Since the start of the “Green Revolution,” agriculture has become more and more industrialized, the scale has gone from backyard plots behind every house to fields of commodity corn and soy so vast they stretch to every horizon.

This isn’t sustainable, but it’s also not any fun. Farms that large are run like machines, not like gardens. The fun of it, just the sheer joy of playing in the dirt to a productive end, this is probably the biggest reason for the local-food and small farm revolution.

Climate change is eased by sustainable farming, as are pressures on water systems, and the dangers of genetically modified foods are avoided by growing small and growing organic. But nobody comes to a party to think about dreary things, they join because they expect they’ll have a great time. The small farm revolution is driven by the joy of special foods grown nearby, the flavor of fresh carrots and the excitement of getting dinner from a person instead of a package.

We’ve published guides for organic growers since 1984, and it’s exciting to see more and more people jumping on the bandwagon for higher quality food, grown nearby.

This week, we’re offering a selection of new and best-selling agriculture books, all on sale for 35% off.

Coming Soon: The New Horse-Powered Farm is the first book of its kind, offering wisdom and techniques for using horse power on the small farm or homestead, from longtime horse farmer Stephen Leslie. It sets the stage for incorporating draft power on the farm by presenting tips on getting started with horses, care of the work horse, different horse-training systems, and the merits of different draft breeds. The novice teamster is introduced to the basic tools of horse-drawn tillage and cultivation used for profitable horse-powered farming, with a spotlight on whole-farm management, as well as information on haying with horses, raising small grains, managing the woodlot, farm education, agritourism, and more. Ships February 22nd.

Organic Gardening, Second Edition Charles Dowding has been practicing no-dig organic growing for over thirty years. In this new, full-color edition of Organic Gardening he shares the wealth of his experience, explaining his approach to soil and plants and revealing the range of techniques that have enabled him to grow healthy and vibrant plants for decades.

R.J. Garner’s The Grafter’s Handbook is the classic reference book and revered encyclopedia (and the only one of its kind) on plant propagation by grafting, and has been favored by orchardists and gardeners since its first publication in 1947. Now revised and updated for a new generation by respected horticulturist Steve Bradley, the all-time classic is back and better than ever.

Paradise Lot: When Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates moved into a duplex in a run-down part of Holyoke, Massachusetts, the tenth-of-an-acre lot was barren ground and bad soil, peppered with broken pieces of concrete, asphalt, and brick. The two friends got to work designing what would become not just another urban farm, but a “permaculture paradise.” In telling the story of Paradise Lot, Toensmeier explains the principles and practices of permaculture, the choice of exotic and unusual food plants, the techniques of design and cultivation, and, of course, the adventures, mistakes, and do-overs in the process.

The Organic Seed Grower is a comprehensive manual for the serious vegetable grower who is interested in growing high-quality seeds using organic farming practices. It is written for both serious home seed savers and diversified small-scale farmers who want to learn the necessary steps involved in successfully producing a commercial seed crop organically.

What is a farm with a future? What will make it sustainable and resilient? And what key qualities and skills does a farmer need in today’s climate to be successful? Rebecca Thistlethwaite addresses these and other crucial questions in this must-read book for anyone aspiring to get into small to mid-scale market farming, or who wants to make their existing farm more dynamic, profitable, and, above all, sustainable. Farms with a Future explores the passion, creativity, and entrepreneurship that’s needed to help family farms find their niche and remain sustainable and successful in an age of agribusiness and consolidation.

If you love the joys of eating home-garden vegetables but always thought those joys had to stop at the end of summer, this set of three books by master organic farmer Eliot Coleman is for you. Includes The New Organic Grower , Four-Season Harvest, and The Winter Harvest Handbook.

For farm entrepreneurs, the opportunities for a farm family business have never been greater. The aging farm population is creating cavernous niches begging to be filled by creative visionaries who will go in dynamic new directions. You Can Farm targets the folks who actually entertain notions of living, loving and learning on a piece of land. Anyone willing to dance with such a dream should be able to assess its assets and liabilities; its fantasies and realities. “Is it really possible for me?” is the burning question this book addresses.

