PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...a cleareyed and unsentimental look at how farming has become relentlessly optimized by automation, markets and politics ... Hammond, with his cowboy hat and thousand-yard stare, can feel like an archetype, but Meghan, his daughter, is a more raw personality. Funny and salty, she’s fully aware that farming is a gamble in which the house always wins, but she is still eager to embrace the incredibly complex skills of the modern farmer ... When Genoways moves away from the subject of the Hammonds, he writes with authority on plant breeding, water rights and, in a particularly interesting example, Henry Ford’s early evangelizing for soy as an ingredient for car parts, an initiative that led Fortune to write, 'There is a bushel of soya beans in every Ford car.' Sometimes, though, we end up in the weeds. A long section about irrigation, for example, overwhelms with technical details and historical arcana.
