8 Books on Farming and Food Production to Add to Your Summer Reading List

Food production is an essential but often undocumented part of our food system. This list of books highlights the history, work, and lives of farmers and food production workers in the U.S. Together, these titles offer a powerful and necessary look at who grows our food, under what conditions, and with what consequences. From generational struggles to systemic injustice, each book offers a different perspective on the realities of agriculture, from Black landownership to immigrant labor, factory farming, and the promise of sustainable alternatives. Whether you’re a curious reader, educator, or food justice advocate, these stories will deepen your understanding and appreciation of the people and process behind every meal.

Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19
Author: Lori A. Flores
Published: January 2025
Summary: “Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx people, including the largely underpaid and migrant workers who harvest, process, cook, and sell this desirable food. Lori A. Flores traces how our dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor has evolved from the World War II era to the COVID-19 pandemic, using the US Northeast as an unexpected microcosm of this national history.”
Length: 272 pages

Catfish Dream: Ed Scott’s Fight for his Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta
Author: Julian Rankin
Published: July 2018
Summary: “Both directly and indirectly, the economic and political realities of food and subsistence affect the everyday lives of Delta farmers and the people there. Ed’s own father, Edward Sr., was a former sharecropper turned landowner who was one of the first black men to grow rice in the state. Ed carries this mantle forth with his soybean and rice farming and later with his catfish operation, which fed the black community both physically and symbolically. He provides an example for economic mobility and activism in a region of the country that is one of the nation’s poorest and has one of the most drastic disparities in education and opportunity, a situation especially true for the Delta’s vast African American population. With Catfish Dream Julian Rankin provides a fascinating portrait of a place through his intimate biography of Scott, a hero at once so typical and so exceptional in his community.”
Length: 160 pages

Land Rich Cash Poor: My Family and the Untold Story of the Disappearing American Farmer
Author: Brian Reisinger
Published: August 2024
Summary: “Taking on this working-class story of heart and hardship, award-winning writer and rural policy expert Brian Reisinger weaves forgotten eras of American history with his own family’s four-generation fight for survival in Midwestern farm country. Readers learn the truth about America’s most detrimental and unexplained socioeconomic crisis: How the family farms that feed us went from cutting a middle-class path through the Great Depression to barely making ends meet in modern America.”
Length: 272 pages

Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future
Authors: Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture
Published: March, 2017
Summary: “Letters to a Young Farmer is for everyone who appreciates good food grown with respect for the earth, people, animals, and community. Three dozen esteemed writers, farmers, chefs, activists, and visionaries address the highs and lows of farming life as well as larger questions of how our food is produced and consumed in vivid and personal detail. Letters to a Young Farmer is both a compelling history and a vital road map. A reckoning of how we eat and farm; how the two can come together to build a more sustainable future; and why now, more than ever before, we need farmers.”
Length: 176 pages

Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company
Author: Alice Driver
Published: September 2024
Summary: “On June 27, 2011, a deadly chemical accident took place inside the Tyson Foods chicken processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas, where the company is headquartered. The company urged everyone to return to work, although the spill left their employees injured, sick, and terrified. During the course of Alice’s reporting, the COVID-19 pandemic struck the community, and the workers were forced to continue production in unsafe conditions. These essential workers, many of whom only speak Spanish and some of whom are illiterate—all of whom suffer the health consequences of Tyson’s negligence—somehow found the strength and courage to organize and fight back, culminating in a lawsuit against Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in America.”
Length: 272 pages

The Color of Food: Stories of Race, Resilience and Farming
Author: Natasha Bowens
Published: 2015
Summary: “The Color of Food teaches us that the food and farm movement is about more than buying local and protecting our soil. It is about preserving community, digging deeply into the places we’ve overlooked, and celebrating those who have come before us. Blending storytelling, photography, oral history, and unique insight, these pages remind us that true food sovereignty means a place at the table for everyone.”
Length: 230 pages

Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us from Factory Farming
Author: Leah Garcés
Published: September 2024
Summary: “In Transfarmation, president and CEO of Mercy For Animals Leah Garcés explains how food and farming policies have failed over decades and offers insights into the wave of change coming from a new crop of farmers and communities who are constructing a humane and sustainable farming system. Factory animal farming faces an abundance of issues—from environmental concerns and animal cruelty, to exploited farmers and poor working conditions—and more and more farmers are searching for a way out and for a new start.”
Length: 224 pages

We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy
Author: Natalie Baszile
Published: April 2021
Summary: “In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. In the 1920s, there were over one million black farmers; today, there are just 45,000. Baszile explores this crisis through the farmers’ personal experiences. In their own words, middle-aged and elderly black farmers explain why they continue to farm despite systemic discrimination and land loss. The “Returning Generation”—young farmers, who are building upon the legacy of their ancestors, talk about the challenges they face as they seek to redress issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and reparations.”
Length: 368 pages