Books like Mark Kramer's Three Farms: Making Milk, Meat, and Money from the American Soil (1980), wrote Noel Perrin in The New York Times Book Review (1980), are "the true 'new journalism.' What's new is not the use of novelistic technique, but the use of truly exhaustive research, the shift from quick and easy reporting to the complete tracing of an ecosystem." Indeed, in setting out to answer the question of why so many American farms are being lost each year, Mark Kramer spent close to a year in libraries gaining background on American agricultural history, trends, and policy. He spent much of the next three years living on farms in Massachusetts, Iowa, and California before writing Three Farms. In the process of his research he became expert enough on the history and politics of agriculture to be offered a position teaching the subject at the University of Massachusetts...