Throughout my reading of “Growing a Farmer” it continues to
astound me just how much of Kurt Timmermeister’s success came by pure
happenstance. He just does what feels right in the moment and goes where the
wind takes him. I thought his thoughts in chapter 8 were a bit silly, though.
He saw no problem in selling unpasteurized milk to his customers and seemed to
think that the e.coli outbreak on the neighbor farm was due to their poor
hygiene on the farm, but I think that outbreak could have just as easily come
from his milk before he started complying with the Agricultural departments
regulations. His thoughts about milk being pasteurized only to make poor milk
drinkable also struck me as somewhat unfounded. I am no expert on milk but I am
pretty sure it is the standard all over the world (or at least with countries
that have good health and food regulation) to pasteurize milk. So for him to
suggest that the regulation that all milk should be pasteurized is due to some
conspiracy by “big milk” companies so they can corner the market sounds really
silly to me. In Norway I know that all milk is pasteurized, and we do not have
such a big corporate influence on our politics, and even so I doubt “big milk”
would be able to enact such legislation all over the world.
I thought it was cool to see how Timmermeister was able to
draw from his previous experience as a restauranteur in order to profit on his
farm. When he could not take his vegetable growing business any further (without
going into large scale production) he instead started charging people for
Sunday dinners. Kurt said he would have liked to have grew up on a farm his
whole life, but I bet that idea would not have come about if not for his
previous life as a restauranteur! I also thought that the Sunday night dinners
were a great idea overall, and it kind of made me wish there was a similar
concept available near USC. I think it’s really hard to find good healthy food
in Los Angeles so I would love to pay 100$ for a meal straight from the farm
paired with a good wine. Although I am sure if it was in LA it would have been
more like 1000$!
My favorite chapters from the 2nd half of “Growing
a Farmer” were Chapter 8 and Chapter 14. I liked chapter 8 because I really
liked the way he told the story about how he made milk. Even though I didn’t
like his rambling about pasteurization I liked how he detailed his process. I
liked Chapter 14 because it was refreshing to see his outlook on how his farm
turned out. Before reading the book I thought it was going to end with his farm
turning into a massive profit machine and end in Timmermeister be coming rich.
I thought it was cool how he did not seem to care whether he made a lot of
money, because he saw himself as profitable because he could support himself
while doing what he loved. My least favorite chapter was chapter 8, because I
the detailed explanations of slaughter and gutting made me a little
unconfortable.
Overall I have learned a lot of useful lessons from “Growing
a Farmer”, mostly that it is a lot easier to succeed if you love what you are
doing! If Timmermeister had created a farm because he wanted to make money I am
sure he would have done things a lot differently, and not ha as much success as
a result. I have also learned a lot of things that are not useful at all, like
that you can order both chickens and bees by airmail, and how crème fraiche is
made, but those may have been the parts of the book I liked the best!
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