Achieve your back-to-the-land dreams without breaking the bank 
 Build your homesteading dreams with all the affordable DIY innovations, tips, and stories you need to successfully launch you on a path to self-sufficiency. Raise and grow your own food, connect with nature, and consume less while producing more! 
 The Frugal Homesteader is a fun, inspirational, and educational guide filled with a lifetime of learning that comes along with becoming a homesteader. Following dozens of successful families who have been motivated to make do, make new, and make more while saving money and living off the land, this book covers such topics as: 
<ul>
<li> Outfitting your garden </li>
<li> Equipping your barn and outbuildings </li>
<li> Protecting and providing for your animals </li>
<li> Harvesting rainwater </li>
<li> Heating with wood </li>
<li> Foraging </li>
<li> Producing more of what you need to thrive in harder times. </li>
</ul>
 Whether you're just starting out and looking for new, sustainable, and affordable ideas, approaches, and techniques, or you're a small-scale farmer in regenerative agriculture, The Frugal Homesteader is the DIY manual to help you succeed.

The Frugal Homesteader: Living the Good Life on Less

Moody, John

Salatin, Joel

Parenting & Relationships

New Society Publishers

The gospel teaches that every human is sacred. Refugee children and Islamist terrorists. Police officers and young African Americans. Unborn babies, always, and also abortionists. Orange-haired casino owners, former First Ladies, progressive hipsters, prosperity-gospel televangelists, members of Congress, Confederate-flag-waving white nationalists? Sacred. This absurd claim is at the heart of the gospel. Each person is created in the image and likeness of God. Each is someone for whom Jesus died. And if this is true, we have much work to do. The writers in this issue may not agree on the best ways and means, but each challenges us to consider the implications of this gospel of life that makes no exceptions.Also in this issue:-- A former asylum seeker returns to Iraq to stand with Christians on the run from ISIS.-- Shane Claiborne tells us why abolishing the death penalty is the church’s business.-- Joel Salatin, America’s most famous farmer, reveals what pigs can teach us about the glory of God.-- John Dear reports on the Vatican’s historic turn toward nonviolence.-- Erna Albertz tells Richard Dawkins how her sister with Down syndrome can help him.-- Gun owners respond to gun violence with a fresh take on “swords into plowshares.”-- Ron Sider looks at the consistently pro-life witness of the early church.-- A hospice nurse reflects on euthanasia and the value of being a burden.-- Jason Landsel asks what made MohammadMuhammad Ali great.Then there’s new poetry, book reviews, a children’s story, insights from Pope Francis and George MacDonald, and art by Pawel Kuczynski, Xenia Hausner, William H. Johnson, Käthe Kollwitz, and Deidre Scherer.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus’ message into practice and find common cause with others.

Plough Quarterly No. 10: What Makes Humans Sacred? (Plough Quarterly, 10)

Reference

Claiborne, Shane

Yousif, Yacoub

Dear, John

Sider, Ron

Douglass, Shelley

Albertz, Erna

Mielke, Rober

Fouch, Steven

Encyclopedias & Subject Guides

Plough Publishing House

From farmer Joel Salatin's point of view, life in the 21st century just ain't normal. In FOLKS, THIS AIN'T NORMAL, he discusses how far removed we are from the simple, sustainable joy that comes from living close to the land and the people we love. Salatin has many thoughts on what normal is and shares practical and philosophical ideas for changing our lives in small ways that have big impact. Salatin, hailed by the New York Times as "Virginia's most multifaceted agrarian since Thomas Jefferson [and] the high priest of the pasture" and profiled in the Academy Award nominated documentary Food, Inc. and the bestselling book The Omnivore's Dilemma, understands what food should be: Wholesome, seasonal, raised naturally, procured locally, prepared lovingly, and eaten with a profound reverence for the circle of life. And his message doesn't stop there. From child-rearing, to creating quality family time, to respecting the environment, Salatin writes with a wicked sense of humor and true storyteller's knack for the revealing anecdote. Salatin's crucial message and distinctive voice--practical, provocative, scientific, and down-home philosophical in equal measure--make FOLKS, THIS AIN'T NORMAL a must-read book.

Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Center Street

A couple working six months per year for 50 hours per week on 20 acres can net $25,000-$30,000 per year with an investment equivalent to the price of one new medium-sized tractor. Seldom has agriculture held out such a plum. In a day when main-line farm experts predict the continued demise of the family farm, the pastured poultry opportunity shines like a beacon in the night, guiding the way to a brighter future.

