This Blessed Earth
A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm
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Narrated by:
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Christopher Solimene
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By:
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Ted Genoways
About this listen
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 40 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 small family farm - and their entire way of life - are under siege.
Beyond the threat posed by rising corporate ownership of land and livestock, the Hammonds are confronted by encroaching pipelines, groundwater depletion, climate change, the fickle demands of the marketplace, and shifting trade policies.
Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores the rapidly changing world of small, traditional farming operations. He creates a vivid and nuanced portrait of a radically new landscape and one family's fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.
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Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.
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Somehow the author manages to stay balanced
- By Emily C on 05-28-14
By: Russell Gold
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The Good Food Revolution
- Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities
- By: Will Allen, Charles Wilson - with, Eric Schlosser - foreword
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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A pioneering urban farmer and MacArthur "Genius Award" winner points the way to building a new food system that can feed - and heal - broken communities. An eco-classic in the making, The Good Food Revolution is the story of Will's personal journey, the lives he has touched, and a grassroots movement that is changing the way our nation eats.
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This story teaches how to take back the soil
- By Shawn Borup on 11-09-19
By: Will Allen, and others
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Running Out
- In Search of Water on the High Plains
- By: Lucas Bessire
- Narrated by: John Chancer
- Length: 6 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.
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Water is life, so….
- By Caroline Pufalt on 11-29-21
By: Lucas Bessire
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Farmageddon
- The True Cost of Cheap Meat
- By: Philip Lymbery, Isabel Oakeshott
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Farm animals have been disappearing from our fields as the production of food has become a global industry. We no longer know for certain what is entering the food chain and what we are eating - as the UK horsemeat scandal demonstrated. We are reaching a tipping point as the farming revolution threatens our countryside, health, and the quality of our food wherever we live in the world.
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Excellent insight of industrial farming
- By Grazyna on 04-19-14
By: Philip Lymbery, and others
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Enough
- Why the World's Poorest Starve in An Age of Plenty
- By: Roger Thurow, Scott Kilman
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than 30 years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the Green Revolution succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every yearmost of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.
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It's Time For Us To Be More Compassionate
- By James on 07-18-10
By: Roger Thurow, and others
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Windfall
- The Booming Business of Global Warming
- By: McKenzie Funk
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Global warming's physical impacts can be separated into three broad categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Funk travels to two dozen countries to profile entrepreneurial people who see a potential windfall in each of these forces. The melt is a boon for newly arable, mineral rich regions of the Arctic, such as Greenland - and for the man-made snow trade. Drought creates opportunities for private firefighters working for insurance companies as well as for fund managers backing south Sudanese warlords who control local farmland.
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unintended windfalls mixed with obvious perils
- By Andy on 02-09-14
By: McKenzie Funk
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The Chain
- Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food
- By: Ted Genoways
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Interviewing scores of line workers, union leaders, hog farmers, and local politicians and activists, Genoways reveals an industry pushed to its breaking point. Along the way, he exposes alarming new trends: sick or permanently disabled workers, abused animals, water and soil pollution, and mounting conflict between small towns and immigrant labor.
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Great Writing, Performance and Content
- By Kevin S. Grail on 09-29-19
By: Ted Genoways
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Boom, Bust, Exodus
- The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities
- By: Chad Broughton
- Narrated by: Stephen McLaughlin
- Length: 15 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.
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A Story I thought I Knew
- By Meek84 on 07-08-18
By: Chad Broughton
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Cadillac Desert, Revised and Updated Edition
- The American West and Its Disappearing Water
- By: Marc Reisner
- Narrated by: Joe Spieler, Kate Udall
- Length: 27 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruptions and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecologic and economic disaster. In Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants to transform the West.
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Too much mouth noise in narration
- By AES on 07-23-19
By: Marc Reisner
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The Idealist
- Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty
- By: Nina Munk
- Narrated by: Susan Nezami
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Jeffrey Sachs - celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential best seller The End of Poverty - disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development."
