A Bushel's Worth: An Ecobiography

In this love story of land and family, Kayann Short explores her farm roots from her grandparents’ North Dakota homesteads to her own Stonebridge Farm, an organic, community-supported farm on the Colorado Front Range where small-scale, local agriculture borrows lessons of the past to cultivate sustainable communities for the future.

"Scattered in among musings of local food systems, community action, family history, and current farm realities are clear moments of reflection that demonstrate Short’s acumen as a writer."
—Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments

"Short's focus on a CSA makes this memoir distinctive from other recent farm–related nonfiction."
—Western American Literature Journal

"A Bushel’s Worth is my favorite kind of nonfiction. Not only is it about many topics close to my heart—gardening, food, family—it is a beautifully told story, and a love story at that, centered around the love of a couple, their love for the land, and a community’s love for a way of life. This book forever changed my perspective and awareness as I 'walk out' in my own garden."
—Katrina Kittle, author, The Blessings of the Animals

"A heartfelt meditation on farm, food, and family. A Bushel’s Worth tells a love story of the land and a life spent caring for it.”
—Hannah Nordhaus, author, The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honeybees Help Feed America

“Kayann Short shares a passionate and often lyrical account of how she and her husband John took their first brave steps toward revitalizing a small Colorado farm and with it their lives and the community they drew around them. It is an inspiring story, a gift for all of us, both on and off the farm, who are trying to learn how to slow down our frenzied lives so that we may give ourselves to what really matters.”
—Gregory Spaid, author, Grace: Photographs of Rural America

"With a companionable mix of literary and earthy sensibilities, Kayann Short writes with graceful, ferocious attentiveness [and] finds reassurance for herself and her modern family in “the old wisdom of the fields.”
—John Calderazzo, author, Rising Fire: Volcanoes & Our Inner Lives

“[A] beautifully written and sensually rich ‘ecobiography’ of farm life...A Bushel’s Worth is a loving natural history – of a farm, a marriage, and a way of life that has changed interestingly and dramatically over just a few generations.”
—Jane Shellenberger, author, Organic Gardener’s Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West

“The book is a substantial meal...as much about growing community as it is about growing food, and it leaves the reader with a generous bushel of instruction and inspiration on both counts.”
—Susan Becker, Director, Boulder Public Library Oral History Program

“A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography eloquently depicts humans and nature coexisting and mutually benefiting not only in theory, but in actuality...where people treat each other respectfully as they gently work on and with the land.”
—Shelly Eberly, National Outings Leader, Sierra Club