In The Seed Underground, Janisse Ray brings us the inspiring stories of ordinary gardeners whose aim is to save time-honored open-pollinated varieties like Old Time Tennessee muskmelon and Long County Longhorn okra—varieties that will be lost if people don’t grow, save, and swap the seeds. With a quiet urgency The Seed Underground reminds us that while our underlying health, food security, and sovereignty may be at stake as seeds disappear, so, too, are the stories, heritage, and history that passes between people as seeds are passed from hand to hand.

A leading light in the field of medicinal herb cultivation, The Chinese Medicinal Herb Farm is the first cultivation guide of its kind, and presents invaluable information for growers interested in producing high-quality efficacious herbs in all climates of the US, with the historical connectedness of ancient practitioners.

The most comprehensive and definitive guide to date on raising all-natural poultry, for homesteaders or farmers seeking to close their loop, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock offers a practical and integrative model for working with chickens and other domestic fowl, based entirely on natural systems.

The Holistic Orchard demystifies the basic skills everybody should know about the inner-workings of the orchard ecosystem, as well as orchard design, soil biology, and organic health management. Detailed insights on grafting, planting, pruning, and choosing the right varieties for your climate are also included, along with a step-by-step instructional calendar to guide growers through the entire orchard year. Includes extensive profiles of pome fruits, stone fruits, and berries.

The NOFA Guides are a series of 8 books originally published by the Northeast Organic Farming Association on organic principles and practices for both the beginner farmer as well as established farmers looking to convert to organic, or deepen their practices. Titles include:

• Organic Soil-Fertility and Weed Management by Steve Gilman (approx 100 pp)
• Crop Rotation and Cover Cropping: Soil Resiliency and Health on the Organic Farm by Seth Kroeck (95 pp)
• Compost, Vermicompost and Compost Tea by Grace Gershuny (95 pp)
• Growing Healthy Vegetable Crops: Working with Nature to Control Diseases and Pests Organically by Brian Caldwell (96 pp)
• Organic Dairy Production by Sarah Flack (96)
• Organic Seed Production and Saving: The Wisdom of Plant Heritage by Bryan Connolly (111 pp)
• Whole Farm Planning: Ecological Imperatives, Personal Values and Economics by Elizabeth Henderson and Karl North (96 pp)
• Humane and Healthy Poultry Production: A Manual for Organic Growers by Karma Glos (100 pp)

Eric Toensmeier is well known in permaculture circles for his book Perennial Vegetables, and the encyclopedic, two-volume set Edible Forest Gardens he coauthored with Dave Jacke. Toensmeier’s new book, Paradise Lot, tells the story behind the tiny, barren lot that he and his friend Jonathan Bates transformed into a lush, perennial garden.

As Toensmeier wonders in the book’s introduction, the road ahead of the two young men seemed hopeful,

“Could we bring about an edible paradise on our blighted lot? Could we regenerate soil, bring back birds, and meet all of our goals on only a tenth of an acre without cramming everything in too tight? And might we ever meet women who could appreciate guys who spent more time on the Plants for a Future online database than singles websites? Time would tell.”

Publishers Weekly’s recent review of Paradise Lot says, “In true permaculture fashion, the book follows not only the progression of the garden but also its influence on and relations with its creators’ lives—including a surprisingly Austen-like romantic element—their neighborhood, and the larger permaculture and forest gardening community…Fans of Toensmeier and Bates’s work will be thrilled to read the details of their experiments with polycultures, their problems with and solutions for pests and overly aggressive plants, and their idiosyncratic plant choices. Adventurous readers with conventional gardens and lawns may be inspired to venture into the more integrated, evolutionary approach that this book so vividly and appealingly portrays.”

Paradise Lot is on sale for 25% off this week.

For an even better glimpse of Eric Toensmeier’s perennial garden, check out our new DVD, Perennial Vegetable Gardening. Watch the trailer below:

Today, many farmers are finding magic in what was once considered a primitive technology — draft power — and helping fuel a rapid and passionate resurgence.

