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For seven months, Manny Howard—a lifelong urbanite—woke up every morning and ventured into his eight-hundred-square-foot backyard to maintain the first farm in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in generations. His goal was simple: to subsist on what he could produce on this farm, and only this farm, for at least a month. The project came at a time in Manny’s life when he most needed it—even if his family, and especially his wife, seemingly did not. But a farmer’s life, he discovered—after a string of catastrophes, including a tornado, countless animal deaths (natural, accidental, and inflicted), and even a severed finger—is not an easy one. And it can be just as hard on those he shares it with.
Manny’s James Beard Foundation Award–winning New York magazine cover story—the impetus for this project—began as an assessment of the locavore movement. We now think more about what we eat than ever before, buying organic for our health and local for the environment, often making those decisions into political statements in the process. My Empire of Dirt is a ground-level examination—trenchant, touching, and outrageous—of the cultural reflex to control one of the most elemental aspects of our lives: feeding ourselves.
Unlike most foodies with a farm fetish, Manny didn’t put on overalls with much of a philosophy in mind, save a healthy dose of skepticism about some of the more doctrinaire tendencies of locavores. He did not set out to grow all of his own food because he thought it was the right thing to do or because he thought the rest of us should do the same. Rather, he did it because he was just crazy enough to want to find out how hard it would actually be to take on a challenge based on a radical interpretation of a trendy (if well-meaning) idea and see if he could rise to the occasion.
A chronicle of the experiment that took slow-food to the extreme, My Empire of Dirt tells the story of one man’s struggle against environmental, familial, and agricultural chaos, and in the process asks us to consider what it really takes (and what it really means) to produce our own food. It’s one thing to know the farmer, it turns out—it’s another thing entirely to be the farmer. For most of us, farming is about food. For the farmer, and his family, it’s about work.
- Sales Rank: #1721299 in Books
- Published on: 2010-04-27
- Released on: 2010-04-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x 1.10" w x 5.50" l, .88 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Review
“The night I turned forty Manny Howard, a younger guy from the neighborhood, led me to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge. We even stole the flag. It was about five in the morning; we weren't sober. It is a great pleasure to now be able to follow him on this slightly safer—well, safer for me—adventure. What a unique wonder this book is! Like a collaboration between Joseph Mitchell, Moe Howard, and Xavier de Maistre (A Journey Around My Room). Informative, grungy, rollicking, hilarious, horrifying, obsessive; most of all, a really great story, lived and written by a writer whose heart is as capacious and teeming as all of Brooklyn.”
—Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder
“With My Empire of Dirt, Manny Howard has created a new job category, gonzo agriculturalist. The squeamish and the vegan-hearted shall enter at their own risk, for this is no gentle Farmer’s Almanac. It’s more like war reportage—on one side, angry rabbits, crazed chickens, and a patch of backyard clay so dry it makes concrete seem loamy; on the other, a Brooklyn-raised City Boy, who won’t take crop failure for an answer. Howard takes living off the land to an urban extreme that will make people think even harder about where their food comes from. Ultimately, though, as tornadoes come and fig trees nearly go, he discovers a marriage that needs tending to, proving that when it comes to love, at least, you shall definitely reap what you sow.”
—Robert Sullivan, author of Rats and Cross Country
“Manny Howard—husband, father, novice farmer—is not the sort of person who does things halfway, and thank goodness for that. Here is the dark, charming, hilarious—and thoroughly original—account of his simple, insane plan to live off the land . . . in Brooklyn. (Crops will be destroyed, tempers will be lost, and a marriage may, or may not, survive.) All of this personal drama is improbably enriched by virtuoso passages on everything from the science of tornadoes to the art of breeding rabbits. What a book!”
—Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning
“Manny Howard's wonderful book is much more than a breezy romp across the line that divides urban from rural life. Yes, it crackles with intelligence and good humor, sparkles with hilarious anecdotes, and is studded with entertaining factoids about the agrarian life that Howard decided, so improbably, to adopt (you'll never hear the phrase ‘pecking order’ in quite the same way again). But at its core this book belongs to a great American tradition that goes back to Thoreau: a lone man with big ideas decides to confront Nature on his own. That the nature in question happens to be in Brooklyn gives this book—which like its author is characterized by an unmistakably New York mix of huge ambition and wry self-deprecation—its unique and ultimately quite touching charm.”
—Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost
About the Author
Manny Howard is a veteran of the magazine world, having written and/or edited for New York, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Details, Men's Journal, Men's Health, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Us Weekly, National Geographic, and Travel & Leisure, among many others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, two children, and a dwindling number of farm animals.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE: THE RAFT
Fifteen minutes gone that we can never get back and all we are doing is staring through the wrought-iron railings of the Promenade fence out over the East River, two eight-year-olds just stuck inside a day. There are no bullies to run from in the park, no rats to stalk in the undergrowth beyond the playground. Though, it’s true, we have never, either of us, ever seen a black party balloon before, still we ran out of good stuff to throw at the one stuck in the tree above us almost right away. Our bikes haven’t turned into police motorcycles yet. This is not an adventure at all.
A soot-smeared orange ferry on its way to Staten Island drifts out of its decrepit, oxidizing dock at the Battery. A tugboat with a gravel barge stuck to its nose pushes its way against the current and, ever so slowly, upriver toward, and eventually beyond, the Brooklyn Bridge. We lay limp against the fence, both unable to imagine how we will survive this endlessly dull day ahead, but both too polite to complain to each other.
Hey, wait. There it is right in front of us. We aren’t pressing our faces up against the fence rails anymore; suddenly these are the twisted bars of a great, dark cage, and right there, staring back at us, is Adventure. “Let’s build a raft,” I breathe, too excited to speak the words.
Chris’s eyes strain against the side of his skull, trying to see my face, gauge my intention without taking his head away from the sun-warmed metal bars. “A raft out of what?”
“Wood,” I say, not certain that rafts can be built from anything else.
“Where would we go?” my friend asks.
“There.” I point with my arm fully extended through the bars out across the river, north of the Fulton Fish Market, to the only visible sliver of beach on Manhattan Island.
“Where will we get the wood?” asks Chris, quickening to the plan.
“I’ll show you,” I reply, the plan coming together as I gallop the few yards to my bike. It is yellow, has a black banana seat, and best of all it has three speeds. The gear shifter looks just like one in a cool muscle car. Rather than being on the chrome handlebars, it’s mounted on the crossbar. The selector has a pommel grip you pull toward you as you work through the gears. It shows the gear you’re in with a red line next to each number, one, two, three. If I pedal hard enough, I have convinced myself, sparks will shoot out of the pipe at the back just behind my seat where the chrome plastic cap has fallen off and left an exhaust-pipe kind of hole. We mount our bikes and make our way north along the Promenade, fly down Suicide Hill to Old Fulton Street and the abandoned cobbled streets beyond, under the noisy roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge and down New Dock Street, which ends hard against the East River. Beyond the low guardrail that we are scrambling over, the river has long since swept the tar-flecked wooden mooring posts and concrete docking into a chaos of enormous, jutting, broken teeth. It functions as a maw, catching the flotsam of a river at its environmental nadir. Collected here among the filth is everything two eight-year-old boys in search of adventure could ever need to build a raft.
The rest of the day and—because Chris is sleeping over and then my mom says it is okay for us to spend the whole day—the next were filled scrambling across the collapsed pier, collecting odd lengths and diameters of rope and faded scraps of plastic—once umbrellas, municipal office-furniture upholstery, buckets, a red flip-flop. We pry planks and boards of waterlogged, tar-streaked wood from between the concrete slabs, slipping in up to our knees in the filthy, whirling eddies as the current first ebbs, then flows.
