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As someone who has read the book but but is still not a huge Pollan fan, I'd like to offer some thoughts:

While the book does have a ton of info and I think it's a solid introduction to a lot of big topics that someone who is less well-read in ag might not have encountered, the book is obviously very biased. This isn't even a huge insult or anything and of course you can expect it from anyone writing about something controversial, but it's just that Pollan has very clear opinions which he sometimes states like they are facts.

I think he has a tendency to sensationalize and over-simplify, saying things like "by fertilizing the world, we alter the planet's composition and shrink its biodiversity." While this might be true in some ways, its obviously pretty negative, as if shrinking the earth's biodiversity is the only thing that fertilizer does. I bet a lot of the people on here could tell you some pretty positive things about fertilizer that help everybody farm and bring food to your table.

I honestly don't remember too many details about this, but I remember him praising local food very wholeheartedly and there are many reasons that I think eating local isn't the solution to problems in our food system. I could write a book about why this is true (and many have- check out for example Just Food or Locavore's Dilemma. I'm saying this as someone who use to think local food was automatically better than imported food and I genuinely have the long-term health of our planet at the top of my list. My dream is to have a huge permaculture garden. I love /r/BackYardChickens and /r/Permaculture. I am the leader of my school's environmental club and voted biggest tree hugger. I'm clearly not just opposing the "eat local" mindset because I'm a huge supporter of conventional agriculture or am interested more in profits than environmental sustainability. Sorry for the digression and sorry if I'm starting to preach/get defensive but I think that locavorism is pretty closed-minded, isolationist, in many ways ungrounded scientifically, and not to mention elitist.

Also, one of the reasons I prefer to read books on food/farming other than Pollan's is that his can be very philosophical and heady. I think this can definitely be very interesting sometimes but other times I just want to yell at him "Come back down to the real, practical world where the majority of the population lives!!" Take his newest book for example- Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation or whatever. Though I haven't read more than a few pages of it, I went and saw him give a talk about it and I understand one of his points is that cooking is one of the best things we can do for the environment/future of sustainable farming. How can this be helpful/practical at all if so much of the population is working all day and doesn't have the time to cook or the money to finance it or the desire to do it in the first place?? I guess this is what I'm really asking and what I think is more important: If cooking is so great for our health and the planet, how can we realistically get more people to do it? He may answer this in his book. I don't know. But for me at least, he often seems to put a lot of energy into things (like the central idea of Botany of Desire) which are more philosophical and less down-to-earth. It's interesting, but in my opinion it's not going to do much to solve problems with our food system. I don't really know if I'm describing my thoughts well here but I hope I am. That said, as I mentioned above, Omnivore's Dilemma (and what I've read of Cooked or his other books, seen in his talks, etc.) does have some cool and informative statistics. Still, these are just an intro and not the whole story at all.

Another simpler reason for the downvotes is just that so many people on /r/farming farm in the exact way that Pollan criticizes very harshly. I'm not taking sides at all, but it's a pretty big difference of opinion that divides everyone.

Sorry for the wall of text, hope this helps! Read Omnivore's Dilemma if you haven't but please please please do not have that be the only book on agriculture you read. Someone could just as easily have written a book that is just as convincing as Omnivore's Dilemma but takes the opposite side, praising and showing the amazing accomplishments of conventional ag.

Final note- As a rule of thumb, I like to be a little wary of best-sellers, NY Times or otherwise. Consider what sells and what people want to hear. The theoretical book I described above which explains all the advancements in conventional ag and argues that our current agricultural model is already awesome in a bunch of ways isn't going to sell at all. Criticism and bad news is easy to write and easy to sell!

PS Sorry if I sound like I think I know everything and that I'm right about everything because I know this isn't true. I just get excited about my strong opinions sometimes. Also as I said I haven't read Omnivore's Dilemma for a while or most of Pollans' other books at all. Hope this helps, though!

Don't grow feed. You might think it's expensive, but you'll never break even compared to the cost of buying the feed. The reality is that the corn growing industry is HIGHLY efficient, and the perceived "high cost" of the feed is actually much lower than the real cost of the industry producing that corn, due to various subsidies in crop insurance and an overall approach to keeping prices low and stable.

In my opinion, with the very very small amount of acreage you have, you have very few options for turning the land into a legitimate profit.

Your two options that are high enough in density/intensity to make the work, organization and logistics worth the effort are hogs for meat, and chickens for meat and or eggs, and even in this case, I'd suggest a focus on meat chickens, as broilers are much more intensive, and a good layer operation (if you're looking at the premium, affective market) is much more extensive.

You can pick up a book by Joel Salatin, "Pastured Poltry Profits" if you haven't already read this.

