The American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture’s Feeding Minds Press released a new book this week titled “My Family’s Soybean Farm,” along with a companion educator guide. Katie Olthoff, who resides near Ames, is the book’s author. She tells the Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network the book is geared for grades K-2 and that it combines illustrations with real photographs and includes a glossary to explain farm tools and practices.

“I have three kids and we live on a large turkey farm,” she said. “We have all of our turkeys in big barns and we raise about 100,000 per year. But when my oldest son was in kindergarten, he asked me why we didn’t have a farm like the ones he saw in books that had a couple of pigs outdoors, a cow you could milk, and maybe some goats and chickens. The farms he saw depicted in his books and on cartoons really didn’t represent what most of Iowa agriculture looks like.”

Olthoff says this is the 10th book she’s written in the My Family’s Farm series, which are available to Iowa teachers free of charge through the Iowa Ag Literacy Foundation. The response to her agricultural children’s books has been nothing but positive.

“There is a push right now for more non-fiction in classrooms,” Olthoff said. “The books through the Iowa Ag Literacy Foundation are based on a real family in Iowa. It has a lot of features of non-fiction text that teachers are looking for, and the photographs are very engaging and put a very personal touch on the modern farm.”

My Family’s Soybean Farm is now available in paperback for purchase directly from Feeding Minds Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble online.

Story courtesy of the Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network