approaches to raising animals on pasture and managing woodlots to provide benefits for himself and his descendents. Logsdon knows small-scale farming, and The Contrary Farmer is as good an owner's guide to a small-scale farm as you'll ever find. For the details on how to raise chickens or sheep or cows or corn or squash you'll have to turn to other sources, but Logsdon supplies what you'll find nowhere else—an understanding of how all these things fit together to create the living, breathing, productive entity known as a farm. He takes the time to give a month-by-month overview of what a typical year is for him, to recount the pleasures found in tending sheep or walking a woodlot or sitting by a pond, to describe a life in which farming provides for many of one's physical and spiritual needs.
Although Gene Logsdon knows when to scant the details in favor of the big picture, he is also a master of detail, and has probably written the best introductory book to grass farming, All Flesh is Grass. Just about everything you need to about how to raise animals on pasture can be found in this book: details on caring for pastures, grazing animals in rotating paddocks, fencing, providing water, cutting and storing hay, and much more. Best of all, though, is that anyone—anyone—can do at least a little grass farming, and once you get a start it is a relaxed and rewarding affair to begin to scale up and diversify. All Flesh is Grass is the ideal book for the person who thinks they might like to raise a few meat and dairy animals for their family's needs, plus maybe have a little extra to sell.