Once upon a time, coaxing food out of the earth required our whole bodies, working in tandem with the immense strength of horses and oxen, in teams powered by the strength of the relationship between us and our four-legged companions.

Horses (as well as mules and oxen) were once a farmer’s only method of traction power. If you needed to pull something heavy across any distance, you hitched up your team—to plow, till your fields, weed them, cut your hay, or take your produce to market. Combines the size of farmhouses being guided by GPS and not a farmer’s voice weren’t to be seen, as they often are in today’s American Midwest.

Today, advanced technologies — and the natural resources and petroleum products needed to fuel them — are omnipresent in agriculture, if not our daily lives. Most of spend our days staring at a glowing screen, pushing text around or copying numbers into spreadsheets — disconnected from that long ago, earthy past. But you’d be mistaken if you thought we could sever the ties completely. We remain dependent upon myriads of diverse beings, from bacteria to beasts, even as we wage wars against the former with soaps and sprays, and sequester the latter to feedlots and distant warehouses.

Thankfully, we are in the midst of a rapidly growing local food movement plowing ahead with all the passion of the back-to-the-land movement, plus all the pragmatism you’d expect from capitalism. The current resurgence of small-scale, holistic, sustainable agriculture has been inspired by many things: A growing awareness of our precarious environmental situation thanks to climate change, a deepening dissatisfaction with a life divorced from nature, and a deep desire to restore the interconnections that make us human.

That desire has led new farmers to try methods of working the earth that go beyond productivity in the narrow sense of how much profit can be gained from an acre of soil. Instead we see farmers using techniques gleaned from permaculture, from biodynamics, from all sorts of traditional skills that respect the ecological cycles of life, and incorporating animals into the farm-system at every step. Curious, passionate farmers today ask not only how many tomatoes they need to pay their mortgages. They ask how much happiness can be packed into a lifestyle? How much magic?

In this quest for reconnection, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, farmers are increasingly putting their tractors out to pasture.

In the introduction to his forthcoming book, The New Horse-Powered Farm, longtime horse farmer Stephen Leslie says, “this book is not about trying to go back to some idyllic past. It is designed to be a manual to help us move a few steps forward to a more sustainable future.”

The book will augment the efforts of organizations like the Draft Animal Power Network and publications like the Small Farmers Journal that have been instrumental in keeping the tradition of horse-powered farming alive. They bring teamsters with decades of experience together with new farmers just getting started with draft animals (and yes, they take plenty of beautiful photos of strong and intelligent animals at work)—from Donn Hewes’s towering mules (pictured above and to the right), to Jean Cross’s adorable miniature horses, and Stephen Leslie’s Fjords with their punk-rock manes (above left), and even the Green Mountain College oxen.

Instead of noxious diesel exhaust, draft animals plowing fields emit nitrogenous fertilizer to feed the soil. Instead of rumbling engine noise, they just snort, whinny, or moo now and then. And instead of depreciating in value over time like your John Deere, animals trained to harness only become more valuable the longer you work with them. Can you imagine a tractor being glad to see you in the morning? Or giving birth to baby tractors?

You can’t bond with a machine. And on every level, from the probiotics in your diet, to the resilience of your community, relationships are the locus of real magic.

Photo Credits, from top to bottom: William Stack, Jennifer McCharen, Draft Animal Power Network

In an era of ebooks and digital friends, good old fashioned fellowship is still one of the best ways to share inspiring ideas, swap tips with fellow craftsmen in your field, and start learning a new skill.

Winter is the season of sustainable farming conferences where you can do just that, and several of our authors are hitting the road to share their stories and their expertise. Take a look at the full list of author conference appearances here.

