American Hustle

FROM BREEDING HORSES FOR A DRUG KINGPIN TO GROWING NEBRASKA SOYBEANS, TWO NEW NONFICTION BOOKS LOOK AT VASTLY DIFFERENT WAYS OF MAKING ENDS MEET

Peter Vigneron

IN TED GENOWAYS’S new book, This Blessed Earth, Rick Hammond, a corn, soybean, and cattle farmer, is preparing to hand over the family business to his daughter, Meghan, and her fiancé, Kyle—the sixth generation of Hammonds to work the land in central Nebraska. Genoways, an Outside contributor and Nebraska local, spent more than a year visiting the Hammonds, from one fall’s harvest to the next season’s planting. Perhaps surprisingly, Genoways learns, Nebraska is not a natural place to farm; there’s just never been that much water. It was government policy—the 1862 Homestead Act, then agricultural subsidies—that allowed the Midwest to become the world’s bread basket. And at a cost: Genoways writes of the environmental damage wrought by pesticides and overwatering, the risks of genetically modified seed, and the harm of flooding…

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Outside (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2017

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