The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

This book left me seriously conflicted. I learned quite a bit about the realities of farming, and about CSA models (the whole diet model is ambitious but really cool in concept), but I had difficulty believing the authenticity of the author's expressed feelings.

There is nothing finer than

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farm-fresh produce, and local dairies serve up some amazing milk, butter and cream; however, I can honestly say that that lifestyle is not for me. It is too difficult, too demanding, too full of sacrifice and a learned comfort with accident and death. Will I strongly consider (as I do every year) a small vegetable garden in the one unshaded patch of our yard? Of course! But, I do not have any illusions about it. I would not assume that because I liked it that I was cut out for farming or, if I traded in my husband for a green-thumbed nomad, that I'd upend my life to the degree Ms. Kimball did. Frankly, her snap decision to join Mark on their wild adventure smacked as a desperate maneuver to impress a good-looking guy and then finding herself dragged along.

I guess what troubles me is that I don't believe. I can't buy into Kimball's professed sincerity - the "miracle" and mystery of a "tablespoon of soil". It sounds like the flowery prose of a travel writer, which was her bread and butter before (and during) her early life as a farmer, and made me emotionally disengage.

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Kristin Kimball was living the high, city life, partying late into the night, wearing the latest fashions. A journalist in her mid thirties, she was yearning for something different, something that felt more like home. When she is sent to write an article on a young man running a local farm she

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finds what she is looking for in both the man and his dreams of a home on a farm. Soon the two of them are ensconced on a 500 acre farm trying to realize Mark's vision of a farm that would provide families with all the food they need for a year. Sound daunting? Raising chickens and cows, milking, making cheese, growing vegetables, sugaring maple trees, harvesting and marketing all that to a skeptical, small town? Now consider that the farm is run-down and long unused, they hired no help the first year, and they did almost all the heavy work with a team of draft horses! As you can imagine, many adventures, tragedies and triumphs came out of that one year.

Kristin Kimball does an admirable job recounting the year that changed her life so drastically. She has a very straightforward and honest way of expressing what it was like to fall in love with Mark and his way of life. She never glosses over the incredible amount of work and the tough emotions she went through. The book is fun too. Its a real pleasure to discover the secrets of farming alongside Kristin as she shares the experience of the first calf born, picking out seeds to buy in the winter, and eating the first new potatoes out in the field. I really enjoyed this book!

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Wow! Kimball writes beautifully and honestly. Fascinating transformation.

Great story, but not terrifically written, and while it started out with a higher purpose of talking about our relationship with food, it ended up being much more about her being a farmer - it lost some of its thoughtfulness along the way. Paled in comparison, ultimately, to Barbara Kingsolver's

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Animal Vegetable Miracle.

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Kristan Kimball, the author, was a single,thirtysomething New York writer when she went to interview a young farmer. They fell in love or something like it, and she moved with him to a farmers life. She writes with equal ease about the backbreaking amount of work,the sadness of a horse dying, and

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the matter of fact rituals of butchering farm animals for meat. A excellent read!

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This was great; entertaining, informative, and interesting. I found it to be a fast read. I highly recommend it if you're interested in farming, CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), and the whole back to the land, local foods movement. It's about the beginnings of an unusual CSA farm in upstate

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New York, written from the point of view of a former city girl. They serve about 100 customers who pay $2900 a person for supplies of beef, chicken, pork, eggs, dairy, cheese, some fruit, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, and veggies enough both to eat and can all they want. They use plow horses rather than tractors.

The author was a thirty-something freelance journalist living in Manhattan, shopping, frequenting cafes, going to parties, and sometimes traveling the world for stories, who goes to interview an also 30-something successful CSA farmer on leased land in Pennsylvania. She depicts him as an appealing, eccentric, kind of larger than life character; highly physical, energetic, very verbal and passionate about his beliefs. I love her initial paragraphs describing his philosophy on life, written in a stream of consciousness sort of way. Amusing and appealing. She's not a farmer, but she helps hoe the broccoli and slaughter a pig before she's done with the visit and interview.

They fall in love, despite her reservations about the farming lifestyle and his hippy proclivities. He convinces her to look for farmland together where they can eventually build a home and run a more complete CSA together - meat, eggs, dairy, grains, fruit, etc., as well as veggies. The book details their struggle with limited funds to build that farm on 500 rundown acres (5 of it for their veggies) in Essex, New York, near Lake Champlain. She shares her learning process as a city girl new to farming who falls in love with it, as well as interesting, very readable details about aspects of farming and the mishaps and hard work involved. It's also the story of their relationship with each other and with the community around them. An engaging story.

