Far from the Madding Crowd Hardcover – 23 January 2023

Howard Barbour - staying on the small-holding of a relative at age eight, decided right then that farming would be his life. In 1956 at age twelve, he began working on a local farm, in time to see the last vestiges of the farming life Thomas Hardy describes, disappear. In those days there were still village blacksmiths, barbers, wart charmers, corpse dressers and dousers, a few workhorses and the old men who handled them. These old men regaled him with stories of terrible horse accidents, steam traction engines, threshing gangs, game keepers and poachers, and the hard slog that was the life of these men and their wives. He remembers twenty Gypsy caravans on the village green and snowball or horse turd wars with the gypsy kids. After an apprenticeship then college, he settled to managing a 100 cow dairy unit. A temporary but debilitating injury gave him pause to reconsider and he opted for a more secure career in teaching. Howard taught agriculture in both Scotland, England, and Oregon. He also taught native village kids inside the Arctic Circle in Alaska.