Farm-Raised Kids: Parenting Strategies for Balancing Family Life with Running a Small Farm or Homestead
Ebook
Overview
Learn to raise tiny agriculturists with this insightful guide full of parenting advice and strategies for engaging kids in farm life while you’re running your own 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.
This publication conforms to the EPUB Accessibility specification at WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
Foreword by Lynn Byczynski
Introduction: Life on Our Farm
Part 1: The Farm Family Lifestyle
Chapter 1 Why Mix Farming/Homesteading and Children?
Chapter 2 Play and Fun on the Farm
Chapter 3 Living the Seasons
Chapter 4 Chores and Farm Work
Chapter 5 Learning and Homeschooling
Chapter 6 Finding Balance and addressing stress
Part 2: Ages and Stages in the Farm Family
Chapter 7 Preparing for the Parenthood Journey
Chapter 8 Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum Healing
Chapter 9 A Baby on the Farm
Chapter 10 Arranging Childcare
Chapter 11 Navigating Work and Family Dynamics
Chapter 12 Starting a Farm after Having Kids
Chapter 13 The Needs of Tweens and Teens
Chapter 14 Farm Kids All Grown Up
Afterword
Featured Families and Farms
Suggested Reading and Other Resources
Acknowledgments
One of the many virtues of Katie Kulla’s Farm-Raised Kids is that it’s for every kind of family, whether they’re traditional farmers, or parents and kids who help create big urban gardens in our cities. This book could accelerate the movement of people forward to nature.—Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods and Vitamin N
The perfect resource for parents! Encouragement and concise recommendations leave you feeling confident in raising your kids on a farm.—Leah Webb, author of The Seven-Step Homestead
Beautiful and important ... A must-read for anyone considering adding a child to the farm.—Andrew Mefferd, editor of Growing for Market Magazine
This gorgeous book offers the gifts and challenges of what it looks like to bring our children alongside in the work of healing and harvesting. I marvel at what might just be possible if more of us placed our babies in the dirt, helped them put seeds in the ground, and reimagined what it means to be part of the wild ecosystem to which we belong.—Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, author of This Sweet Earth: Walking with our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse
This is a beautiful book filled with tons of real life examples from farmers and homesteaders around the country, and their kids ... it’s wonderful to see their good examples shared more widely to benefit the next generation of up and coming farmers.—Josh Volk, author of Compact Farms and Build Your Own Farm Tools
- Title: Farm-Raised Kids: Parenting Strategies for Balancing Family Life with Running a Small Farm or Homestead
- Author: Katie Kulla
- Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 240
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781635867619, 9781635866711, 1635866715, 1635867614
- Resource ID: LLS:9781635867619
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-05-26T05:43:27Z
Katie Kulla is a farmer, author, and illustrator writing about farming, seasonal eating, nature, and family life. She and her husband started farming in Oregon in 2006 and have two children who were born on the farm and are homeschooled. Katie co-hosts the Growing for Market podcast and her writing has been published in Taproot, Growing for Market Magazine, Farmer-ish, Geez, and GreenPrints. She can be found at
katiekulla.com.