Whether you’re interested in fermentation, cheesemaking, running a resilient homestead, or using horses for draft power, sustainable farming conferences are a great opportunity to get hands-on experience and find mentors to guide you. Some highlights from the coming season include:

•     Jack Lazor’s workshop on growing and processing oats in Vermont (NOFA-VT, February 15-17)
•     Gianaclis Caldwell’s workshop on managing a raw milk dairy safely (PASA, February 8-9)
•     Stephen Leslie’s workshop on The New Horse-Powered Farm (NOFA-NH, March 1-2)
•     Eliot Coleman’s seminar on keeping the farm in the family (NOFA-VT, February 15-17)

In addition to our authors, Chelsea Green staff will be at many of these winter conferences, and many of our books will be available to browse in-person. We love getting a chance to talk face to face with our readers, so please stop by to say hello.

We hope to see you out there!

P.S. Have you ‘liked’ us yet? Our Facebook page is a great way to stay connected to our authors, find out about special events, get how-to tips for gardening, as well as plenty of news about the politics and practice of sustainability. So, if you haven’t yet, click on over, and let us know how much you ‘like‘ us!

Winter Conference Kick Off Sale: 35% off 

 Books on sale until February 15th.

Seeds are the foundation of agriculture.

As John Navazio describes in this excerpt from his new book, The Organic Seed Grower: A Farmer’s Guide to Vegetable Seed Production, America was once home to hundreds of small-scale seed producers, each of which developed seeds adapted to grow best in the surrounding region.

Today, following the trend of most business, just a few large companies provide seed for farmers everywhere. With the advent and rapid spread of transgenic seeds, and companies like Monsanto actually owning patents to the organisms they sell, we’ve come a long way since the first human saved the first spelt seed back in the Fertile Crescent!

What have we lost in the move to corporate seed production? Navazio explains in this excerpt, and points the way to a better system.

A Short History of Agricultural Seed: An Excerpt from The Organic Seed Grower by

Reposted from GRIT.com

In The Resilient Gardener (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010) scientist and gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields—resilience science, climate change, sustainable agriculture and more. In this book you’ll learn how to garden in an era of unpredictable weather and climate change; grow, store and cook different varieties of her five “key crops”; and keep a home laying flock of ducks or chickens. Deppe didn’t just write this book, she lives the principles in it every day, and you can, too, with her expert advice. In this excerpt from chapter 10, “Squash and Pumpkins,” learn how curing squash brings out the best flavor and texture for cooking.

Why You Can’t Buy a Prime Winter Squash

Bad squash, like bad coins, tend to drive out the good. Wherever bad coins circulate, people keep back the good ones and spend the bad. Soon only bad coins are circulating. The grower who picks squash too early is the first to market. He beats out those who grow their squash to full maturity by weeks. Customers see those first displays of squashly beauty in the fall and celebrate the season by buying one. Then they try to eat it. Then they remember why they don’t usually buy squash. So year after year, the customer is discouraged from buying squash, and year after year, the fact that squash can be a spectacular, gourmet-quality food remains largely a secret.

Squash in the supermarkets and even those in the farmer’s markets are often not of the best varieties. However, even the good early varieties are picked immature. Then they are sold uncured. Cucurbita maxima (the most common “winter squash”) varieties should have a full month of curing before going to market. Farmers are not set up to do that, and customers don’t know that they should, and it isn’t worth the effort anyway if the squash isn’t full grown. If we want prime winter squash, we must select premier gourmet varieties, then grow and cure them ourselves.

Curing Squash: Three Squash Species, Three Curing and Use Patterns

There are three major squash species grown and used in the United States and Canada: Cucurbita maxima, C. pepo, and C. moschata. (A fourth, Cucurbita mixta, isn’t widely grown, as it requires too much heat for most people in the United States to grow and has poor flesh. In Mexico, however, there are many mixta varieties, which are grown primarily for their edible seeds. I won’t cover C. mixta.)

Squash varieties of the Cucurbita maxima species need a full month of storage indoors to cure into prime quality. Many max varieties will keep several months. Some varieties actually become sweeter and develop more intense flavors for six months or more of storage. ‘Sweet Meat-Oregon Homestead’ is actually sweeter and more flavorful at six months than when harvested and is still only getting better. Some varieties, such as ‘Sweet Meat-Oregon Homestead’ and ‘Blue Hubbard’, are very large and are especially nice for those who want to use prime winter squash as a major part of the homestead food supply. There are also prime smaller varieties such as ‘Buttercup’, for those who just want a meal at a time for a person or two. The better-keeping max varieties can provide prime squash through March and even beyond. The very largest varieties of orange pumpkins, which are not culinary quality, are also maxes.

