The inspiring and sometimes hilarious story of a family who quit the rat race and left the city to live out their ideals on an organic farm, and ended up building a model for a new kind of agriculture.

“You would be forgiven,” Brent Preston writes, “for thinking this book is yet another in the well-established City Folk Move to the Country genre. You would be forgiven for thinking that we, having decided to experience life on the farm, had found it nasty, brutish and ridiculous, then written a book. You would be forgiven for assuming that we had moved to the country not to farm, but to write about farming. You would be forgiven, but you would be wrong.”

Or at least you would be mostly wrong. Because Brent Preston and Gillian Flies did move to the country, and they did make a lot of stupid mistakes, some of which are pretty hilarious in hindsight. But their goal from the beginning was to build a real farm, one that would sustain their family, heal their environment, and nourish their community. It was a goal that took a decade of grinding toil to achieve.

Told with humour and heart in Preston’s unflinchingly honest voice, The New Farm is the story of one family’s transition from die-hard urbanites to bonafide farmers and passionate advocates for a more just and sustainable food system. It’s the story of how a couple of young professionals learned not just how to grow food, but how to succeed at the business of farming. And it’s the story of a small, sustainable, organic farm that ended up providing not just a livelihood, but a happy, meaningful and fulfilling way of life.