Micro Eco-Farming: Prospering from Backyard to Small Acreage in Partnership with the Earth

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Daniel Haynes, April 18, 2010 (view all comments by Daniel Haynes)
Short version: Beyond bad.

Long version: If you want specific and factual information on farming or gardening, this book won't provide it.

If you a handful of names of very delicious sounding heirloom vegetables, it's worth a very quick skim through.

Sadly, the bulk of the book is nonsense of the worst sort. New Age idiocy and superstitions heaped on top of the most ridiculous anecdotal "evidence". Not even an attempt at logical or rational analysis. Just lots of stuff like "We sprinkled sea water on our vegetables and got beets the size of soccer balls and suddenly no more colds or flu in our family". I'm serious, that's one of the claims made in the book. Not bad enough for you? How about the 83 trace elements from the periodic table that are "absolutely required" for healthy soil/plants were once "evenly distributed" over the Earth. If that doesn't reduce even a first year geology student to tears of laughter wait until she gets to the part about plants and animals "sending out signals over the airwaves" that they're unhealthy/dying and thereby attracting weeds and predators to themselves.

Don't even get me started when she babbles on about "holy water", "radionics" and "paramagnetics". I wish I were making that up folks, but it's in the book that I paid $12 for.

How/why she came to the decision to leave the term "New Age" out of the title I don't know but if she had, I wouldn't have had to write the bad review because I wouldn't have wasted my time or money on it.

The amount of factual information in the book is so limited that I can't recommend it to anyone. The only reason I gave it a 2 rating is that she cites several sources, a few of which are quite good and helpful. That plus the aforementioned handful of descriptions of some delicious sounding heirloom crops kept it from getting a 1.

What limited facts it does (apparently accidentally) include can be found in much more practical and reality oriented books like "Successful Small-Scale Farming: An Organic Approach" by Karl Schwenke.

I'm going to keep my copy of "Micro Eco-Farming". I'm not going to sell it cheap, give it away or try to trade it back to Powells. It's so bad that I couldn't in good conscience pass it on to anyone. The buck and the bad book stops here.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780963281432

Author:

Adams, Barbara Berst

Publisher:

New World Publishing

Author:

Berst Adams, Barbara

Location:

Auburn, Calif.

Subject:

General

Subject:

Organic gardening

Subject:

Industries - Agribusiness

Subject:

Agriculture - Crop Science

Subject:

Agriculture - Sustainable Agriculture

Subject:

TEC003030

Subject:

Agriculture-Sustainable Living

Copyright:

2005

Series Volume:

239

Publication Date:

20050731

Binding:

TRADE PAPER

Language:

English

Illustrations:

Y

Pages:

176

Dimensions:

8.98x6.06x.46 in. .64 lbs.