Cucurbita maxima varieties include ‘All Gold’, ‘Amish Pie Pumpkin’, ‘Atlantic Giant’, ‘Autumn Pride’, ‘Banana’ (all), ‘Big Max’, ‘Big Moon’, ‘Black Forest’, ‘Blue Ballet’, ‘Buttercup’ (all), ‘Flat White Boer’, ‘Gold Nugget’, ‘Hokkaido’ (all), ‘Hubbard’ (all), ‘Jarrahdale’, ‘Kindred’, ‘Kuri’ (all), ‘Marina di Chioggia’, ‘Mooregold’, ‘Queensland Blue’, ‘Rouge Vif d’Etampes’ (a.k.a. Cinderella), ‘Sibley’, and ‘Turban’ (all).

The species Cucurbita pepo includes nearly all our summer squash as well as most of the small and medium-sized Halloween pumpkins that are not culinary quality, many ornamental pump­kins, naked-seeded pumpkins, and many gourds. It also includes a few winter squash varieties of prime eating quality such as the delicatas and the classic ‘Small Sugar Pie’ (a.k.a. ‘New England Pie Pumpkin’). All the pepos of prime culinary qual­ity are small.

The pepos require only about seven to four­teen days of curing. So we can eat the little prime pepos while we are waiting for our maxes to cure. Ideally, we eat up the pepos before the end of December. Even those that are among the better keepers are not prime beyond that time. The pepos are prime right after the curing period and deteriorate from there, with the flesh getting stringier, and the sugar and flavor going downhill. The better-storing pepos such as the delicatas are prime for two months only, and good for no more than three. The prime pepos such as delicatas and ‘Small Sugar’ have flavors that are distinct enough from those of the maxes so as to constitute an entirely different vegetable.

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KEEP READING: http://cappers.grit.com/garden/vegetables/curing-squash-ze0z1212zwar.aspx#ixzz2Hc20BWDk

If you could take a time machine back eight years, you might have heard Chelsea Green making the announcement that the first comprehensive book on growing seeds commercially was on its way to your bookshelf. But life happens, and the project hit nearly a decade of delays on its way to completion.

Ladies and gentlemen, that long-awaited and much-anticipated book, The Organic Seed Grower by John Navazio, is finally available, and will be on sale for 25% off this week.

Editor Ben Watson has been along for the entire journey.

“A lesser author, and a lesser publisher, would have called it quits on this project years ago. But the subject is one that’s important enough to take the time that it takes. If anything, with the phenomenal growth in the organic food sector, this book is even more relevant and more critically needed than it would have been if we’d published it eight years ago. In hindsight, the timing was almost perfect.”

Funded by a grant from the Northeast SARE program, The Organic Seed Grower is an in-depth manual for the serious vegetable grower who is interested in growing high-quality seeds using organic farming practices. It is written for both serious home seed savers and diversified small-scale farmers who want to learn the necessary steps involved in successfully producing a commercial seed crop organically..

Early praise for the book from Suzanne Ashworth, author of Seed to Seed, says that, “John Navazio has taken organic seed production to a higher level with extensive information on selection, genetic integrity, isolation distances, and seedborne diseases. Although his focus is on plant breeders and commercial growers, much of the information is also applicable to small-scale farms producing seed for on-site use.”

It’s been a long time coming, but the best book on growing seeds is finally here! Get a copy for 25% off this week.

It may seem counterintuitive, but now is the perfect time to be thinking about next winter’s harvest. How can you time your plantings this summer and fall so your broccoli and cabbage are big enough to survive the winter and get cranking as early as possible the following spring? What kinds of vegetables can you expect to last through the cold season, and into the ‘hungry gap’? In this post, we share a couple of excellent resources on the kind of year-round vegetable production a dedicated homesteader, or anyone attempting to bring food closer to home will want to try.

