"Growing a Revolution" is essentially a sequel to Montgomery's earlier work, "Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations". While the previous work set out to show the consequences of poor soil management and agricultural practices, "Growing a Revolution" is a more upbeat and thrilling account of the author's research into how to avoid the bad endings that "Dirt" chronicled.

The book, broadly speaking, is a survey of conservation agriculture, told through a narrative lens of the author's encounters with the farmers themselves. I found this approach to be very engaging. Academic books, even those written for a lay audience, have the tendency to be dry and distant from their topics. This book, in contrast, is rich with the sense of the author's joy and wonder at the topic as well as enough recourse to the underlying science to satisfy the more skeptical reader. You could easily imagine Dr. Montgomery sharing some of these tales with you over small glasses of the Costa Rican mango brandy he describes.

The strength of the book, in my opinion, is connecting threads commonly seen in the organic agriculture community around no-till methods, soil amendment, and economics. There are many books on each of these topics, but fewer that draw attention to the interconnection between them. ( )

In this book, we follow the author on an investigation of various agricultural methods all over the globe to see what works and which methods rejuvinate depleted soils. This is a rather pleasant book to read - no doom and gloom. The author is optimistic about humanity's ability to feed itself provided the methods described in this book are followed. No fancy technology or equipment is necessary. It doesn't matter if you are an organic produce farmer or a conventional farmer, farm with animals or plants, have a huge farm in the USA or a small family farm in Africa, the principles described in this book make farming profitable, improve the soil, reduce erosion, retain water, minimize weeds, reduce input costs in terms of fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide. ( )

borrowed by Cindy

We can only hope, little by little, thing will change to a more sustainable model. ( )