Hodge, Deborah. Up We Grow: A Year in the Life of a Small, Local Farm. Toronto, Canada: Kids Can Press, 2010.

Heartwarming photos invite children into the world of a small, co-operative farm over four seasons. Readers will get to know the hardworking farmers who plow, plant, compost, mulch, harvest and market fruits and vegetables, and care for animals. Rarely has the important work of a farm been so lovingly presented in photos and text. The book focuses on production as well as the human interaction that makes up small-scale, local farm culture.

Martin, Jacqueline Briggs. Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table. Readers to Eaters, 2013.

Will Allen is no ordinary farmer. A former basketball star, he’s as tall as his truck, and he can hold a cabbage, or a basketball, in one hand. But what is most special about Farmer Will is that he can see what others can’t see. When he looked at an abandoned city lot he saw a huge table, big enough to feed the whole world. No space, no problem. Poor soil, there’s a solution. Need help, found it. Farmer Will is a genius in solving problems.

Peterson, Cris. Clarabelle: Making Milk and So Much More. Boyds Mills Press, 2007.

By featuring a single cow and her calf on a large Wisconsin dairy farm, Cris Peterson describes all the latest technology that enables farmers to create by-products from their herds. And yet none of the modern-day machinery matches the miracle of production that is the cow herself.

Stiefel, Chana. Cows on the Family Farm. Enslow Publishing, 2013.

An introduction to life on a farm for early readers. Find out what a cow eats, where it lives, and when calves are born.