If you want to do this, your acreage is a bit under the amount that he suggests for a full time vocation (20 acres), but enough that you could make a substantial operation, and depending on your location, you might get a longer/larger season. My weather is a bit harsh, and in many ways it makes poultry production a pain. If you live somewhere with very mild weather, or somewhere relatively hot and dry, but with access to irrigation that keeps your grass growing for a much longer season, you might be able to approach the volume that Salatin is suggesting on smaller acreage, but you should include more info so we can help you better.

I'd suggest you work on primarily:

Curb Appeal - the small space you have, which is really just a big yard, hardly even worthy of being called a homestead traditionally, let alone a production farm, means that you need to squeeze every bit you can out of each square foot to make production profitable. Making your hole operation pretty means that you can get customers to irrationally associate the visual appeal of your operation with a host of other assumptions about the happiness of the animals, the quality of care you provide them etc. This isn't immoral. People WANT this out of their farms, because they are neat city folk, and they want to feel comfortable and not have their standards questioned. Pigs want a muddy pit and gross slop. They don't care how it looks, but people will be happier eating pork that came from a pretty farm, so play to that, not to what the animals need. Having a pig hut that you move around from small pig pasture to small pig pasture that looks like a miniature red barn might seem dumb, and the pigs wont care, but many customers will LOVE it, especially if the visual appeal of your property creates photo ops. Play to that market demand.

Overlapping systems of production - Salatin raises rabbits, which produce potent manure, and he stacks his rabbit operation literally vertically on top of a laying hen operation. The hens scratch through the bedding below the rabbits, and they help turn the manure into useful fertilizer, and keep the operation smelling relatively mild. He also grazes cattle on the same fields he runs chickens on, and turkeys on. This vertical stacking increases the economic activity per acre, and your small parcel demands this kind of stacking. Think about ways you can use the same space for multiple things throughout the year.

Affective Experiences - Customers want emotional value in the things they buy from small farms. Cutesy bullshit to a farmer is gold to a non-farmer customer. Silly signs, heart warming blurbs and product descriptions, chances to get their hands minorly dirty in some of the production work in a non challenging way. People want a narrative about the farm their products come from, and they want to make memories/come away with stories about the experience. Since you don't have a large property, you can focus on combining the visual appeal with things that help create these opportunities. Consider teaching classes on things like making pickles/jam, harvesting honey, making cheese. You might even be able to teach them about a thing you don't even have space to do on your farm. Maybe you pair with a local farm that does have a large number of apiaries, and you do a class that involves a "field trip," to the neighbor and a meeting with a bee keeper.

People want these experiences, and a shockingly low amount of information and expertise is needed to impress them. You already know a huge amount more than most city folks, and they will pay what seems like a ludicrous amount of money to get a taste of the things that you consider mundane.

Good luck!

Also, remember, share some more info about zones, what your neighbors are up to, how far away you are from a major city/town that gets a lot of seasonal tourism, etc if you want us to be able to help you more.

I'll also point out that a lot of the guys here are "real farmers," in the sense that they are row croppers, growing corn, soy, wheat, rape, rice, etc. They are working hundreds to thousands of acres, and what they are doing is very different from what you're trying to do. You might get more applicable expertise in like a homesteading/backyard chickens/permaculture forum than you will here.

Welcome axxx. I am on similar acreage and also grow organic vegetables. I'm going into my second season and I'm making many changes after all the mistakes I made last year! It's great to hear that there is a community of farmers helping each other out. We got many seeds in last week as well and put them under fluorescents in the basement. I am striving to create a sustainable farm.

Here are some resources if you don't know of them:

National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service -http://attra.ncat.org/

Excellent science based gardening book that has made me update my practices - http://www.amazon.com/Teaming-Microbes-Organic-Gardeners-Revised/dp/1604691131/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301667399&sr=1-1

Do you know these guys? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSvLkh5oOsY&feature=related No-till is less energy intensive and makes the soil healthier. I am going to be experimenting with it this year.

How many years have you been after it? Would love to discuss farming anytime. Glad to have you.

/r/homesteading/ would be a good resource for you.

Check out the book You Can Farm by Joel Salatin

Check out ATTRA

I takes a lot of work and lots of skills to farm. It takes even more to break even at it. The odds of success are very low. But people can succeed.

Good Luck!

*edit
subtracted a picture of a delicious cookie. :(

There's a good book by John Hudson on the topic, called Making the Corn Belt.. There he talks about how older societies used it, and the steady growth of corn as feed to corn as a commodity produced for mass market consumption (which started in earnest around the mid-19th century in Illinois). It wasn't really until the 19-teens that monocropping corn became the truly dominant form of agriculture in the Corn Belt, at least per his book.