Eliot Coleman was one of the first authors we published, and his book The New Organic Grower helped set Chelsea Green on the path to becoming the leading publisher of books on sustainable agriculture.

Coleman runs Four Season Farm up in Harborside, Maine — a very chilly place to make a living growing salad. But that’s exactly what he does, and his two most recent books are full of information on how to keep tender, tasty veggies growing throughout the dark and cold of winter. Chances are, you live in a climate several hardiness zones more hospitable than Coleman, so we’re here to tell you that when it comes to growing fresh food year-round, sorry, you have no excuses! Or at least, with advice from this master-farmer, winter will no longer be one of them.

Coleman was by no means the first to implement the winter-gardening strategies he has helped make famous. In this excerpt from The Winter Harvest Handbook, he points to the inspiring example of Parisian farmers 150 years ago, who grew vegetables under glass cloches for city markets.

“La culture maraîchère (market gardening) in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century was the impressive result of years of improvement in both protected and outdoor vegetable production…In addition to feeding the inhabitants of Paris, the growers also exported vegetables to England. Growers averaged at least four and usually up to eight harvests per year from the same piece of ground. It was a successful system both practically and economically.”

Read more about these enterprising French farmers here. And take a peek inside The Winter Harvest Handbook, here. All three of Coleman’s classic organic farming books are now available as a convenient set, which you can purchase in our bookstore.

Over in the United Kingdom, another farmer-author is busily tackling the challenges of winter gardening. Charles Dowding is the author of many gardening books, including How to Grow Winter Vegetables.

In this beautifully illustrated volume Dowding explains step-by-step how to grow, and more importantly, how to plan, for plentiful harvests during the “winter half” of the year.

“True winter is underway by December, when growth is almost halted, and continues until March or even April, by which time daylight and some early warmth have returned, although there are still very few fresh vegetables to eat. Then, in April, May, and even into June in a cold spring, there can be a long and frustrating wait for plants to grow and mature. Although the weather may be fine and warm, there is surprisingly little to eat from the garden, in a period known as the ‘hungry gap’ — a kind of ’second winter’ in food terms.”

Read more from Dowding’s book, here.

And happy gardening!

A New Wave of Savvy Young Farmers Plows Ahead 

New farmers are filling a small-scale niche long abandoned by industrial agriculture. As Rebecca Thistlethwaite says in the first chapter of her new book Farms with a Future, mid-sized farms are the hardest to maintain.

The USDA Census from 2007 says as much — farms earning between $10,000 and $100,000 per year disappeared in droves, while farms earning less than $10,000 cropped up like chickweed after a spring rain. As production is scaled up, stresses on the farmland and the farmer increase, but profit doesn’t necessarily keep pace. Regulations are often more stringent for larger farms, such as Vermont’s laws about selling raw milk which reduce the pressure on the smallest producers but require mid-sized ones to do expensive testing and reporting.

But a sense of place is the true spirit of local food, and these days small and even tiny farms are starting up all across the country, feeding their communities fresh food, grown organically, and creating fun lifestyles for the entrepreneurial folks who started them. Perhaps more than any previous wave of back-to-the-landers, small farmers today are approaching their missions with a desire to do it right and make a lasting, positive impact. With inspiration (and funding) from the Slow Money movement, and from farmers like Richard Wiswall (another Chelsea Green author), newcomers to the field are proceeding with caution to match their passion and harnessing the tried-and-true methods of sound business to create a resilient and sustainable food system.

New farmers are doing market research before they start digging, and writing business plans before they go out and buy a bunch of peeping chicks. Sustainable farmers like the ones FarmPlate profiles on their blog are looking for unmet needs in the local foodshed, and developing high-value that both make a tidy profit and increase the vitality of the local food culture. At the 5000 plus new farmers markets that have opened in the first dozen years of this century you’ll find the unique fruits of their labors: specialty ferments like sauerkraut or kombucha in wild new flavor combinations, artisan farmstead cheeses, heirloom vegetable varieties long thought forgotten, grains grown and ground by hand, and heritage breeds of beef, poultry, and eggs.

