An intimate, gorgeously observed memoir about family and farming that forms a powerful lesson in the hard-earned risks that make life worth living The summer he was 31, Arlo Crawford returned home for the summer harvest at his family's farmseventy-five acres tucked into a hollow in south-central Pennsylvania where his parents had been growing organic vegetables for almost forty years. In the 1970s, well before the explosion of the farm-to-table and slow food movement, Arlo's father Jim left behind lawyering and Vietnam, and decided, against all odds, to give farming a try. Like many summers before, Arlo returned to the farm's familiar rhythmsrise, eat, bend, pick, sort, sweat, sleep. But it was profoundly different, too. He was also there to change his direction, much like his father when he purchased the farm years ago. As the first vegetables come in that summer, there is rumor of a tomato blighta potential catastrophe for a key cropand Arlo's return stirs up memories of the murder of a neighboring farmer twenty years before. Newly awakening to New Morning Farm's most basic triumphs and struggles, Arlo sees that a farm is sometimes a life-or-death proposition, riskier and more fraught than he ever imagined. A Farm Dies Once A Yearis at once a mediation on workthe true nature of it, and on taking pride in ita son's reckoning with a father's legacy, and a chronicle of one full season on a farm. Above all, it is a striking portrait of how one man builds, sows, and harvests his way into a new understanding of the risks necessary to a life well-lived.