Kimball could not do it all without her husband Mark, who is “missing the gene for anxiety…unlike me, he does not spend energy considering the full rainbow of disaster that could take place,” she writes. Mark is one of the most willful, irrepressible farmers you will ever meet. He has a seemingly unlimited reserve of energy. He plows barefoot, even in winter; he takes ice-cold showers (good for the mitochondria); he does wind sprints every morning. Left-handed, he has trained himself to be ambidextrous. His curiosity for the farm is less infectious than alarming. Everything about it excites him—the crops, the soil, the ancient clamshells he finds in his fields (evidence that this land was once covered by water, a fact which thrills him). He likes to stick the shells in his mouth and crunch them between his teeth. It has something to do with communing with nature, something to do with testing himself, something to do with celebrating the moment.

This is a trait I recognize. I have spent the past few years at work on a book about the agrarian writer Louis Bromfield, who in 1939 began a farm in Ohio called Malabar that was built out of the same adventurous DNA as the Kimball place. Bromfield once described the very best farmers as being teched, or slightly crazy. Mark is teched. Kimball is nothing like Mark—she’s an ex-New York media person, an ex-vegetarian, an ex-globetrotter, who discovered farming only by chance. Sent by a magazine in the early aughts to profile Mark (who was then farming in rural Pennsylvania), she interviewed him while he butchered a hog. Blood splattered on her white agnès b. blouse. She fell in love, and a few years later the two were married in the hayloft of their new barn.

Kimball has since learned to embrace all the craziness and madcap moments that come with farming, which in her book feels less like a Wendell Berry poem and more like an episode of I Love Lucy. One of the most hilarious scenes comes when she is making 100 gallons of sauerkraut, which has to be crushed and compacted to eliminate air and bruise the cabbage (to help fermentation). When you are making only a few pounds of sauerkraut, this can be accomplished with a mallet. But when you need to make enough to feed 300 people without specialized equipment, you have to improvise.