Farm: The making of a climate activist (Nicola Harvey, Scribe)

Is it possible to be a meat-eating environmentalist? How do you spend months bonding with your heifers, seeing them as they truly are—curious, playful and happy sentient beings—just to send them off to China, pregnant, as part of the live cattle export trade? How do you ignore the heat of prolonged summers, the onset of wild storms, and waterways polluted with eroded soil and synthetic fertilisers, when your baby daughter’s very future is at stake? What on earth are you supposed to do? These are some of the moral issues Nicola Harvey must confront after leaving her journalism job in Sydney and returning to her homeland of New Zealand to become a farmer. While her husband puts his head down and gets on with it stoically, Harvey tries to find some answers, or at least some way to help her go on while she fails. She eventually concludes that failing just might be the answer: fail and fail again, but don’t give up trying to change. It is heartening to hope that young female farmers like Harvey will upend modern food production and save us all as the climate deniers die off. But there are also new bad guys to fight: the monocropping meat-replacement industry that is simply continuing the environmental damage. Farm is an enlightening read for everyone who is interested in food production. It is both intensely personal and vitally important, ranging far and wide across the agricultural spectrum, teasing out issues and raising questions, but also offering sustenance and hope.

Julia Taylor worked for many years in trade publishing.

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