Ervins important undertaking inspired farmers statewide to see their barns in a new light and brought attention to an often overlooked category of Michigans architecture. ~Michigan History Magazine "When I was a young girl growing up within the farm community near Rankin, in Genesee County, I heard the working sounds of tractors plowing large fields and watched the harvests of soybeans, wheat, hay, and oats. My ancestors were Michigan pioneers and farmers near Ludington and Grand Blanc. My love for all things farming came from them and continues to this day. Respect for the land and a deep respect for the profession of farming is the hallmark of this book. Since I began to canvass the state nearly two decades ago Ive had the good fortune to visit the farms and talk to many generational farmers and families. Before Michigan became a state in 1837, pioneers came from all over the world to farm this fertile land then known as, The Land of Many Waters. Clearing giant trees of pine, oak, ash and maple, they plowed with ox or a team of horses, for the purpose of raising crops. Wheat, oats, corn and barley, were some of the first crops a new homesteader raised. Barns were built out of logs from the trees, to shelter bushels of precious grains and valuable animals. Just think what it must have been like in the 1800s to travel by water and wagon through wilderness and swamps to the new territory called Michigan! These courageous pioneers, and those that came after them throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, were happy to find a place to call home."

A window into the roles and construction of Michigan family farms

A coffee-table celebration of the beauty and impact of the tower. An artistic focus, rather than technical. Minimal bibliography. No index. 10 In this richly detailed memoir, Jager evokes rural America (i.e. Missaukee County, Michigan) in the 1940s and a life defined by wartime economy, the mores of Dutch Calvinism, and the seasons of a small family farm. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Poignant, irreverent, and hilarious: a memoir about survival and self-discovery, by an indomitable woman who never loses sight of what matters most. It’s the summer of 2005, and Mardi Jo Link’s dream of living the simple life has unraveled into debt, heartbreak, and perpetually ragged cuticles. She and her husband of nineteen years have just called it quits, leaving her with serious cash-flow problems and a looming divorce. More broke than ever, Link makes a seemingly impossible resolution: to hang on to her century-old farmhouse in northern Michigan and continue to raise her three boys on well water and wood chopping and dirt. Armed with an unfailing sense of humor and three resolute accomplices, Link confronts blizzards and foxes, learns about Zen divorce and the best way to butcher a hog, dominates a zucchini-growing contest and wins a year’s supply of local bread, masters the art of bargain cooking, wrangles rampaging poultry, and withstands any blow to her pride in order to preserve the life she wants. With an infectious optimism that would put Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm to shame and a deep appreciation of the natural world, Link tells the story of how, over the course of one long year, she holds on to her sons, saves the farm from foreclosure, and finds her way back to a life of richness and meaning on the land she loves. This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594--a drop of 93 percent. In his hard-hitting book, historian Pete Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers' fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He exposes the shameful fact that at the very moment civil rights laws promised to end discrimination, hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their hold on the land as they were denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure. More than a matter of neglect of these farmers and their rights, this "passive nullification" consisted of a blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation, blatant acts of discrimination and cronyism, violence, and intimidation. Dispossession recovers a lost chapter of the black experience in the American South, presenting a counternarrative to the conventional story of the progress achieved by the civil rights movement.