Here at Chelsea Green we have a dedicated interest in the growth of this movement. We’ve built our own business model on the strength of the growing desire for living more in concert with nature, eschewing fossil fuels, and coming to a deeper understanding of ecosystems and how they sustain us. We’ve seen that desire grow over the past thirty years, and while we’re pretty sure Monsanto and Exxon Mobil aren’t going away anytime soon, we know the values embodied in sustainable agriculture are a palpable alternative to the trainwreck pattern of development humanity has been pursuing over the past century and a half.

Nowhere is it more obvious that a shift is happening than in the realm of small farms and local food, and the new wave of farmers is taking the overused concept of sustainability farther than ever. By working with livestock and composting systems to restore the health of the soil, and often using horses instead of diesel-powered tractors these farmers are going back to the future (or Yak to the Future, as one Vermont company puts it). They’re putting small but important elements in place to build diverse and strong food systems by fostering strong relationships with their communities. Even the efforts farmers are making to protect their own financial and emotional sustainability by thinking carefully, doing good old-fashioned market research, and developing flexible and ambitious business plans is pushing the envelope and expanding the meaning of sustainability.

Reposted from Mother Earth News.

“Every earth-conscious home cook who wishes to nourish his or her family with sustainable, local, grassfed and pastured meats should be able to, regardless of income,” argues Shannon Hayes, radical homesteader and author of Long Way on a Little. The core reference for any home cook, Long Way on a Little examines the conundrum of maintaining a healthy, affordable and ecologically conscious meat-based diet, while simultaneously paying America’s small sustainable farmers a fair price for their food. In this excerpt from chapter 9, “Heads, Tails and Other Under-Appreciated Treasures,” learn about nose-to-tail cooking and how offal, such as chicken livers, lamb’s heads and oxtails, are packed with essential nutrients and often contribute the best flavor to home cooking. Then try some delicious offal recipes.

“Heads, Tails and other Under-Appreciated Treasures,” is a foray into what most Americans consider the grisly side of prudent meat consumption. I, too, fell into this camp, balking at the very idea of cooking a pig’s head or skewering a chicken’s heart. The thought of tackling this chapter, frankly, filled me with dread. Having written it, I’ve come through the fog, and the recipes included are some of my family’s favorites. While heads, tails and organ meats do not represent as much waste from an animal as the bones and fat, their concentration of minerals and fat-soluble vitamins makes discarding them a huge waste of nutritional value. And, handled properly, they are fantastic.

Long Way on a Little represents the single greatest learning curve I’ve climbed in my understanding of grassfed meats and how to most thoroughly use them. It represents four years of studying cookbooks from the Great Depression and World War II eras, of experimenting in the kitchen, of writing and rewriting until I could outline a new cuisine for my family that minimizes our waste and maximizes our nutrition and our enjoyment. I hope you will find it useful in your own kitchen, and that you will join me in what has now become a permanent learning path, of perpetually exploring how we can use our food choices to heal the planet and change the course of history in this country, and how, ultimately, each of us can find the delicious trail to going a long way on a little.

Offal Recipes

I’ll admit it: I did not look forward to researching and writing this chapter of the book. Organ meats, heads, feet and other such odious (in my opinion) cuts were an over-glorified salvation effort—the affected cuisine of die-hard nutritional fanatics, stoic old-world hausfraus or pretentious epicureans. According to my own eco-sensibilities, if a person chose to forsake the organ meats, but made full use of the bones and fat of the beasts that gave their lives for our wellbeing, well, that was ample thrift to earn the omnivore’s atonement. As far as I was concerned, the kidneys, livers and hearts could go to the dogs, the heads and feet to the compost or the renderer. I have just enough customer demand for oxtails to equal our supply, so I rarely ate those, either (though they never repelled me as hearts and heads did).

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KEEP READING: http://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/offal-recipes-ze0z1301zwar.aspx#ixzz2Hc2ztj6K