Uprisings

Uprisings is a wonderful title for a wonderful book. Sarah Simpson and Heather McLeod do a great job of telling the story of the community grain revolution that is spreading across North America. They show how each uprising is helping to build a more sustainable agriculture that is all about community resilience and local food security. Their hands-on instructions for growing your own grains is very informative and well-researched. Uprisings provides lots of loaves of inspiration and knowledge to enable you and your community to join the revival of small-scale grain production.

---Dan Jason, owner of Salt Spring Seeds

For those of us who are convinced that food independence is the key to preserving personal freedom as well as political and economic freedom, Uprisings is an extremely important book about the cultural and economic situation society faces today. It chronicles the first courageous steps toward food independence in growing grains and processing them locally into good food for humans. It describes in detail both the start-up successes and sometimes failures in this effort and in the second part, gives excellent instruction in how to grow and process grains. Together, the two parts deliver a clear writing on the wall of how society can (and must) decentralize food production and thwart the dangerous monopolies that now threaten the food market.

---Gene Logsdon, author of The Eternal Garden

In Uprisings, McLeod and Simpson reveal not only their passion for locally grown food, and in particular grains, but a compelling case for home gardeners to think of grain crops as they do traditional garden vegetables. This book is filled with meticulously researched case histories that will prove invaluable to any smaller-scale farmer of grains. The authors manage to demystify these most basic of food crops with elegant descriptions and clear instructions. They provide a plan for all of us, from backyard gardeners to small organic growers, to discover for ourselves free and sustainable access to a commodity that industry might normally remove from our reach. In Uprisings, a new standard has been set on the topic of growing, harvesting, and processing grains, and the Field-to-Table movement is stronger because of this book.

---Mark Macdonald, West Coast Seeds

We’ve lost our way with raising grains, and Uprisings has come to put us back on the path to good health and honest self-sufficiency. With this book, Simpson and McLeod have gifted the reader with a tool chest of skills for resiliency and self-reliance that runs the gamut from the basics of heirloom grains to the value of community…with a wealth of solid how-to for small-scale local grain production in between.

---Richard Freudenberger, publisher, BackHome magazine, author Alcohol Fuel: Making and Using Ethanol as a Renewable Fuel