Big News for 2026: Lectures, Next Book, and Malabar Farm Back on Amazon

The OEFFA conference is only six weeks away!

For this first week of 2026, I’d like to highlight some of the new and exciting things that are coming up—soon!

First of all, I am giving the keynote, “Together for Organic,” for the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association’s 47th annual conference, “Finding Common Ground,” on February 14 in Newark, Ohio. I’ll be highlighting the past, present, and future of how we can bring people from diverse backgrounds together to build an organic food system. Unfortunately, because of budget constraints, OEFFA is limiting registration to only 200 people this year. So if you’re in Ohio and you’re one of the lucky ones who gets a registration slot, I’ll see you there. If not, I’ll make sure to post a recording of the keynote online.

I’ll also be joining the Ehrenfried Pfeiffer history circle at the Fellowship of Preparation Makers Annual Gathering on January 22, in Kimberton, Pennsylvania. It’ll be an informal day of biodynamic farmers sharing what they know about Pfeiffer, and they invited me to join them and share some of the information I’ve collected over the past couple years.

My second big piece of news is that, if all goes according to plan, I should get my next book published sometime in 2026. I know you’ve all been anxiously waiting, and I’ve been frustrated to discover that my Cold War Against Organic book is taking longer to write than I’d anticipated. That’s because I want to be very careful to make sure I get all the facts right before I publish something that exposes how agricultural scientists, government agencies, and professional organizations actively worked to suppress organic farming during the Cold War. I’m still going to do it—and it seems more and more important to get that information out as time goes on—but I have to make sure I do it right. And that’s going to take at least another year.

In the meantime, I’m going to put out a different, less controversial, but still very important book. Some of you may remember the extremely popular three-year series of articles on “The History of Organic Agriculture in America” that I wrote for Acres U.S.A. I’m going to turn those articles into a book that covers the early history of organic farming in the United States, tentatively titled The Quest for Permanent Agriculture: Organic Farming in America from F.H. King to Silent Spring. I’m rewriting the articles to incorporate new information, remove redundancies, and make them flow together into a cohesive whole. So if you’ve saved the original articles, you’ll see that the book is similar but different—and, I hope, better.

Finally, we’ve just passed the fourth anniversary of my first book, Malabar Farm: Louis Bromfield, Friends of the Land, and the Rise of Sustainable Agriculture. I know some of you were having difficulty purchasing copies last fall. That was due to some distribution issues that have finally been resolved, and I’m happy to announce that Malabar Farm is now available on Amazon again! So if you don’t have a copy yet or want to get one for someone else…and if you got an Amazon gift card for Christmas that you haven’t spent yet…or a Barnes and Noble card…or even one for Target…well, I’ll leave it at that. I’m also working with Acres U.S.A. to get Malabar Farm back in their bookstore as soon as possible.

A year ago, this blog only had 30 subscribers. Now it’s up to 160 and growing. Thank you so much to all of you for staying interested in my work and for sharing it with others! You’re why I do what I do. Happy New Year!