Bromfield's Malabar Farm is more or less the sequel to Pleasant Valley. While Pleasant Valley flows like a continuous story, Malabar Farm is more disconnected, and is really a set of essays that don't attempt to be in chronological order, and are occasionally redundant. Bromfield comes across here as more arrogant about his approach to farming, however, there is still a good deal of interesting material, and if you've read Pleasant Valley and liked it, you will appreciate finding out what happened over the next few years. By this time, they had given up on being a general purpose farm, and had become specialized as a grass farm focused on both beef and dairy cattle. He spends quite a while rationalizing this, and indeed, I found his discussion of this insightful as it represents the beginning of the development of the large, specialized farms of today. He presents the argument both economically and technologically. Also, this book talks more about mechanization which is featured only a bit in Pleasant Valley. Summary: not as good as Pleasant Valley, but if you read and enjoyed Pleasant Valley you will want to read this too. This book could be read independently of Pleasant Valley but will make a lot more sense if you have read that first.
