Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand by Jeff Chu (Hardcover) (PREORDER)

Nonfiction - Nature - Essays - Biographies & Autobiographies - Memoirs - Body, Mind Spirit - Inspiration & Personal Growth 

RELEASE DATE: 3/25/2025 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE AND ARRIVE 1-2 DAYS AFTER THE RELEASE DATE)

A profound meditation on nature, heritage, and belonging, from an accomplished journalist who left New York City for life on a working farm

“I needed this book. I think you need it, too.”—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

In his late thirties, Jeff Chu left his job as a magazine writer and found himself at Princeton Theological Seminary’s “Farminary”—a twenty-one-acre working farm where students learn to cultivate the earth while examining life’s biggest questions. Now, he unpacks what he learned about creating “good soil,” both literally and figuratively, drawing lessons from the rhythms of growth, decay, and regeneration that define life on the land.

In gorgeous, transporting reflections, Chu introduces us to the cast of characters, human and not, who became his teachers. While observing the egrets that visit the pond, the worms that turn waste into fertile soil, and the Chinese long beans that get passed over in the farm’s CSA, Chu considers our desire to belong, the story behind the food on our plate, and the significance of his own roots. What is the earth trying to tell us, if we’ll only stop and listen?

Good Soil helps readers connect to the land and to one another at a time when we seem drawn most to the phones in our hands. For nature lovers, foodies, and anyone who has daydreamed about a more fulfilling life, this book is a tribute to friendship, to the sacredness of our bond with the natural world, and to how love can grow from the unlikeliest of places.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Jeff Chu is an award-winning journalist and editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure. He is the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me? and the co-author, with the late Rachel Held Evans, of the New York Times bestseller Wholehearted Faith. Chu is a former Time staff writer and Fast Company editor whose work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Modern Farmer. In his weekly newsletter, "Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer," Chu writes about spirituality, gardening, food, travel, and culture. He lives with his husband, Tristan, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

"Part memoir, part meditation, Good Soil is an extraordinary work of grace and courage that announces Jeff Chu as a major figure in an emerging field of modern and rigorous Christian thinkers. And he's funny: Baby chickens with eyeliner! Progressive fundamentalists! Passive-aggressive bok choy! If Wendell Berry and David Sedaris had a love child, they could only hope he might be as fine a thinker and as funny a writer as Jeff Chu."-- Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Amity and Prosperity and Circle of Hope

"I have lots of shiny things to say about this book--it's smart, kind, honest, and revelatory in all the right ways--but the truest thing I can say is how befriended I felt from the very first page. Jeff Chu has a gift for loving people he has never met (and may not even like), having decided ahead of time that the best thing any of us can do is pay attention to what gives us life and tell one another about it. Good Soil won't let go until it has made you want to do that at your very next opportunity." --Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark

"Delving into the soils that we come from--our families, cultures, communities--we can only humbly let go of the idea that we alone shape our path and that our roots and those around us 'are inescapably interdependent with the world, ' . . . [ Good Soil is] sustenance for the soul found while diving hands into the dirt." --Kirkus Reviews