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Summary
"The river was in God's hands, the cows in ours." So passed the days on Indian Farm, a dairy operation on 700 acres of rich Illinois bottomland. In this collection, Alan Guebert and his editor, his daughter, Mary Grace Foxwell recall Guebert's years on the land working as part of that all-consuming collaborative effort known as the family farm.
Here are Guebert's tireless parents, measuring the year not in months but in seasons for sewing, haying, and doing the books; Jackie the farmhand, needing ninety minutes to do only sixty minutes' work and cussing the entire time; Hoard the dairyman, sore fingers wrapped in electrician's tape, sharing wine and the prettiest Christmas tree ever; and the unflappable Uncle Honey, spreading mayhem via mistreated machinery, flipped wagons, and the careless union of diesel fuel and fire.
Guebert's heartfelt and humorous reminiscences depict the hard labor and simple pleasures to be found in ennobling work, and show that in life, as in farming, Uncle Honey had it just right with his succinct philosophy for overcoming adversity: "the secret's not to stop."
Author and Editor
Alan Guebert is an award-winning agricultural journalist and expert who was raised on an 720-acre, 100-cow southern Illinois dairy farm. He began the syndicated agriculture column “The Farm and Food File” in 1993. Throughout his career, Guebert has won numerous awards and accolades for his magazine and newspaper work. In 1997, the American Agricultural Editors’ Association honored him with its highest awards, Writer of the Year and Master Writer.
Mary Grace (Gracie) Foxwell graduated cum laude from Saint Mary's College and worked as an English teacher in Italy and then moved to Washington, DC in 2008 to join the Foreign Policy program at The Brookings Institution. There she wrote and edited grant proposals for the $26 million program and successfully cultivated and solicited new funding from major foundations, U.S. and foreign governments, and Fortune 500 companies.
The Land of Milk and Uncle Honey, a memoir Guebert co-authored with his daughter Mary Grace, and published by the University of Illinois Press, is a collection of personal memories written over the past two decades as part of his weekly column. Each story recalls and reflects on the people, food, and values he learned on Indian Farm in the early 1960s.
Details
- Paperback
- Size: 8.9" x 6"
- Pages: 543
- Illustrations: Many black and white photographs
- Publication: 2015. University of Illinois Press.
