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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 102.1 | The History Cooperative
102.1  
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March, 2006
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Reviews

The Fate of Family Farming
Variations on an American Idea

By Ronald Jager
(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2004. Pp. xx, 244. Notes. $26.00.)

This highly readable book invites readers to question the idea that family farming is simply a subject for nostalgia. Farm families' adjustments are numerous—niche farming, organic farming, integrated pest management, and community-supported agricuture—but there is also help available, such as the "beginning-farmer networks" operated by county extension agents and the women-in-agriculture networks. Thanks to these and other programs and strategies, family farming remains alive and kicking in America. 1
      Ronald Jager grew up farming in Michigan during the World War II era, which he described in his book Eighty Acres (1990). His way with words and his turn of thought resemble those of Wendell Berry and Indiana's Scott Russell Sanders. Jager writes warmly about agrarian values and offers a substantial account of American agrarianism, from Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and Emerson, through Liberty Hyde Bailey and Louis Bromfield, down to Berry and the iconoclastic California grape grower Victor Davis Hanson, whom Jager quotes: "That the land is now nothing is the real diagnosis of modern man's mysterious spiritual illness" (p. 72). . . .
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