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Really good writing and such an interesting story of 2 people becoming first generation farmers. Loved the ups and downs they experienced and the risk they took to pursue a dream. Now if only I could get some one to GIVE me 500 acres...

This book is not really about farming but more about the author's search for what makes her happy. It is also a very candid portrayal of her relationship with a man and how and why she loved him. I enjoyed the journey of how she fell into a radically different lifestyle, often with some serious

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reservations. This book is written by a highly intelligent and talented woman who wasn't afraid to test the waters of an alternative world. Highly recommended.

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This was great; entertaining, informative, and interesting. I found it to be a fast read. I highly recommend it if you're interested in farming, CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), and the whole back to the land, local foods movement. It's about the beginnings of an unusual CSA farm in upstate

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New York, written from the point of view of a former city girl. They serve about 100 customers who pay $2900 a person for supplies of beef, chicken, pork, eggs, dairy, cheese, some fruit, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, and veggies enough both to eat and can all they want. They use plow horses rather than tractors.

The author was a thirty-something freelance journalist living in Manhattan, shopping, frequenting cafes, going to parties, and sometimes traveling the world for stories, who goes to interview an also 30-something successful CSA farmer on leased land in Pennsylvania. She depicts him as an appealing, eccentric, kind of larger than life character; highly physical, energetic, very verbal and passionate about his beliefs. I love her initial paragraphs describing his philosophy on life, written in a stream of consciousness sort of way. Amusing and appealing. She's not a farmer, but she helps hoe the broccoli and slaughter a pig before she's done with the visit and interview.

They fall in love, despite her reservations about the farming lifestyle and his hippy proclivities. He convinces her to look for farmland together where they can eventually build a home and run a more complete CSA together - meat, eggs, dairy, grains, fruit, etc., as well as veggies. The book details their struggle with limited funds to build that farm on 500 rundown acres (5 of it for their veggies) in Essex, New York, near Lake Champlain. She shares her learning process as a city girl new to farming who falls in love with it, as well as interesting, very readable details about aspects of farming and the mishaps and hard work involved. It's also the story of their relationship with each other and with the community around them. An engaging story.

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Definitely enjoyed this memoir.

Entertaining account of one woman's transformation from NYC socialite to upstate organic farmwife. Could easily be called "Seed, Plow, Pluck" and appeal to earthier fans of Elizabeth Gilbert's hit memoir.

Fear that this might get all romantic proved totally wrong. The real love affair here is not with the handsome salt-of-the-earth guy the author marries but with learning to live both gently and solidly on the earth. This happily-ever-after required guts and no small amount of hard work.

An excellent book that everyone should read. It illustrates what is possible when individuals put their mind to something and how everyone benefits.

I read the book when it was first published and liked it. The second read was even better. Honest. Well-written. Full of real life. And focused on a young couple creating a sustainable CSA and a home. A great read in February while waiting for the ground to warm and plants to grow.

I could never ever ever live on a farm/homestead. However, I adored reading about it. The amount of work it takes to run a farm is unbelievable, which did not surprise me. The fact that they learned on the job did surprise me. Not a boring tale at all.

Farming the hard way. The very hard way.

In many ways beautifully written, this is a tale of true City Girl who fell in love with a back-to-nature farmer and her adjustment to what loving such a man meant. She exchanges (and, for the most, not grudgingly) a life of convenience and lack of purpose for a life of constant toil leavened by

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appreciation of the land and its products. The author does a good job of describing daily life on a non-mechanized farm that includes everything from the needed draft horses, cows, pigs, chickens to virtually every conceivable food crop. She is very happy with her new life. I'm thankful that her description makes it clear to me that I would be miserable under the same circumstances. Conveying both in the same volume is actually quite an accomplishment.

If you love nature or are interested in what is required to produce that Saran-wrapped vegetable, this is a terrific read.

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A young New Yorker on a mission to interview a "new age" farmer ends up becoming a partner in the development of a 500 acre "full service" farm serving 100+ CSAs. Her growth on the farm, as well as the farm itself, are well documented. I just don't know when she would have had time to write this

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book!

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As a woman who is about to move from the comfy suburbs of Strip Mall America to 5 acres in the country on a gravel road, I was very interested in this book and happy to have it recommended to me. It was easy-to-read, well-written, and enjoyable. What stood out to me, though, was not what Kimball

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tells about but rather what she omits.