At the end of the second day when we return home near what we estimated to be dinnertime, Chris’s dad, Mr. Dupassage, is waiting for us outside my apartment building. He leans impatiently against his orange BMW 2002, arms folded until we come to a tire-screeching skid a few feet from him. I’m sure that the orange BMW is the first European car I’ve ever seen. Chris says his dad can go a hundred miles an hour in it. Mr. Dupassage wants to know what is all over our clothes. Chris does not tell him that the tar on our hands and faces and shoes and jeans and our nearly identical terry-cloth polo shirts is from the wood we salvaged for the raft we are going to build.
Chris says he does not remember what it is. I straddle the crossbar of my yellow banana-seat bike, studiously watching the derailleur move when I shift gears. I think that Chris might be ashamed of our raft adventure.
Opening the trunk of his orange European car, Mr. Dupassage tries another tack, asks Chris where the stuff all over his clothes came from. Chris says he does not remember that either.
Mr. Dupassage takes a lime green towel from the trunk and shakes white paint flecks off it onto the faded gray asphalt of the street and, draping it over the supple, beige leather passenger seat, warns Chris that he is going to have to sit right on the towel and not move a muscle the whole way home or he might get that stuff on his clothes all over the upholstery of the orange European car.
I wonder if sparks come out of the back of Mr. Dupassage’s orange car when he goes one hundred miles an hour in it. Mr. Dupassage smiles when he says good-bye to me. He tells me to be careful not to touch the walls in the halls or in the elevator on my way upstairs, then he gets into his orange car. I think the car must be going almost one hundred miles an hour when it reaches the corner, but from where I am standing, still straddling my yellow banana-seat bike, I can’t see any sparks flying out behind it.
Chris is French, or his parents are, or his father is. I wonder how long it takes to get to France from Pierrepont Street. My mom calls from the window on the second floor where we live. She wants to know if I know what time it is. I look at the red LED readout on my Texas Instruments watch and I tell her it is eight fifty-six.
In the elevator, when I lean against the wall, some of the tar from the raft wood wipes off my shirt onto the brown-and-white-flecked enamel wall. I suppose that French people must not like rafts very much. French people like river barges better than rafts.
When my mom tells me to explain how I got myself covered in tar, I tell her that Chris and I are building a raft to sail across the East River.
The East River is not, in truth, a river. It is a tidal strait that joins with the Harlem River, also a part of the same tidal strait that was painstakingly, over twenty years during the nineteenth century, hollowed out to accommodate ship traffic. This strait connects the Long Island Sound up north to New York’s Upper Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond to the south. Because the narrow waterway joins two such whopping great bodies of water, the tide roars up during the flow tide, then twelve hours later, down during the ebb tide. In its narrower stretches the tide moves at speeds approaching six knots. Manhattan turned the riverbank to stone on its western bank, as did Brooklyn and eventually Queens on the opposite shore, so now, call it a tidal strait or a river, it is more a sluice than a naturally occurring body of water. People who fall or dare to jump in it have few places where they can pick their way out. The East River hosts a handful of accidental drownings every year.
For this and many other reasons, the East River is no place for an eight-year-old to play. Another person’s mother might have made this point immediately after her son announced his intentions to cross it on a raft that he and his buddy Chris Dupassage planned to build from found material piling up on the tide line along its rocky banks and fetid beaches. Not my mother. She supported every insane notion or scheme I ever presented to her. It was a conscious—determined, really—effort to shield what she considered my creative gift, to protect my imagination, my notion of the possible, from the crush of practical reality.
