Book details

  • Genre:travel
  • Sub-genre:General
  • Language:English
  • Pages:364
  • eBook ISBN:9798317852023

Farm Country Chronicles

Across five continents, a journalist’s memoir tells tales of rural life in an ever-changing world.

Overview

Farm Country Chronicles takes us to places we've never been and introduces us to people we'd never otherwise meet. In a two thousand-year-old village in China's Hebei province, we encounter an aging farmer who is proud of the hogs he sells to neighbors and the apples he ships to America. He fears that he will be the last generation of his ancient family to farm. But, in this moment, he is content. In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, we meet a young farmer whose ancestors have tilled this land for nine generations. He also worries that he might be the last of his family to farm. But he has always wanted to be a farmer, and he will fight to save that dream. In rural America, we shake hands with the world's strongest farmer and watch cocky kids learn to ride rodeo bulls. We enter the eccentric world of farm show extravaganzas and learn what Louisiana shrimpers and Iowa corn farmers have in common. Journalist Jim Patrico brings together the interconnected lives of farmers across five continents. With vivid prose and a deep respect for the people he visited, Patrico tells simple tales of a complex world that is changing by the day. Part sociologist, part historian and part anthropologist, he fills the pages of Farm Country Chronicles with humanity and humor while exploring agriculture's 21st century challenges. This new memoir extends the trail Patrico broke in Dispatches From Farm Country, a 2024 memoir that earned five-star reviews. Except this time, Patrico's reporting takes us to Africa, Asia, Europe and South America as he tells first-person stories of real farmers around the globe. Chapter by chapter, this book reminds us that farming is the essential profession upon which society depends. And we spend time with the people who make it possible.
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Description

Farm Country Chronicles takes us to places we've never been and introduces us to people we'd never otherwise meet. In a two thousand-year-old village in China's Hebei province, we encounter an aging farmer who is proud of the hogs he sells to neighbors and the apples he ships to America. He fears that he will be the last generation of his ancient family to farm. But, in this moment, he is content. In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, we meet a young farmer whose ancestors have tilled this land for nine generations. He also worries that he might be the last of his family to farm. But he has always wanted to be a farmer, and he will fight to save that dream. In rural America, we shake hands with the world's strongest farmer and watch cocky kids learn to ride rodeo bulls. We enter the eccentric world of farm show extravaganzas and learn what Louisiana shrimpers and Iowa corn farmers have in common. Journalist Jim Patrico brings together the interconnected lives of farmers across five continents. With vivid prose and a deep respect for the people he visited, Patrico tells simple tales of a complex world that is changing by the day. Part sociologist, part historian and part anthropologist, he fills the pages of Farm Country Chronicles with humanity and humor while exploring agriculture's 21st century challenges. This new memoir extends the trail Patrico broke in Dispatches From Farm Country, a 2024 memoir that earned five-star reviews. Except this time, Patrico's reporting takes us to Africa, Asia, Europe and South America as he tells first-person stories of real farmers around the globe. Chapter by chapter, this book reminds us that farming is the essential profession upon which society depends. And we spend time with the people who make it possible.
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About The Author

Jim Patrico has spent more than 40 years traveling two-lane roads, gravel roads and no roads at all across America and on five continents to interview and photograph farmers and ranchers going about their jobs and raising their families. As a native of the suburbs, he brings fresh eyes to farm culture and has learned to appreciate its wonderful simplicity and to understand its enigmatic complications. Unlike most journalists who write about rural America from afar, Patrico embedded himself in the culture. He moved his family from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Plattsburg, Missouri, a town so small it has no stoplight. (Well, it used to have a blinking yellow caution light. But the state took it away when the highway department concluded Plattsburg did not have enough traffic to justify the light's existence. That's the way things sometimes work in rural America.) As a freelance photojournalist and a senior editor for two national farm publications, Patrico received a Henry R. Luce Special Citation (2002) for public service reporting from Time Inc. He was named Agricultural Journalist of the Year by the North American Agricultural Journalist (2012). He is a Master Writer and Writer of Merit for the American Agricultural Editors Association (now Ag Communicators Network). He was named Photographer of the Year for that same organization nine times. He earned two Oscars in Agriculture from the University of Illinois. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism with an emphasis on photojournalism. He is the author of two commissioned book, one about taxes, the other a history of photo use by farm magazines. In 2024 he published a memoir, Dispatches From Farm Country.
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