Pastured Poultry Profit$

Business & Money

Industries

Polyface

In a day when beef is assailed by many environmental organizations and lauded by fast-food chains, a new paradigm to bring reason to this confusion is in order. With farmers leaving the land in droves and plows poised to "reclaim" set-aside acres, it is time to offer an alternative that is both land and farmer friendly. Beyond that, the salad bar beef production model offers hope to rural communities, to struggling row-crop farmers, and to frustrated beef eaters who do not want to encourage desertification, air and water pollution, environmental degradation and inhumane animal treatment. Because this is a program weighted toward creativity, management, entrepreneurism and observation, it breathes fresh air into farm economics.

Salad Bar Beef

Engineering & Transportation

Engineering

Saving the landscape, rebuilding entrepreneurial rural families, and protecting nutritious food are the themes of this timeless treatise-hence the word "testament." Delving into the soul of the Salatin family's nationally acclaimed Polyface Farm, author Joel Salatin offers Family Friendly Farming as the key to dealing with resource issues, food policy, and social fabric. With humor and personal stories, he opens his family and farm convictions for all to see, share, and enjoy. Written from his unabashed "Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist" perspective, his ideas are guaranteed to encourage and challenge virtually every "ism" in the culture. It will captivate anyone passionate about healing the land, healing families, and healing the food supply. For several decades young people have been leaving the family farm. The ones left behind are now responsible for society's greatest resources: clean land and clean food. Anyone dedicated to preserving these resources will find in these pages a nongovernmental, self-empowerment approach to environmentalism and food safety. The heart of this book is aimed toward parents tired of their Dilbert cubicle at the end of the expressway who want to reconnect with their children through a pastoral lifestyle. It's written for anyone who yearns to grow old working with and being adored by value-sharing grandchildren and honored by passionate, productive adult children. Family Friendly Farming can make any family business more viable and any family more functional. The ten-chapter section on how to get the kids to love the farm is an invaluable addition to any collection of child-rearing manuals. Salatin moves from the family team-building section into a practical discussion on how to increase income per acre and create new, white-collar salaries without buying more land, equipment, or buildings. He deals with the unique and thorny issues surrounding any family business by using his own multi-generational family farm experience as his base for insight and wisdom.

Family Friendly Farming: A Multi-Generational Home-Based Business Testament

Economics

Holy Cows and Hog Heaven is written by an honest-to-goodness-dirt-under-the-fingernails, optimistic clean good farmer. His goal is to: <ul>
<li>Empower food buyers to pursue positive alternatives to the industrialized food system</li> <li>Bring clean food farmers and their patrons into a teamwork relationship</li> <li>Marry the best of western technology with the soul of eastern ethics</li> <li>Educate food buyers about productions</li> <li>Create a food system that enhances nature's ecology for future generations</li> </ul>
Holy Cows and Hog Heaven has an overriding objective of encouraging every food buyer to embrace the notion that menus are a conscious decision, creating the next generation's world one bite at a time.

Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm Friendly Food

Drawing upon 40 years' experience as an ecological farmer and marketer, Joel Salatin explains with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat. From child labor regulations to food inspection, bureaucrats provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin's expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex.

Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front

Foodies and environmentally minded folks often struggle to understand and articulate the fundamental differences between the farming and food systems they endorse and those promoted by Monsanto and friends. With visceral stories and humor from Salatin's half-century as a "lunatic" farmer, Salatin contrasts the differences on many levels: practical, spiritual, social, economic, ecological, political, and nutritional. In today's conventional food-production paradigm, any farm that is open-sourced, compost-fertilized, pasture-based, portably-infrastructured, solar-driven, multi-speciated, heavily peopled, and soil-building must be operated by a lunatic. Modern, normal, reasonable farmers erect "No Trespassing" signs, deplete soil, worship annuals, apply petroleum-based chemicals, produce only one commodity, erect Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, and discourage young people from farming. Anyone looking for ammunition to defend a more localized, solar-driven, diversified food system will find an entire arsenal in these pages. With wit and humor honed during countless hours working on the farm he loves, and then interacting with conventional naysayers, Salatin brings the land to life, farming to sacredness, and food to ministry. Divided into four main sections, the first deals with principles to nurture the earth, an idea mainline farming has never really endorsed. The second section describes food and fiber production, including the notion that most farmers don't care about nutrient density or taste because all they want is shipability and volume. The third section, titled "Respect for Life," presents an apologetic for food sacredness and farming as a healing ministry. Only lunatics would want less machinery and pathogenicity. Oh, the ecstasy of not using drugs or paying bankers. How sad. The final section deals with promoting community, including the notion that more farmers would be a good thing.

The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer

Literature & Fiction

Literary

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Books by Salatin, Joel