Growing A Farmer Blog Post

            Growing A Farmer: How I Learned To Live Off The Land was a pretty interesting book. The part that I found most interesting was the plot itself. A guy who’s worked and owned businesses primarily in the city of Seattle deciding to just one day buy 4 acres of farm land on impulse just sounds crazy to me, especially considering the amount of maintenance that comes with keeping a farm running. That is definitely not something I could ever do, especially if I don’t know the first thing about running one in the first place.

            I did learn a few things from the book, and the majority of them were things I would have rather not learned. For example, the way in which meats were packaged when shipped to his restaurant. I found the comments about the wet slippery white fluid coming off of the chicken and the pork juice in the pork loins to be disgusting, mostly because of the words in which he used to describe it. I also learned more about bees and the honey harvesting process. I never knew that there was a queen bee in each colony that can lay up to 2000 eggs per day and it takes 155 bee trips to a flower to make a tablespoon of honey. What I didn’t understand was why he would let the bees die off every winter, when he says himself the tradeoff for the honey is to ensure the bees survive. He seems to love bees so much, as he dedicated a whole chapter to them, but then he lets them die off because they’re relatively cheap to him and he enjoys buying boxes of new bees.

            I also learned in great detail about how a chicken is slaughtered and prepared. Timmermeister went in greater detail than I would have liked to learn about, but that is the reality of how the meat we eat is prepared, so I expected to not particularly enjoy that part of the book. However, what I can say is I respect the guy for taking on such a different lifestyle from what he had before. To go from owning a bakery, to owning a restaurant, and then ditching that all to run a farm when you have little prior experience about farming just sounds like a crazy risk that I don’t think I would ever take. He seemed a little crazy talking about his love for bees for a whole chapter and describing in detail how a chicken’s legs move around before they finally go limp after being killed, but he seems to have a very strong work ethic, as he did started his farm mainly to challenge himself, so I can respect him for taking on such a different lifestyle. Today he does pretty well, selling cheese in addition to running his farm.

            Overall I thought the book was interesting. Kurt goes into great detail with everything, including purchasing his farm, how to harvest honey from bees, and slaughtering animals. I think the biggest takeaway from the book was how he used his entrepreneurial mind and took a huge risk to start this life. He left his comfortable job in the city of Seattle to start something new, and he created an entirely different lifestyle for himself, sharing the reality of how our food is prepared.