Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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"Farmer Jane" by Temra Costa, the Book
http://www.farmerjane.org/book.html
http://www.farmerjane.org/book-women.html

    Women are passionate advocates for sustainable food and farming and have 
been changing the way America eats and farms for decades. Farmer Jane tells 
30 such stories of some exceptional women leaders that are working on this 
change by farming, educating, advocating, and/or transforming how we eat 
through their food businesses.

    But it’s not just about being a woman. (Stay with me here.) It’s about 
the impact that femininity has in changing businesses for the better. Women 
lean towards relationships and long-term strategies that prioritize future 
generations, and the good news is that this viewpoint is starting to become 
valued in the emerging green economy. It’s all about systems thinking and 
perspectives of what the new (triple) bottom line should be – that of 
environment, people, and prosperity (health, and economic). Beyond their role 
in shifting business, women are raising the next generation of leaders, of 
farmers, of gardeners, of aware human beings that will care for this place 
long after we’re gone.

    Meet the Women of Farmer JaneThis book is not just a celebration of the 
profiled women, but of all women that vote for sustainability every time they 
shop, eat, farm, and advocate for change. The biggest hope for this book is 
that you’ll be inspired to do the same.

    WHAT SUSTAINABILITY LEADERS ARE SAYING ABOUT THE BOOK:

        Temra Costa is a tireless advocate for small-scale and sustainable 
farming in California.  It is through this work that she has met and worked 
with the collection of inspiring, unrelenting women featured in this book.  
Farmer Jane is a work about good stewardship of the land and it is a joy to 
see so many peers, colleagues and friends honored in this wonderful anthology.

        -- Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse and author of The Art of 
Simple Food


        They say women hold up half the sky. They also hold down half the 
farms. Temra Costa's look at the growing sisterhood of women farmers and land 
activists is a revelation. Full of passionate, eccentric, off-the-chart 
kitchen visionaries, these resilient and outrageous women light the path for 
us to think about who is growing the food we eat and how they tend to the 
land and their communities. Even if you never thought of farming, or even 
gardening, it's full of tips on how to eat well, and make your community 
thrive.

        -- NPR's Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva)


        As night and day are fundamental to our survival, the leadership of 
women is absolutely essential if we are to have a livable and sustained 
planet earth. With respect to agriculture and sustenance, the 20th century 
has been called the 'locust years,' a time when the industrial logic of 
machinery and chemicals supplanted the mythos of life and stripped away 
complex webs of family farms under the moniker of husbandry. Farmer Jane 
heralds a growing "womandry" movement that restores people, place, and 
nurturance back into the heart of our culture. It is a scrumptiously written 
testament to the role of women in bringing back the life of our soils and 
daily fare— a roll call of pathfinders, a heralding description of how women 
are stepping forward to cultivate biological farming, vibrant communities, 
and meaningful livelihoods.

        -- Paul Hawken, author, Blessed Unrest


        The sustainable food movement is largely a women's movement--women 
run many of the farms, staff the non-profits, provide the vital intellectual 
and physical energy that propels the movement forward. This has been a 
largely untold story--and Costa has provided a critical corrective by 
documenting, at long last, to the massive contribution women have made to 
transforming our food system.

        -- Tom Philpott, Food editor, Grist; co-founder, Maverick Farms


        "Personal, political, practical and powerful, Farmer Jane is 
beautiful field-guide to the future paths of the food movement. It works so 
well because it brings together everyone from farm worker organizers to fresh 
food activists and, with wit and wisdom, sparks the conversations and 
concrete actions that we'll need to transform our food system together. A 
wonderful book."

        --  Raj Patel, New York Times Bestselling Author of Value of Nothing 
and Stuffed and Starved


        In these crisp, vivid pages, noted food activist Temra Costa 
introduces us to the women who are tilling the ground for a healthier, more 
sustainable future.  Their stories are inspiring and important: the answers 
to our industrial food disaster are all here, if we'll only listen.

        -- Christopher D. Cook, author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big 
Business and the Coming Food Crisis.