Carving Out a Living on the Land

Starred review from May 20, 2019
Van Driesche’s charmingly pragmatic account of running a Christmas tree farm in Western Massachusetts with his wife, Cecilia, resembles a mini-MBA for farmers in its breadth and depth of insight. With in-the-field lessons on pricing, negotiations, and brand management, the book also holds more usable advice for the small business owner than many dedicated business manuals. Perhaps most valuable are Van Driesche’s stories of the resilience and flexibility his work required. As he observes, he and his wife were interested in farming, but never set out to work a Christmas tree farm. Similarly, they thought they’d own their land, but found leasing made more sense. Van Driesche finds in the, perhaps unpromising, subject of spoon-carving an illustrative example of “the farmer’s ingenuity” as he recounts his discovery that the craft provides a “good way to keep hands in shape for the harvesting and tying of wreaths,” “uses up wood, an excess resource,” and “can be done while keeping an eye on a growing family.” Filled with a practical and open-minded approach to problem-solving that agrarians and urbanites alike will find refreshing, Van Driesche’s book provides an invigorating paean to seizing opportunities, finding one’s strengths, and working hard.