A Bounty of Farm Picture Books

It's officially summer now, and farmers' markets are in full swing. I don't know about you, but even one visit takes me back to times on farms, including field trips with classes or visiting grandparents in Kentucky on their pocket farm (not the gentrified version!) or living "in the country" where every neighbor was a farmer/large-scale gardener of some sort or other. I've gathered up several picture book titles to share in hopes it will nudge you out to a local farmers' market soon, no matter what the weather. If they can spend countless hours in the elements, daily, we can support their commitments to providing the very best and also benefit from the inevitable plusses to mind and body that straight-from-the-farm goodness provides.

FEEDING MINDS PRESS, 2023

The first of two books are from a tremendous pair of creators and an awesome small press you should know about.  FARM BOOTS  is written by Lisl Detlefsen and illustrated by Renee Kurilla. In this delightful story-in-rhyme, it's the boots that star. Revealed in short couplets and brightly illustrated pages, the many ways that boots are part of life on the farm throughout the year are celebrated through a year's seasons. These certainly involve work of many kinds, but also reveal the types and variations of fun and adventure that can be had in footwear that we rightly label boots.

The end papers are a visual glossary of the variety of boots (and related farm elements) that can be spotted within the pages. In repeated readings (which both the story/concept and the rhymes will invite) young audiences may try using that array inside the covers to play a find-and-search game in the illustrations. 

Many who write and publish picture books are likely to caution that getting a full year span into a single story (unless the story is intentionally about seasons) is challenging and can be awkward. Detlefsen and Kurilla accomplish this with grace, allowing  boots to reflect work, play, holidays, weather changes, skating, sledding, and much more. Illustrations reveal detailed scenes that, to my eye, are in temperate- zone mid-America, but the circumstances shown are common to farming worldwide. Characters illustrated are diverse. Some aspects that are common to farming and shown in appealing detail include working with animals, harvesting crops, competitions, markets, and so many more. The back matter has a simple glossary that groups multiple boots under broader labels with a category name, and is then followed by a brief descriptive passage. This well-paced and lively concept book has limitless value for a wide range of young audiences, including naming objects and colors, recognizing and predicting rhymes, and retelling. Never let such useful purposes override the sheer joy of a book like this. If you've never known a child who refused to have anything on their feet but boots for a phase of their development, you've known very few children! This is winner.

FEEDING MINDS PRESS, 2019

Next up is RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE: A Table-to-Farm Book About Food and Farming, also written by Lisl Detlefsen and illustrated by Renee Kurilla. These two books are quite different and yet they share some stellar qualities. The endpapers serve up an invitation to notice the farm-based products/objects and link them to the processed results on the closing endpapers. Throughout, the illustrations again provide a child-friendly but richly detailed and informative view of specific farm/food settings and steps in  growing, harvesting, processing, and delivering food to our supermarket shelves. Language and descriptors are accurate but not excessive and make this a great book for early childhood.

The text is not rhymed but uses a very intriguing hook for each cluster of pages. Direct address to the reader/characters inquiries- 

"What's that, you say? You'd like ________?

    RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE? Then you need a farmer."

The questions arise in everyday homes, include a variety of families and identities, and range from pancakes to fruit to dairy to veggies, to... more. Each page and element involves the farm-to-table stages, showing complex situations that subtly include features related to safety, health, and mechanical aspects bringing seed to supermarket. The concluding pages encourage young readers to grow food themselves and to "see" the process behind their bounty in every bite they eat. The cover does a great job of suggesting the way a simple dinner can call to mind the farmer on a tiller, a rancher with cattle, an orchard, bees, and more. 

Alfred A. Knopf, 2024

If this is your first time finding Lisl Detleftsen's books, be sure to click her name above and learn more. She, with her young family, is a working farmer whose titles reflect a wide range of farming life that could likely be new to you. She does write on other subjects, too, like her recent picture book AT THE END OF THE DAY , illustrated by Lynn Bontigao. Visually referencing one very familiar family and feelings in opening pages, the narrator reminds us that school and work days are often exhausting, draining, sending us home, "at the end of the day" with more to do and little energy to draw on. 

Page after page we share in the sigh-inducing realities of bad weather, chores, sibling squabbles, disappointments and actual appointments. By mid-book we see that military mom is only able to coach and support her drooping mixed-race family via screen, but dad is valiantly seeking reasonable management along with moments of joy- as fleeting as a firefly, as corny as a knock-knock joke, as loving as puppy licks. I won't spoil the surprise climax, but the warmth and restoration of it is palpable and reassuring. The exhaustion is also real, the do-it-again-tomorrow reality is wry. But, especially at the end of the day, family is family and love is love.

Charlesbridge, 2017

When it released  several years ago, I wrote about FRESH PICKED POETRY: A Day at the Farmers' Market, written by Michelle Schaub and illustrated by Amy Huntington. They, too, are a masterful pair of creators whose combined text and images generate a virtual life experience for readers anywhere. The poems in this entertaining and informative collective are arranged so as to reveal a visit to a farmers market as if stopping stall by stall, sampling delectables, and making those visits a regular part of life. Give these books a try, then get yourself to a farmers market!