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In Over the Rainbeau, Lisa Schwartz conveys the romance and challenges of her journey from tending a pair of goats to building a multifaceted sustainable farm in the New York City suburbs and becoming an award-winning cheese maker. This inspirational memoir comes to life with tantalizing original and chef-created recipes, aspirational how-tos and captivating photographs. The book is a seasonal journey of Lisa and the farm and is presented with beautiful seasonal color palettes. Each season contains memoirs written with beautiful accounts of life on the farm.

Over the Rainbeau contains 64 delicious recipes, with 15 recipes from renowned chefs including Dan Barber and Adam Kaye of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Michael Anthony of New York City's top rated Gramercy Tavern and Robert Weland of Poste Brasserie in Washington, D.C. The book's "One Steps" include Starting with Herbs, Homemade Yogurt and Composting to enable readers to take incremental steps to add sustainability to their lives.

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Whether you want to grow a few vegetables or you're ready to go whole hog and relocate to the countryside, this invaluable handbook will guide you through every aspect of a self-sufficient lifestyle. Packed with practical information, expert advice and real-life experiences, this is the ultimate reference book for anyone who wants to make the move toward natural living.

• Make your home self-sufficient: Find out all you need to know about eco-building, recycling and traditional crafts such as spinning, weaving, dyeing, making candles and tanning hides.
• Grow your own fruit and vegetables: Detailed instructions and tips on how to cultivate more than 100 vegetables, fruits and herbs.
• From crop to kitchen: Learn how to prepare and preserve your food, including information on drying, freezing, canning, bottling, brewing, basic butchery and making your own bread, butter, yogurt and cheese.
• Food from the wild: Discover how to forage for food with a practical wild food calendar and identification guide.
• Raise your own livestock: Expert advice on choosing and keeping chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, goats, sheep, cows, bees and more.

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This book gives you all the information you need to start your own local foods business. You'll get plain-English advice from a self-proclaimed farm-girl-turned-entrepreneur on:

• Trends in niche agriculture and local foods
• Creating a business plan for a small-scale or hobby venture
• Assessing your home marketplace and uncovering niches not yet served
• Financing options, especially grants and cost-sharing programs
• Free or low-cost marketing ideas
• Basic strategies for surviving the first year in business
• And more

About the author

Sarah Beth Aubrey was born into a family of farmers and was raised to believe, like Scarlett O'Hara, that it is land that sustains after all else. In addition to operating her company, Aubrey's Natural Meats, Aubrey writes and speaks extensively on agriculture, the rural lifestyle and small farm development.

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There has never been a better time to make and sell great cheese. People worldwide are consuming more high-quality, handmade cheese than ever before. The number of artisan cheesemakers has doubled in recent years, and many of the industry's newcomers are "farmstead" producers — those who work only with the milk of their own animals. More than ever before, the people who choose to become farmer-cheesemakers need access to the knowledge of established cheese artisans who can help them build their dream.

Few career choices lead to such extremes of labor, emotion and monetary challenge. In The Farmstead Creamery Advisor, respected cheesemaker, instructor and speaker Gianaclis Caldwell walks would-be producers through the many, and often confusing, steps and decisions they will face when considering a career in this burgeoning cottage industry. This book fills the gap that exists between the pasture and cheese plate. It goes far beyond issues of caring for livestock and basic cheesemaking, explaining business issues such as:

• Analyzing your suitability for the career
• Designing and building the cheese facility
• Sizing up the market
• Negotiating day-to-day obstacles
• Ensuring maximum safety and efficiency

Drawing from her own and other cheesemakers' experiences, Caldwell brings to life the story of creating a successful cheesemaking business in a practical, organized manner. Absolutely essential for anyone interested in becoming a licensed artisan cheesemaker, The Farmstead Creamery Advisor will also appeal to the many small and hobby-farm owners who already have milking animals and who wish to improve their home dairy practices and facilities.

Recommended Product for Wiser Living: Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, MOTHER EARTH NEWS is recommending books to readers. For 40 years, MOTHER EARTH NEWS has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

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Conventional agriculture destroys our soils, pollutes our water and is a major contributor to climate change. What if our agricultural practices could stabilize, or even reverse these trends?

The Biochar Solution explores the dual function of biochar as a carbon-negative energy source and a potent soil-builder. Created by burning biomass in the absence of oxygen, this material has the unique ability to hold carbon back from the atmosphere while simultaneously enhancing soil fertility. Author Albert Bates traces the evolution of this extraordinary substance from the ancient black soils of the Amazon to its reappearance as a modern carbon sequestration strategy.

