John Seabrook’s new book has a great title. A staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, Seabrook comes from a remarkable family and has written its history. He starts in the middle of the 19th century, when Samuel Seabrook left his modest job in England and took a ship from Liverpool to the United States. He did not flourish. He tried various trades and eventually acquired thirteen acres of scrubby land. But he did no better than he had done in his five previous jobs in England. The land was eventually repossessed by the sheriff. He died poor and was buried in an unmarked grave. 

His son Arthur and his grandson Charlie (always known as C F and later described as the Henry Ford of agriculture) did a whole lot better. At the age of fourteen, the year his father died, Arthur was apprenticed to a local farmer who taught him ‘truck farming’ – the equivalent of market gardening, or growing various vegetable crops on a large scale for shipment to urban markets. Truck farming was to be the family’s main business for the next two generations. 

Arthur turned out to be very good at farming. After eighteen years as a tenant, he had saved enough to buy fifty-eight acres of scrubland near Deerfield in Massachusetts and to build both a farm and a large house on it. The land was close enough to a railway line