One Vermont family, four seasons, and the real work behind your food.
This is the true story of how you get your milk. And because it unfolds on a family dairy farm in Vermont, it's also the true story of how you get delicious, Grade A maple syrup.
Author Alan Pistorius lived for a full year with the Treadway family, sharing their work and play, their joys and worries. He records all four seasons of farm life: planting in the spring, baling hay in the summer, harvesting corn in the fall, and hanging sap buckets for maple syrup in the winter. The result is a powerful, close-up meditation on farming, small business, and family. It is also a portrait of a rural way of life that is vanishing too fast.
In the tradition of Richard Rhodes's Farm, this is immersive agricultural nonfiction for readers drawn to the real rhythms of working the land in New England.
"Comparable to Richard Rhodes's Farm ( LJ 10/1/89; "Best Books of 1989," LJ 1/90, p. 54), this book tells the story of the Treadways, a farm family struggling to preserve a way of life that is too rapidly disappearing. To research this book, Pistorius lived for one year in the family's Vermont household. He shared their work and play, their joys, their worries, and their disappointments. We see them planting in the spring, baling in the summer, harvesting corn in the fall, and hanging sap buckets in the winter. Throughout the book, the reader is given a feeling for the rhythms of life on a farm and is quickly drawn into that life. Recommended for most libraries."
Library Journal
