Good Husbandry by Kristin Kimball review – a new life on a community farm
Written by PD Smith
Sustainability and a love of the land are at the heart of a couple’s approach to farming. But grit and perseverance are essential
Kristin Kimball was a freelance writer living in New York when, at the age of 31, she went to interview an idealistic young organic farmer in Pennsylvania, “a lanky, loquacious, sharply intelligent and ridiculously energetic man”. They “clicked together like a pair of magnets” and took on a run-down farm nestling between mountains and a lake in the majestic landscape of Adirondack Park, on the rural north-eastern edge of New York State.
United by an “atavistic love for working the land”, their business model at Essex Farm is radical in every sense. Rather than growing one or two crops, they sell “memberships” so that local people can eat the way farmers used to two generations ago: “a whole diet, year-round, unprocessed, in rhythm with the seasons, from a specific piece of land, with a sense of both reverence and abundance”. For an annual fee, they supply their 200 or so members with beef, pork, chicken, eggs, vegetables, fruits, dairy, grains and flours, as well as extras such as sauerkraut, jam, maple syrup and soap. Sustainability is at the core of their approach: “feed people, be nice, don’t wreck the land”. They even use horses for farm work. As an arts graduate who had never grown a thing in her life, Kimball admits that she didn’t “know enough about farming to be afraid of it”. But as her beautifully written book shows, farming is not for the faint hearted.
She began to question whether she wanted her children to grow up sharing 'this crazy, dirty, brutal life'
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