Growing a Farmer Blog 2

As I kept reading Timmermeister’s “Growing a Farm,” I still found all the intricate details that he used to describe all these different farming processes or topics. While these descriptions did not necessarily paint a vivid image in my head like they did earlier, I could still understand nearly every aspect of each topic that he chose to talk about. The way in which he talked about the sheep did not create a visualization of what a sheep does, but it still provided me with the necessary facts about the animal. Perhaps I could’ve imagined everything that he was saying in my mind, but with the way he did it before, his writing was so good that I could even mentally feel or smell whatever he was writing about. I liked how he sometimes gave smooth transitions into a topic like how he used Dinah to start his chapter about cows. After talking so much about Dinah, Timmermeister talked about a morning routine. The way it was written felt so seamless because you expected him to talk about Dinah, and even when he didn’t, the subversion did not seem too jarring. This was because I could tell that anything he said for Dinah could be generalized for all cows, and as before, his diction helped describe the process in a way only he could.

As great as this detail was, however, it came at a price. As I kept reading this book, I realized that having this much detail in most chapters of the book would become too redundant and overwhelming. Indeed, I started to feel as if Timmermeister made sure that he carried out every single farming process slowly so that he could catch everything possible about them. If I were to improve from this book, I would have Timmermeister spend most of these chapters just going through the basic process. He can have some of his thoughts, but not too much to fill up too many pages. Then, he can spend time intricately going through every minute step in a process or dive deep into a certain topic for ones that he loved the most or were the most important to him. If he did it this way, the reader could possibly feel how special these few processes or topics were to him. He’s already trying to let us appreciate food from the farm by telling us how it was made; that alone is something worth pondering about.