Combining practical techniques for the production and use of biochar with an overview of the development and future of carbon farming, The Biochar Solution describes how a new agricultural revolution can reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to below zero while increasing world food reserves and creating energy from biomass wastes. Biochar and carbon farming can reduce fossil fuels inputs into our food system; bring new life to desert landscapes; filter and purify drinking water; and help build carbon-negative homes, communities and nations.

Biochar is not without dangers if unregulated, and it is not a panacea, but if it fulfills its promise of taking us back from the brink of irreversible climate change, it may well be the most important discovery in human history.

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Essential steps to a healthy, sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture: what it means, why it is needed, and how it can transform the planet.

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Transform your garden into a wildlife haven busting with life by learning how to provide supplementary nesting sites to a host of creatures. Bird, Bee and Bug Houses explains all you need to know about how to create the perfect nesting place for a wide variety of species including birds, bats, butterflies, lacewings, ladybugs and rare solitary bees.

Essential pollinators, predators and seed-spreaders, the habitats of many of these species are under threat from intensive farming and the spraying of harmful chemicals. But we can help them by building these safe havens in our gardens. Only a few basic woodworking skills are needed to create these unique and quirky houses. A range of materials (some recycled or scavenged) and finishes are used in order to make sure they are as attractive as they are practical. All the basic techniques, tools and materials needed to create your bird, bee or bug house are explained and each project has a detailed exploded diagram with cutting list. Each section of the book has detailed information on choosing locations, maintenance, species habits and nesting requirements.

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Keeping chickens is a trend that just keeps on growing, even for city dwellers. With this book, today's modern farmer will find plans and construction techniques for making seven different coops, along with fun chicken facts and great recipes for all those eggs!

Farm-raised author Chris Gleason's hip eye for design, combined with sound woodworking techniques, make the coops both attractive and sturdy. Practical information such as how to properly size a coop and how to source reclaimed materials is included. Don't miss the authors "tour de coop," in which he visits coops from other backyard farmers to find out why they keep chickens and what lessons they have to share with others interested in doing so.

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In a day when beef is assailed by many environmental organizations and lauded by fast-food chains, a new paradigm to bring reason to this confusion is in order. With farmers leaving the land in droves and plows poised to "reclaim" set-aside acres, it is time to offer an alternative that is both land and farmer friendly.

Beyond that, the salad bar beef production model offers hope to rural communities, to struggling row-crop farmers, and to frustrated beef eaters who do not want to encourage desertification, air and water pollution, environmental degradation and inhumane animal treatment. Because this is a program weighted toward creativity, management, entrepreneurism and observation, it breather fresh air into farm economics.

About the Author Joel Salatin and his family own and operate Polyface Farm, arguably the nation's most famous farm since it was profiled in Michael Pollan's New York Times bestseller, The Omnivore's Dilemmaand two subsequent documentaries, Food, Inc., and Fresh. An accomplished author and public speaker, Salatin has authored seven books. Recognition for his ecological and local-based farming advocacy includes an honorary doctorate, the Heinz Award, and many leadership awards.

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A quiet revolution is taking place: People across the United States are turning toward local food. Some are doing it because they want more nutritious, less-processed food; some want to preserve the farmland and rural character of their regions; some fear interruptions to the supply of non-local food; some want to support their local economy; and some want safer food with less threat of contamination. But this revolution comes with challenges.

Reclaiming Our Food tells the stories of people across America who are finding new ways to grow, process, and distribute food for their own communities. Their successes offer both inspiration and practical advice.

The projects described in this book are cropping up everywhere, from urban lots to rural communities and everywhere in between. In Portland, Oregon, an organization called Growing Gardens installs home gardens for low-income families and hosts follow-up workshops for the owners. Lynchburg Grows, in Lynchburg, Virginia, bought an abandoned 6.5-acre urban greenhouse business and turned it into an organic farm that offers jobs to people with disabilities and sells its food through a local farmers' market and a CSA. Sunburst Trout Farm, a small family business in rural North Carolina, is showing that it’s possible to raise fish sustainably and sell to a local market. And in Asheville, North Carolina, Growing Minds is finding ways to help bring fresh foods into schools. Author Tanya Denckla Cobb offers behind-the-scenes profiles of more than 50 food projects across the United States, with lessons and advice straight from their founders and staff. Photographic essays of 11 community food projects, by acclaimed photographer Jason Houston, detail the unusual work of these projects, bringing it to life in unforgettable images.

Reclaiming Our Food is a practical guide for building a local food system. Where others have made the case for the local food movement, Reclaiming Our Food shows how communities are actually making it happen. This book offers a wealth of information on how to make local food a practical and affordable part of everyone's daily fare.