The lower reaches of the East River have teemed with traffic since the earliest Dutch settlements in the 1670s, and I spent most of my childhood living up on the bluffs above Old Fulton Street, the site where, in 1814, Robert Fulton inaugurated regular steamboat-ferry service between Brooklyn and Manhattan and made Brooklyn boom. The ferry kept Brooklyn’s economy running, fueled its growth from Dutch farming village to throbbing Anglocentric factory town and international port until 1924, forty-one years after the Brooklyn Bridge was completed. The cobblestone streets bustled and the town became a city. The horse-drawn construction of the Eagle Warehouse and all the other warehouses and towering factories put an end to any doubt that Brooklyn was rising just as confidently as its neighbor across the river. By the 1970s, though, those factories and warehouses were slipping into decrepitude, creating a vacant canyon land where packs of dogs and kids on bikes from the various bordering neighborhoods competed for territory among the low-slung, Civil War–era brick warehouses with rusting, arched iron doors that still smelled of the pepper they once housed. Here on the flats stood a dozen monolithic, white cement factories built at the turn of the nineteenth century by the Scottish-born king of the cardboard box, the industrialist Robert Gair. In 1926, Gair moved his light-industrial empire upstate to Piermont. By the 1970s, “Gairville” had become a collection of empty or emptying monuments to the slow death of urban manufacturing.
A week passes and Chris still hasn’t returned to fix our raft. During that gap I check on our pile of salvaged raft material at least twice a day. If, when I get down to the river’s edge, any other kids happen to be hanging around on the north side of New Dock Street, in the paved lot long since gone to seed, forsaken by its owner, or the city or whoever abandons the vast spoiled tracts in the landscape of my childhood, I wait for them to leave, to leave without molesting our raft pile. I position myself a calculated distance from our pile. Not so close that I will draw attention to the salvage, but near enough so that if some nosy kid does notice the pile, he’ll know it is mine and that I am watching him. I worry a lot about what I’ll do if the nosy kid who does notice our raft-makings also wants to build a raft and sail it across the East River. I worry especially about what I will do if that nosy kid who shares my nautical ambitions is much bigger or more aggressive than me. But I stay at my post by the pile all the same. I lie on my back on the sun-baked pavement, my shoulders propped against a discarded tire—hundreds and hundreds of tires are heaped behind the concrete wall of the Sanitation Department depot on the south side of New Dock Street. I lie on the hot sidewalk, my chin resting on my chest just like James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven. His shoulders on his saddle, his chin on his chest, his back in the dust of that West Texas cattle station, he reclines, unconcerned and unmoving, while dangerous men fuss needlessly around him.
Time passes slowly out here on the river. I catalog the hours. I count the days. Try to calculate the minutes until Chris returns to the raft. While I am not picking over the ingredients of our unmade raft, I am filling a composition notebook. It is a diary of the project, an account of the project and a fable of the adventures to come, with meticulously drafted plans for The Raft’s construction. Chris never does return.
I am grown now. I am still restless. Often uncomfortable in my husk, feeling it tighten around me when the world falls quiet. Those who know me well have grown used to both grand gestures and grim antics. I come through in a pinch if a spasm of physical strength (and, on the rare occasion, bravery) is required. I fall down on the job if the most rudimentary clerical precision is called for. My mind is a whirl; concocting stories, nursing regret, scheming, and—more often than I like—suspecting the worst. I talk too much and I listen intently.
This past February, suffering through a three-month hangover, the result of a failed effort at a career change, I am untethered, undone really.
Years of magazine writing had taught me to trust that after a requisite period of inward-aimed anger, doubt, and pity, inspiration always returns. The plan had been to bide my time, await the rebound strategy, the plan for renewal or reinvigoration that has always been just one good night’s sleep away.
If only I could sleep.
© 2010 Manny Howard, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
47 of 50 people found the following review helpful.
Like the garden -- sprawling and unplanned
By C. McGrath
Like most of the reviewers, I saw Manny Howard on Colbert. He was funny and self-deprecating, and he seemed like the perfect guy to tell a story of ambition gone wrong. Turns out, though, the book went far more wrong than the farm.
