I grew up on a small New England farm with goats and an orchard. It was a farm out of a children’s book, and very different from working Midwestern farms with huge tractors rumbling across flat cornfields. This book is about those farms. For research, I drove around Illinois. It was spring. I sketched barns and fields, and knocked on doors and talked with farmers. I became friends with one farmer in DeKalb County and in the fall, after I moved to New York, I flew back for the harvest and he let me drive his combine harvester. This book tells the story of the seasons on a farm, from seed to silo. Children’s books undersell farms. Cute pigs, red tractors. The reality is much more interesting.
