How Farming Taught Arlo Crawford To Follow His Bliss

Arlo Crawford never wanted to be a farmer like his parents. But that changed one spring. He shares his experience from the office back to the fields with KUOW's Marcie Sillman.

Crawford's parents were part of the back-to-the-land generation of the 1970s. Crawford's father dropped out of law school and bought land in southern Pennsylvania. That land became New Morning organic farm, and that's where Crawford and his sister Janie grew up.

Crawford said farming in this remote area was his parents' thing, not his. He left the farm for boarding school when he was a teenager; ultimately he wound up at a desk job at Harvard University's Fogg Museum of Art.

Despite his job and his steady girlfriend, Crawford was unhappy. He didn't know where his life was heading. So one spring he quit his job, and traded life in Cambridge for life on New Morning organic farm.

It was a summer of hard work and self discovery. Crawford chronicles the experience in his memoir "A Farm Dies Once A Year."