Living Off the Land: A Spirituality of Farming

Andrea Geary is an agricultural reporter for The Manitoba Co-operator.

Baltaz uses her university education in religion and English and
experience gained from working as an agricultural journalist to examine
how God fits into the lives of today’s Canadian farmer. To draw out
farmers’ thoughts on this rather personal issue, Baltaz drafted a
questionnaire and, according to the book’s introduction, surveyed
farmers from coast to coast.

The book’s format incorporates chapters consisting of farmers’
views on a certain aspect of their lives, such as farming and family,
each followed by a brief profile. These profiles provide a more incisive
and interesting look at today’s farmer. The person profiled is named
and a brief personal history is given. In the main chapters, Baltaz has
chosen to make the people quoted anonymous, attributing statements
simply to, for example, “a Cudworth (Saskatchewan) farmer.”

It is difficult to transform information from a questionnaire into a
prose-style format that is easy and enjoyable to read. Baltaz has used
divisions within her chapters to deal with specific ideas, but these
divisions seem to fragment the chapters, weakening the impact of the
issues dealt with in Living Off the Land.