Sarah Frey‘s The Growing Season: How I Built a New Life – and Saved an American Farm is a delightful and inspiring memoir that charts her path from scrappy rural childhood to creating one of America’s largest fresh produce growers and shippers, and serving as its CEO. Frey is an American farmer and entrepreneur. She is the CEO and owner of Frey Farms, which she founded at age sixteen. Frey Farms is the largest H-2A visa employer in Illinois as well as the largest grower of pumpkins in the United States. Joining her is journalist Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give and St. Mark’s is Dead.
In Conversation: On Saving an American Farm, and Growing an Empire
In Conversation: On Saving an American Farm, and Growing an Empire
Author:
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Ada Calhoun
Ada Calhoun is the author of the memoir Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, named one of the top ten memoirs of 2017 by W magazine; and St. Marks Is Dead, a non-fiction book about the history of Manhattan’s St Mark’s Place. She has collaborated on several New York Times bestsellers, and written for the New York Times, New York, and The New Republic. Reaching middle age successful but miserable, author Ada Calhoun set out to find out why other Generation X women were also feeling miserable. In Why We Can’t Sleep (Grove Press) she reports that the generation raised to “have it all,” is exhausted, terrified about money, under-employed, and overwhelmed. She opens up the cultural and political contexts of Gen X’s predicament and offers solutions for how to pull oneself out of the abyss―and keep the next generation of women from falling in. The result is empowering. Publishers Weekly called it “[A] Bracing, empowering study… Women of every generation will find much to relate to in this humorous yet pragmatic account.”
Sarah Frey
Sarah Frey has been described by The New York Times as “the Pumpkin Queen of America.” She sells more pumpkins than any other producer in the United States. Her family business, Frey Farms, plants thousands of acres of fruits and vegetables in seven states. With a mission to end food waste in the fresh produce industry, the family makes natural food products and beverages from imperfect or “ugly fruit.” In The Growing Season: How I Built a New Life–and Saved an American Farm (Ballantine Books) , Frey tells the inspiring story of how a scrappy rural childhood gave Frey the grit and resiliency to take risks that paid off in unexpected ways. She was fifteen when she moved out of her family home and started her own fresh produce delivery business with an old pickup truck. Two years later, when the family farm faced foreclosure, Frey returned, took over the farm, and created her own produce company. Today, Frey Farms, is one of America’s largest fresh produce growers and shippers. Publishers Weekly noted that “Frey’s energetic, inspiring memoir will appeal to small business owners and anyone who likes a bootstrapping success story.”
