Celebrating Agriculture Literacy

This month, Massachusetts Farm to School is proud to partner with Massachusetts Agriculture in the Classroom to help educators and families bring food and agricultural literacy into their classrooms and communities. We have created a Farm to School month suggested reading list for the month, sharing books at the ECE, Elementary, and Secondary levels. 

Join the “Read. Grow. Learn.” Reading Challenge*

Choose a book from our Farm to School Month book list and share it with your students, family or community. Then email a photo of your reading experience to communications@massfarmtoschool.org by October 31st to be entered into a drawing for a Bookshop.org gift certificate. Photos do not need to show students. A photo of the featured book, your reading setup or participating adults is welcome. If your photo includes students or other children, please follow your school or organization’s photo-permission policies.

Week #2

Early Care & Education
Barn at Night by Michelle Houts, Illustrated by Jen Betton
Barn at Night follows a father and a daughter as they care for farm animals in two visits to the barn on a working farm. First, waking early to do the routine, daily work in the pre-dawn hours, and in a midnight visit to the barn to help a horse who’s foaling. Written in lyrical poetry, the story shows how farmers feed and care for their animals even in the coldest weather, in both situations that are planned for and not.

Elementary
Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, Illustrated by Shabazz Larkin, Afterword by Will Allen
Will Allen is no ordinary farmer. A former basketball star, he’s as tall as his truck, and he can hold a cabbage, or a basketball, in one hand. But what is most special about Farmer Will is that he can see what others can’t see. No space, no problem. Poor soil, there’s a solution. When he looked at an abandoned city lot he saw a huge table, big enough to feed the whole world.

Secondary
The Farm by Wendell Berry
The Farm is a book-length poem that beautifully captures the daily rhythms, cycles, and physical realities of rural agricultural life. It serves as both a practical guide and a philosophical meditation on sustainable land stewardship, emphasizing the deep bond between the farmer, the animals, and the soil. The poem celebrates the enduring, sacred value of agrarian labor and the interconnectedness of all living things.

Week #1

Early Care & Education
Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner, Illustrator: Christopher Silas Neal
Up in the garden, the world is full of leaves and sprouts, growing vegetables, ripening fruit. But down in the dirt exists a busy world where earthworms dig, snakes hunt, skunks burrow.

Elementary
Wôpanâak Seasons by Carrie Anne Vanderhoop
A young Wampanoag child takes readers on a  journey through Aquinnah, on Neope, known as Martha’s Vineyard. Spring brings the return of wildlife; summer brings beach adventures and clambakes; fall is for harvesting cranberries and making jams; and winter features cozy gatherings and heartfelt traditions.

Secondary
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life. They vowed that, for one year, they’d only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, this book is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.