Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>]

Hannelore Sudermann
Staff writer
            Jesse Tinsley - The Spokesman-Review
            Mary Jane Butters, who runs an organic farm and publishes a 
magazine called MaryJanesFarm, has signed a $1 million, two-book deal.



MOSCOW, Idaho _ A local organic farmer known for promoting her own style of 
simple, wholesome living, just signed a $1 million, two-book deal.

Mary Jane Butters's two tomes will be printed by Clarkson Potter, a 
publishing branch of Random House that specializes in illustrated lifestyle 
books including Martha Stewart's cookbooks and Paul Allen Smith's gardening 
guides.

Butters' first book, "Mary Jane's Gathering Place," is scheduled to be 
published in Spring 2005. The second is tentatively due out in 2006.

Butters, 50, has come a long way from the day 18 years ago when she bought 
her five-acre farm on Paradise Ridge south of Moscow. She started growing 
organic produce, then branched out into camping food made with crops that 
didn't require pesticides. The farm grew into a business and people turned to 
her to learn organic techniques, sometimes traveling to her land to sample 
farm life.

Though she still gardens daily and is regularly followed around her property 
by a bevy of Rhode Island reds, her interests have taken her beyond food 
crops and into flowers, crafts, art, and advice. A respected friend 
encouraged her to compile her ideas about wholesome living into a book.

"I thought, a book? I'm not a writer," she said.

But tapping into her domestic ideas over the past year and a half, Butters 
has produced three issues of MaryJanesFarm, a lifestyle magazine and catalog 
for the organic foods she produces. Butters does much of the writing and 
photography herself.

A friend passed on her magazines to an agent who urged her to put a book 
proposal together. So Butters took several months and amassed 40 pages of 
concept, contents and personal history.

The agent shopped the proposal around to publishers this summer. "A wonderful 
thing happened," said Butters. "The publishing houses started bidding."

Among those interested was Pam Krauss, vice president at Clarkson Potter.

"There is definitely a growing trend toward more wholesome living, and I 
think Mary Jane is ahead of the curve with her magazine," said Krauss in a 
prepared statement. "We know women like to get together and share ideas and 
that they are looking for a simpler, healthier way of life.

"Mary Jane offers the wisdom and knowledge from our mothers' and 
grandmothers' eras that have been lost to a younger generation of women 
today."

Butters was familiar with the publishing house and welcomed their offer.

"They do beautiful illustrated books," she said. "And my dream is to do an 
illustrated book."

She plans to plumb some of her magazine ideas and then go beyond.

"I want to visit with women and share their projects with the world," she 
said. "I want it to be a manual. I want to show all those home-ec type of 
skills that have gone out of fashion."

Cooking, health, gardening, sewing and common sense, "it will be about 
everything from making slipcovers to how to raise a pig," she said.

Butters has definite ideas about the finished product.

"I want it to have a wire bind so it says open when you're working on a 
project," she said. "And I don't want it to be expensive. I want women to be 
able to afford it."

Butters knows about money. Farming has good years and bad, she said. "This 
year we had a rough winter. It was a white-knuckle ride with the weather and 
the economy."

Money from the book deal will pay the bills. It will also pay for a new 
camera, which she'll use to document her farm life for the books.

Butters, who writes whenever an idea strikes her -- day or night -- hopes to 
get her work to the publisher next spring. For her, writing a book is simply 
another way to share her enthusiasm and interests.

"I'm not a writer with a lot of cleverness," she said. "I just tell stories."