Farm-Raised Kids: Parenting Strategies for Balancing Family Life with Running a Small Farm or Homestead

Essential parenting advice and practical strategies for engaging kids in farm life--to create opportunities for play and learning, to foster resilience and independence, and to keep kids busy while you’re running your farm or backyard homestead.

In this first-ever book on the topic, author Katie Kulla offers her own hard-won wisdom, gleaned from more than a decade of raising kids while running a CSA farm with her husband. The book also features invaluable advice and insights from other farmer-parents and a wealth of practical tips and ideas for how to engage children on the farm--including activities for learning and play, and suggestions for how to enlist kids in chores and other farm responsibilities. Included are experiences and stories of diverse farm families encompassing a variety of identities and backgrounds across geographic locations, race and genders, family sizes, and farm scales, to represent the real face of farming today.

Katie Kulla and her husband, Casey, own and operate Oakhill Organics, a CSA farm in Yamhill, Oregon. They have two children, ages 10 and 13, both of whom were born on the farm and are homeschooled. Katie holds a master’s degree in creative nonfiction writing; she regularly writes for Growing for Market and has also been published in Farmer-ish, Geez, and GreenPrints.