I can't think of another book as disjointed -- as completely discombobulated -- as this. Roosters are about to be castrated in one chapter, but chapters later are still crowing. Obvious questions such as 'how much did this fiasco cost?' go unanswered, although oddly he does mention it in the original magazine article. He mentions calloo, many times, and then decides he should identify the unfamiliar plant... a hundred pages later. Anecdotes go rambling out of control. He drags in Wendell Berry's ghost, using long swathes of Berry's writing, ostensibly as a literary device, but clearly for padding. He throws in pages of poorly integrated Brooklyn history. He rambles about the start of his relationship with his wife. He grasps at any thread that will add pages, because, it turns out, aside from his horrific animal husbandry tales, he doesn't really have anything to say.
I agree with the reviewers who point out that his treatment of the livestock is vile, and that he and his wife come across as horribly unpleasant. But the real problem is that the book itself is an unstructured mess. Maybe the tornado that flattened his garden blew away his notes. Maybe he was too busy feuding with his wife to remember to take any.
Or maybe he just grabbed his advance and forgot that he was supposed to deliver a book..
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
A shocking account of cruelty, hubris and ignorance
By N. B. Kennedy
If you've read the New York magazine article (Sept. 10, 2007) on which this book is based, you might be eager to settle down with this account of the author's attempt to eat only food that he has grown or raised for 30 days. The article is well researched and charmingly written, and the author comes across as diligent and self-effacing, and a bit of a bumbler. He's no Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) and he knows it.
Yet within the first few pages of his book, Mr. Howard reveals that he divorced his first wife, got his girlfriend (current wife) pregnant and urged her to abort the baby, became bored in the working world and dropped out, downloads porn in his spare time, and bought his daughter a dozen birds and left them all to kill each other... oh, all except for the one that he smashes against a wall in a drunken rage.
I had to read that part about the birds again, it was so shocking. What in this man's character would compel me to read on? Read on I did, though, hoping that through his urban farming experiment, Mr. Howard would learn a few lessons about humility, compassion and responsibility. Sadly, he does not.
His cruelty to animals is breathtaking -- time after time, he acquires animals without any knowledge of how to care for them, and the result is always the same -- they die. Or, he kills them in particularly brutal ways, like smashing them against whatever hard surface is at hand. He beats a rabbit about to give birth until it is paralyzed and then, after she has given birth, cruelly moves her water dishes out of her reach. "Something good has to come of this grotesque error," he writes before he kills her.
His drunken rages repeatedly rear their ugly head. And, he demeans the very people who could help him, writing in a shorthand that puts people in their place -- the feed store owner, for example, is "Cowcatcher." He professes to love his wife, yet takes digs at her, repeatedly referring to her "uniform" or her "business rig," meaning she's dressed well for a job she excels at and pays the household bills with. Unlike her husband. He mentions that his name is not on the deed to their house... I'm sure that will be an important fact at some future date.
At one point, just before Mr. Howard leaves a squirrel to die slowly of starvation in a trap -- as a self-styled "warning" to other squirrels -- he asks himself, "Why haven't I seen this obvious disaster?" It's a question any reader might ask of him.
54 of 62 people found the following review helpful.
Animal cruelty...and I'm not a PETA fanatic
By Peter J. Brofman
I was very excited to read this book after seeing him interviewed on Stephen Colbert. The author has a very dry sense of humor which is great. However, halfway through the book I was tired of reading about multiple cases of animal cruelty. Such instances include negligence in caring for birds he got as a gift for his child followed by manually and deliberately killing them, trapping a squirrel and letting it sit without food or water for 2-3 days before drowning it, and letting a rabbit suffer to die by being eaten inside out by maggots instead of putting it out of it's misery (a veterinarian, a swift head shot, he'll even drowning it would have been better). I had to stop reading halfway through as I really hated to hear him treat animals that way. Maybe he did it for shock value; if so he's a jackass. Maybe you'll read the book just to hear those stories; in which case you're a jackass.
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