Temra Costa is a nationally recognized sustainable food and farming advocate. "Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat," is the product of the past twelve years she has spent working to promote a more vibrant local food economy in California and beyond. Her previous role as statewide director of California's Buy Fresh Buy Local campaign, engaged stakeholders in our food system from farm to table.Temra lives in Sonoma County, California where she writes, gardens and tends to chickens and bees. You can learn more by visiting www.FarmerJane.org.PRAISE FOR FARMER JANETemra Costa is a tireless advocate for small-scale and sustainable farming in California. It is through this work that she has met and worked with the collection of inspiring, unrelenting women featured in this book. Farmer Jane is a work about good stewardship of the land and it is a joy to see so many peers, colleagues and friends honored in this wonderful anthology.-- Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse and author of The Art of Simple FoodAs night and day are fundamental to our survival, the leadership of women is absolutely essential if we are to have a livable and sustained planet earth. With respect to agriculture and sustenance, the 20th century has been called the 'locust years,' a time when the industrial logic of machinery and chemicals supplanted the mythos of life and stripped away complex webs of family farms under the moniker of husbandry. Farmer Jane heralds a growing "womandry" movement that restores people, place, and nurturance back into the heart of our culture. It is a scrumptiously written testament to the role of women in bringing back the life of our soils and daily fare-- a roll call of pathfinders, a heralding description of how women are stepping forward to cultivate biological farming, vibrant communities, and meaningful livelihoods. -- Paul Hawken, author, Blessed UnrestThe sustainable food movement is largely a women's movement--women run many of the farms, staff the non-profits, provide the vital intellectual and physical energy that propels the movement forward. This has been a largely untold story--and Costa has provided a critical corrective by documenting, at long last, to the massive contribution women have made to transforming our food system. -- Tom Philpott, Food editor, Grist; co-founder, Maverick Farms"Personal, political, practical and powerful, Farmer Jane is beautiful field-guide to the future paths of the food movement. It works so well because it brings together everyone from farm worker organizers to fresh food activists and, with wit and wisdom, sparks the conversations and concrete actions that we'll need to transform our food system together. A wonderful book." -- Raj Patel, New York Times Bestselling Author of Value of Nothing and Stuffed and StarvedThey say women hold up half the sky. They also hold down half the farms. Temra Costa's look at the growing sisterhood of women farmers and land activists is a revelation. Full of passionate, eccentric, off-the-chart kitchen visionaries, these resilient and outrageous women light the path for us to think about who is growing the food we eat and how they tend to the land and their communities. Even if you never thought of farming, or even gardening, it's full of tips on how to eat well, and make your community thrive. -- NPR's Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva)In these crisp, vivid pages, noted food activist Temra Costa introduces us to the women who are tilling the ground for a healthier, more sustainable future. Their stories are inspiring and important: the answers to our industrial food disaster are all here, if we'll only listen.-- Christopher D. Cook, author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis