This book was such a good book. I read it and enjoyed it very much. I highly recommend it to anyone.

Start Your Farm is an interesting new volume aimed at people looking to become farmers or who want to re-evaluate their business philosophy and direction for their farming work. Released 10th Sept 2018 by The Experiment, it's 272 pages and available in paperback, ebook, and audio formats. Authors Forrest Pritchard and Ellen Polishuk are well known business farming experts.

There are a lot of people who are keen gardeners (and some pure dreamers) who want to increase their connection to the land and either be or become more self-reliant and sustainable. This book aims to speak to that wish and help the dreamers and wishers seriously evaluate whether they're capable physically and mentally to become farmers and for those who are committed, how to get from dreaming to planning and finally to fulfilling those dreams.

This could have been a very depressing book. Farming is a physically and mentally demanding job. The realities of dealing with weather uncertainty, mechanical equipment failure and repair, costs, bookkeeping, regulations, to name just a few, are daunting at best. This book manages to be quite realistic whilst also being supportive and encouraging. There's a lot of experience detailed in the authors' narrative. I was impressed with the level of detail included about realistic expectations, problem solving, finding motivation, navigating uncertainty and unexpected costs and a lot more.

There's an old chestnut of a farming joke. How do you make a small fortune farming? Start with a large fortune! Seriously though, the authors manage to encompass satisfaction and lifestyle change as a tangible reward. It doesn't have a monetary value but living the life that suits you certainly has value (huge value).

This is a very personal book. It's not full of photographs of lush countryside and fluffy ducklings and lambs. It might be that some readers' takeaway from the book will be that farming is not in their future, and that's a good and valuable thing to know before staking said future on becoming a farmer.

This fills a vacant niche in the farming library. Think of it as philosophy of farming and a good in-depth job description.

Five stars.

If you have been dreaming of starting your own farm or are wanting to imagine the possibilities and practicalities of delving into starting your own farm, large or small, then Start Your Farm is for you. You can even have years of farming under your belt like myself but are looking for some new ideas or inspiration.

It is daunting when you are just starting off on a new venture or project, and starting too large at the forefront can really hinder success or your own feelings of success. When talking with people interested in getting into farming or a new livestock breed I always caution starting off small, because you can sink yourself into something too soon and find that it wasn't a success, or that you didn't really like how the experience went.

I know the feeling of jumping into something whole hog and realizing it just didn't work out like you thought it would, and if you stated our strong in something and it soon fails your expectations that can really change your outlook and motivation.

I jumped into meat chickens with ordering two 50 chick batches and by the end of the season, I felt through processing them all out and the family quickly tired of many meals off chickens. The price break at the time of the chicks didn't balance out the time of so many birds, nor the lack of long-term freezer space for them wither meaning we ate 2-3 meals a week involving chicken. Which sounds great but at the time that was the primary meat source for a while, which became unappealing to the household masses. Meaning I ate a lot of chicken for a while. This is kind of why I still have turkey in the freezer from December of last year when a few turkey buyers fell through and we had 3 forty pound tom turkeys throughout the holidays.

In Start Your Farm, the chapters are lined out very well from questioning why one might want to become a farmer to how to make a profitable farm. I know that many of us get into farming to escape the "rat race" and work for ourselves, but the failure rate of farming is increasing and for those of us choosing to farm for our livelihood, we need to make good solid decisions in farm economics. I think the authors really delve into the importance of profitability while also stressing that sustainability is also a vital component of not only your farm but also for the environment.

At the end of each chapter, there are review questions that give the reader some introspective thinking time about the concepts that they just read. These questions are really valuable questions to consider for yourself and your growing farm because they are questions that come up and can also prepare you for what you're embarking on.

Start Your Farm is a great book filled with valuable information for the new farmer, and also for the veteran. The concepts in the book are fresh and engaging. Start Your Farm is worth reading once and coming back, again and again, to think about the questions and topics raised within its chapters.

If there are opportunities to receive a hard copy of the final book for review and to share with my local farming community meetings, let me know. This was a great resource and will be a great resource for farmers of every kind and of every age.

I had hoped that the book would focus more on starting a small scale farming business with a focus on selling produce. This book was more for commercial farms and people who have no real clue about large farming operations. Growing up in a rural area I understand the large farms. I needed more information on small scale niche farming.

This wasn't the book I thought it would be. It still has some good information in it, but was really intended more for someone who is interested in large-scale farming, rather than a small-scale farmer or homesteader. The sections on land and soil basics were interesting, but the financial sections and marketing suggestions just weren't something we are ever going to use. I felt like, based on the description, it was for farms of all sizes, but it's really more for someone starting a large-scale farming process.