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Sachs tries hard but the system is not there
- By Amazon Customer on 11-13-15
By: Nina Munk
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Sheepish
- Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet
- By: Catherine Friend
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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What do you do when you love your farm...but it doesn’t love you? After 15 years of farming, Catherine Friend is tired. After all, while shepherding is one of the oldest professions, it’s not getting any easier. The number of sheep in America has fallen by 90 percent in the last 90 years. But just as Catherine thinks it’s time to hang up her shepherd’s crook, she discovers that sheep might be too valuable to give up. What ensues is a funny, thoughtful romp through the history of our woolly friends, why small farms are important, and how each one of us - and the planet - would benefit from being very sheepish, indeed.
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We're all a little sheepish
- By Pam on 12-23-14
By: Catherine Friend
What listeners say about This Blessed Earth
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Daniel
- 03-03-21
Informative insight into agricultural policies
Overall a good narrative on Family Farming. Narrator sounded like a robot. learned a lot.
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- Linda
- 05-24-19
Good Read, Bad Audio
As a fourth generation Nebraska farmer, I appreciated the information presented and the story of a family with whom I can identify. Many July evenings while my husband was still in the field, I sat on the porch of our 1920s farm house looking up at the southwest sky, praying the hail didn't come or worse, a tornado. One storm, one worm, one tariff can wipe out months of hard work and the investment of life savings. The story the author conveys could in many ways be my own family; the history of corporate and government involvement in agriculture concurs with my own research and understanding.
Unfortunately, the narrator is dreadful. I finally tried turning up the play speed to help, but it still resembled a first grader reading Dick and Jane--no expression, long "A"s, mispronunciations (Kearney, Beatrice, hay mow to cite a few). I highly recommend the book, but not the Audible edition.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-09-19
Very interesting.
learned much about farmimg and the struggles that go with it. It is desperate times for farmers in Nebraska.
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-02-19
The book is good if you can get past the narration
I am typically very tolerant of narration, but in this case Alexa could put more heart into the narration. I saw the other reviews, and figured it couldn't be that bad, because I've seen those comments many times before. The narrator reads like he is reading a long series of statements rather than a flowing book with sentences and paragraphs.
I learned a lot about farming and ranching in Nebraska, and the struggles a farmer in the Midwest goes through on a daily and annual basis.
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- K.
- 08-12-19
love the book, narrator might not be the best fit
great book, I just wish it would have been narrated by someone with a different cadence to their voice. some of this material can be very new to city readers and the narration interfered with me fully absorbing it a bit I think. I imagine the narrator does great with other subjects/writing styles, this just didn't seem like a 100% good fit for them.
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- Amanda
- 02-26-24
An eye-opening look into the realities of farming today
I appreciated the historical narrative woven into this experience of life for a modern multi-generational farm family. Important information for anyone who eats, drinks, or breathes. The narration was challenging (odd pauses, emphases, and pronunciations) and I wondered multiple times if it was done using reading software instead of recorded by a person. I read the paper copy when I could and filled in with the audiobook.
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- Ilga
- 02-12-20
A real lesson in modern farming
Learned more than I expected about the work of farming. Daunting. The reader did not impress me much—mispronounced names.
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- DuckHunt
- 04-03-19
Narration is horrible
This seems to be read without comprehension, which ruins the intonation and cadence of sentences and therefore makes it hard to follow or enjoy.
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- Edith Anderson
- 03-08-19
What was the producer thinking?
The narrator mispronounces words and puts emphases on the wrong words and always pronounces the article a as a long a. It’s so bad I couldn’t get past the first chapter because I struggled to parse every sentence. I regret purchasing the audio book. Now I need to buy the Kindle to read it for my book club meeting.
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- Mph
- 02-09-18
Narrator might as well be a computer
I am about 20% through and not sure I can finish. this Narrator is miserable. If interested, I would recommend the Kindle version.
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8 people found this helpful