My god. That is the most delusional and disingenuous thought process I've heard in awhile. Do yourself a favor and read these fantastic books before you belief system destroys the United States of America: Capitalism and Freedom, Why Government Is the Problem and Basic Economics.

Bonus points I think you hit almost every liberal regurgitated talking points.

Read the book "Teaming with Microbes" it is by far the best book on organic gardening I have ever read. You can get it through Multnomah County library.

Also, hit me up if you want to use my compost tea brewer or need some help with planting/planning/harvesting (I live in SE).

Oh well for soil this is my favorite suggestion: http://www.amazon.com/Soil-Science-Simplified-Helmut-Kohnke/dp/0881338133

The reason I mentioned finding out what is normally or traditionally grown there is that those are the kinds of plants that are going to be easiest to grow there. This region looks straight up tropical, which means that reading sources that are meant for temperate regions with temperate region problems may not help you out too much. Growing plants has a huuuuuge local aspect about it, you want to tap into local knowledge. That's why people are recommending the local universities, if that makes sense.

There was a good article on flexible leases similar to jdutch's suggestion. You can also check out the book Getting to Yes about negotiating concepts.

I think everyone's heard about how high corn prices have been, that makes landowners start seeing dollar signs. Offer him a cut of those giant profits and you might go a long way to appease him.

Put together a couple hypothetical situations, large yield, low yield, emphasize the input costs, and show him what he would get in the different situations under the current agreement or some flexible lease. Also emphasize how you know the land and take care of it. The person whose going to pay the highest is just going to use it for whatever he can get out of it, and leave the land depleted of nutrients when he's done.

Just the ramblings of some random internet stranger.

A hundred years ago, two or three so-called "water barons" systematically bought up most of the state's water rights from the small private farmers and ranchers who owned the watershed. (See: "Chinatown," "Cadillac Desert," "The King of California,") and ran their extensive agricultural domains as fiefdoms. Those landowners who hesitated, were "convinced" by tactics legal and (often) otherwise.

In order for the state to grow (and food to grow, for that matter) huge political concessions, purchased legislators, and much smarmy backroom dealing ensued, as the state's water sources and aquifers were divvied up into water "districts" owned, leased, traded, and sold by private entities and their heirs. (Obviously, where there is no water, there can be no industry or housing.)

From them today, the counties, municipalities and private developers purchase water (a public resource,) all of which-- including the infrastructure to deliver it-- is paid for by public taxes and levies. The problem now arises because of poor management, over-allotment, and rampant cronyism in both D.C. and Sacramento.

The rice farmers (who are not farmers at all but huge multinational holding companies owned by one of the families,) cut a deal with the state back in 1974(?) to get first dibs (at ridiculously low rates-- like zero--) to water (from San Francisco!) the rest of the district pays through the nose for, all delivered by publicly-financed and maintained levee system and aqueduct. Perhaps not so eqregious a use of a public resource in time of plentiful rains, but extortionate during drought such as this.

The California water wars were and are a fascinating tale of greed, monopoly and corruption. If you'd like to delve further, I highly recommend this excellent account of its modern origins.

Forrest Pritchard's Gaining Ground is just about to be released you can pre-order it now.

note: I am an apprentice for Forrest but I have read the book and it is an amazing read. It covers a lot of his early mistakes and talks about how to make a go at being a profitable organic farmer.

The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-scale Organic Farming https://www.amazon.com/dp/0865717656/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fzm-ybSPDRHKH

It is Arabidopsis. Anyone who farms in the western us should get this book, it is a very helpful reference.
http://www.amazon.com/Weeds-West-Tom-D-Whitson/dp/0756711827/ref=pd_sim_b_4/181-9259276-8260968?ie=UTF8&refRID=1T8PXM4H80XWMSET9FQY


Or if you really want to be nerdy you can use the same book I had to use in school. http://www.amazon.com/Flora-Pacific-Northwest-Illustrated-Manual/dp/0295952733

EDIT: Grammar

You might want to check out Gaining Ground by Forrest Pritchard to learn what it takes to handle a cattle farm & try to be profitable.

If you haven't read Tomorrow's Table I highly recommend doing so. Balance of approach is the future agriculture.

If the barn is wired there are plugins https://smile.amazon.com/JALL-Ultrasonic-Control-Electric-Repellent-Cockroach-No/dp/B07J9YDKSQ/ref=sr_1_5?s=lawn-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1542310253&sr=1-5&keywords=mouse+repellent

This story would fit right in with countless stories provided by Joel Salatin in his book "Everything I want to do is Illegal"

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-Do-Illegal-Stories/dp/0963810952/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493743855&sr=8-1&keywords=everything+I+want+to+do+is+illegal