Or am I just a person who doesn't accept happiness at face value? If so, then I apologize and I recognize that maybe it really was all that easy.

I loved reading about the process of farming, livestock raising, the temperaments of horses, making do with less, and "shopping with the Amish"... but was there no culture shock, depression, sadness at leaving her entire civilized life behind? We read occasionally (maybe 2-3 times?) about vague conflicts between her and her husband, but I never get inside her head to learn about the struggles between leaving friends, jobs, and familiarity of the city to being an outsider in the country, wholly dependent on the decisions of her partner. I wanted to read more about what it's like to go from self-sufficient singledom in NYC to sudden coupledom in a totally isolated setting.

I really like this woman, I do! I loved the feminist in her --that she didn't in any way deliver what seems so common in women's memoirs, i.e. "finding herself" in her new husband or birthing children. But I find it hard to believe that upon transitioning to this new life there was no second-guessing, no disappointment -- just a lot of toned arms, gourmet meals thrown together from lichen, dandelions, and steer balls, and extreme generosity from dozens of the kindest, most welcoming neighbors that any small town has ever produced.

Let me bore you with an analogy. In college, I studied abroad with a friend in Madrid and kept a diary because my mom asked me to. When I returned home with 4 full notebooks, she loved reading about the characters we met, the delicious (and often bizarre) food we ate, the troubles we had with our landlady, and the encounters we had with locals all over Europe as we learned to navigate a completely foreign landscape. She passed the journal to other family members and everyone had a good time reading about our adventures. I was happy to have provided people who've never been outside of the USA such a diversion!

But because I knew my mom would read them, those journals didn't say things that I thought were too personal or shameful. I was too embarrassed to write about was the extreme loneliness, the sobbing homesickness, my longing for letters from my boyfriend that never came. I couldn't put down in words the times I got drunk, the episodes of being lost and frustrated, the ugly and jealous feelings I had every time someone else got a care package and I didn't. I didn't have the guts to put my guts on paper because I wanted everyone reading it to like me.

There is also a possibility that Kristin Kimball is just a much, much nicer and more adaptable person than I am. Which is probably the case.

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adult nonfiction. Journalist falls in love with farmer, gives up city life to build a farm with him in upstate New York. Nothing is as easy or simple as it would seem, from the pair's somewhat turbulent romance to mowing the front lawn. Essex Farm utilizes organic, sustainable practices, relies on

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draft horses to pull the farm equipment, and aims to provide a complete diet--which means in addition to the fruits, veggies and flowers, they also raise chickens, beef and dairy cows, and pigs.

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This was a delightful, honest account of one woman's adventure going from the life of a Manhattan writer to a full-time farmer on a farm that is not only self-sustaining but provides enough animal products, grain, and vegetables to support more than one hundred other people.

Kimball's story begins

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when she travels from New York to Pennsylvania to interview a man who runs a community farm that provides subscribers with eggs, vegetables, pork, and chicken. To her surprise, she finds herself not simply sitting down and interviewing the farmer but hoeing rocks from the tomato patch and assisting in the slaughter of a pig. To her even greater surprise, the farming life -- and the rugged, college-educated, idealistic farmer -- capture her imagination and she starts returning again and again. Eventually she and Mark become a couple and start their own farm in upstate New York, where they eschew tractors for draft horses and set out to build a completely self-sustaining lifestyle.

This a story in which the romance of the idea of having a farm and becoming engaged to someone you love is balanced by the intense challenges of farming and the personality conflicts of two strong-willed people who are in love with each other. Neither the success of the farm or the relationship is guaranteed.

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I’ve lived most of my adult life in farming communities and many of my friends are farmers, so while I’ve never farmed, I know enough about the way they talk. And it ain’t like this. Seriously, I enjoyed this book and leaned a lot about organic farming, but I couldn’t help but laugh as I

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listened (I had the audio version of “The Dirty Life”) to Kimball’s poetic descriptions of the agrarian life. Much of it sounded more like an English literature PhD dissertation than a memoir about farming a la Amish style. And how often has a distressed cow had The New Yorker read to her the way Kimball did. And who would possibly see Sandra Cisneros in the face of another cow. Well, Kimball did. The wedding scene near the end of the books was a cross between Woodstock Hippie and Fifth Avenue Chic. After all, don’t we all have guests “coming from Europe”? Enough snark. Kimball is really an excellent writer. It just mixes a little strangely with the…dirt.

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This was a really gripping story of two people starting a farm, and life, together.

Funny, delightful autobiography.