New York Times Book Review

JOEL: GROWING UP A FARM MAN By Patricia Demuth. Photographs by Jack Demuth. 144 pp. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $12.95. (Ages 8 to 12) By SHERWIN D.SMITH

Agribusiness may be taking over, but family farms still exist. Thirteen-year-old Joel Holland lives on one, 245 acres in northwestern Illinois, and the Demuths spent a year living nearby, recording Joel’s daily life in straightforward words and photographs. Their book introduces a young urban reader to an unknown world. It’s not the world of “Charlotte’s Web,” either.

It’s a world of hard work and muddy boots, of chores before and after school, of 15-hour-work days at harvest time. One summer day, according to the Demuths’ count, Joel fed 320 animals, lifted 900 pounds of grain, shoveled 4,000 pounds, walked or ran 8 miles, jumped 15 barbed-wire fences and drove farm machinery 25 miles. (He’s been driving tractors since second grade.) The Hollands raise pigs, cattle and sheep and grow corn, oats and hay. It’s a business worth close to $1 million, and everybody — Joel, his father and mother, his 16-year-old brother and his two grown brothers, who have their own farms close by — shares in the work. Joel’s special responsibility — for all practical purposes, he’s in charge — is the hog operation, which grosses more than $40,000 a year.

Raising animals for sale for food leaves little room for sentiment (that is reserved for Jessica the dog and one pet lamb). The realities of shoveling manure, of birthing calves, of castrating piglets (and clipping their tails so that the other pigs won’t chew on them) and of fighting to keep animals from dying during a smothering Middle Western heat wave are learned early.

So are pride in one’s skills and a sense of fulfillment in dealing with living, growing things. There’s even time for fun —hunting in the fall, snowmobiling in the winter, fishing and water-skiing in the summer. Above all, on this farm there’s a sense of family unity and continuity. The house Joel lives in was built by his great-grandfather. Hollands have been working this same patch of land since Joel’s great-great-grandfather bought it more than 120 years ago. “After living out here, I don’t think I’d ever want to be in the city,” says Joel. “I’d miss seeing things grow. The change of seasons.” And he adds: “You just don’t have the freedom” in the city. “Or the responsibilities. I’m not saying a city kid doesn’t have responsibilities. But you don’t work as a family the way you do on a farm.”