Food Tyrants

Our basic right to healthy food is at risk. What can we do?Written in an astute, engaging style, armed with examples from her own homesteading lifestyle, small farmer Nicole Faires gives you the tools to fight the intangible battles, as well as the practical ones.When author and homesteader Nicole Faires decided to retrofit an old school bus and tour America’s small farms with her husband and two small children, she expected to learn a lot, be inspired, and have some fun. But what she found disturbed her. Mismanaged small farms; clueless urbanites setting up shop to “get back to the land”; a mindless devotion to organic farming; and, ultimately, the discovery of just how dependent we are on corporations for our food.She began to understand how dangerous and fragile our food system really is. Climate change. Farmers retiring or going out of business. Corporations controlling our food distribution system while being protected from the consequences when they endanger our health. Skyrocketing food prices. Outsourced food production. With this admittedly bleak assessment of the current state of affairs, Nicole and her family decided to abandon the bus trip and instead start a farm. “I couldn’t tell people the solutions to our food crisis while I was traipsing around America taking photos. I had to live it,” Nicole says.

Having walked the talk for the better part of her life, [Nicole's] no neophyte to the nitty-gritty business of building a solar oven, tending sick calves, or making your own soap.

Nicole Faires is an adventurer, self-proclaimed eccentric, wife, and mother of three girls. She grew up in a semi-nomadic homeschooling family and spent her early years in rural Montana on a hobby farm where she raised chickens, grew her own food, learned to crochet, read out-of-print books by Masanobu Fukuoka, and dreamed of the Amish. She is the author of The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading and The Ultimate Guide to Permaculture and continues to seek new adventures and local food with her family in beautiful British Columbia.