This Blessed Earth

Winner of the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize
2019 selection for the One Book One Nebraska and All Iowa state reading programs

"Genoways gives the reader a kitchen-table view of the vagaries, complexities, and frustrations of modern farming…Insightful and empathetic." ―Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, and yet its future is in peril. Rick Hammond grew up on a farm, and for forty years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation homestead in Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their family farm―and their entire way of life―are under siege on many fronts, from shifting trade policies, to encroaching pipelines, to climate change. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores the rapidly changing world of small, traditional farming operations. He creates a vivid, nuanced portrait of a radical new landscape and one family’s fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.

SKU 7709. Copyright 2017, Hardcover, 226.

About the Author 

Ted Genoways is an award-winning poet, journalist, and editor. In addition to This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm (Norton, 2017), he is the author of two books of poems and the nonfiction books The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food (Harper, 2014) and Walt Whitman and the Civil War (California, 2009). Genoways is a contributing writer at Mother Jones and The New Republic, as well as editor-at-large at Pacific Standard. His work has appeared in Harper's, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and the Washington Post Book World. He is a winner of a National Press Club Award and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and he has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. He edited the Virginia Quarterly Review from 2003 to 2012, during which time the magazine won six National Magazine Awards. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife and son. Find him online at www.tedgenoways.com.