'It was a surprise, and yet when I started doing the work, I was shocked at how viscerally I responded,' she adds. The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love 'Instead,' Kimball remembers, 'he handed me a hoe and said, 'There's the broccoli patch.' That was the first time that I actually did any farm work. He said he was too busy to grant her the interview, even though they had previously scheduled it. When she arrived at the farm, Kimball knocked on the door of the farmer's trailer, which also happened to be his office. At the time, she jokes, she was not of farming stock: 'I was very much an East Village Manhattan girl.' A travel writer living out of a New York studio apartment, she drove to Pennsylvania to write about a young sustainable farmer she'd heard of who lived there. Kimball's path to farming was a circuitous one. 'You Can't Really Refuse When A Farm Needs Your Help' 'There's the enormous satisfaction of growing food for people,' she adds, 'and at the same time it is incredibly hard - the work never ends, and it never gets easier.' 'I find in my life that I experience both of those things almost on a daily basis.'

'You know, one of the things that I tried to get over in the book is that farming is both incredibly romantic and also extremely hard, and can be very ugly,' Kimball says. We do all of our butchering and slaughtering on-farm, and so there's that whole level of dirt, also.'įarming is often idealized by city folk, and there is some romance to be found in the farm Kimball describes, but there's also back-breaking work and the hard-earned satisfaction that comes with it. There's your own sweat, the sweat of the animals.

'I had no idea you could be dirty in so many different ways,' she says.

The title of her book, Kimball says, comes from the fact that farm work is consistently filthy, and pushed the boundaries of what she initially considered disgusting. Seven years after her life-changing move from Manhattan to Essex Farm, Kimball has documented her adjustment to rural living in her new book, The Dirty Life. This is what most people in the history of the world have focused their energy on. I think that in some way, human beings are hard-wired to be agrarians.

The dirty life by kristin kimball