GROWING A FARMER Pt.1

Today I am going to talk about a wonderful book called Growing a farmer. While this book is an assigned reading for my Writing 340 class, I found it very intriguing to me. The title can easily catch readers' sights: how do you grow a farmer? As I read through, I would definitely introduce this book to my friends. Growing a farmer describes a journey how the writer gradually becomes a expert farmer after years. This book can be really a guideline book for anyone who wants to own a farm since Kurt Timmermeister gives a lot of details and steps of how he did successfully develop his own farm step by step. Kurt once owned a cafe at downtown Seattle which was very profitable. After earning some money, he wanted to move out the city to experience the nature. He bought a piece of land of four acre in Vashon Island. Later on, he sold the cafe and opened up a 24-hour restaurant which he found not to be so profitable. Also, he started to care about the food quality he ate and even stopped eating at his own restaurant. This made him to become a farmer. Kurt attended some lectures, bought some books on farming, and even bought a tractor to start with. He made his business plans with an intern, Matt at the beginning: grow tomatoes, peppers, onions, and leeks on February; cauliflower, brocolli, kale, and greens on March; cucumber and squash on May. The first year didn't come well. Afterwards, he came up with different ideas to make his farm profitable. He tried beeskeeping and examined what types of bees would produce more honey. He studied different varieties of trees to grow and made his own red wine vinegar. He used rotational grazing for his sheep. He tasted different kinds of buttermilk and calculated volumes of milk that different cows could make.

I have read almost half of the book and I found the writer a really intelligent man. He is able to discover big wisdom in small matters. When he was in contact with the bees, he thought of social contract and related to the bahaviors of bees. When he was raising cows, he thought of making cheese rather than merely collecting milk to make preservations easier. I thought those small wisdom were the reason why he would make a profitable farm eventually. His habit of thinking and planning carefully before acting inhabits from his personality. He bought a lot of books on farming and spent days and nights selecting what kind of trees he should grow and what kinds of animals he should keep. He is also a very passionate man. When he made the decision to run his own farm, he immediately drove to Skagit Valley to visit a local farm there, trying to buy it (though he did not eventually). He even gave details on how a small milking machine operates. I think I learned how he was so passionate about what he was doing and concentrated 100% of himself. That was a very valuable trait that one needs to possess for success. His passion and love about the nature is everywhere in the sentences and I believe whoever reads the book will be influenced by him.