In Heirloom (Reviews, May 12), Tim Stark discusses his journey from Brooklyn to rural Pennsylvania to farm.

In the book, you say that none of your neighbors are organic farmers. What made you decide to grow organically?

Chemicals can be gross and smell awful, so when I started, I did everything by hand. It takes time to learn how to farm organically, it’s time consuming and requires a lot of bodies. But it’s how I make a living—I think my tomatoes have this real purity, and I’m proud of that. My clover is now covered in crimson flowers, and there’s a guy who comes to the farm with his honeybees. The bees go wild over the clover. When you see that, you know you’re doing something good.

Farming has obviously had an impact on your writing. Has writing had any influence on your farming?

I look back on my career as a farmer and am amazed that I managed to follow through on what I set out to do. Part of writing is that follow-through. You have this great idea, you write three or four really good pages, but what about the other 250 pages? Farming is also like that, you have to keep going. I’m a very careful writer; I edit a lot. On the farm, I’ve noticed that I’m now more meticulous about things, similar to the way I am with my writing. I want my farm to shine, to make it really nice.

With increasing urban sprawl, do you think the growing/buying local trend is sustainable?

The people who come to New York’s Union Square Greenmarket are so appreciative of the produce we bring them, it makes me want to cry sometimes. I love picking peas and sweet corn in the morning and taking them to the market in the afternoon—there are people who have never had anything like that, anything so fresh. And yet farms are still getting paved over as the value of real estate goes up. I think it’s important to get the grower’s perspective on some of the issues and to shed as much light as possible on the difficulties facing today’s farms, because it’s scary to think where we’ll be 20 years from now.

Were there any writers or books that inspired you as you wrote Heirloom?

There were a couple of influential books that gave me the momentum to keep going with my memoir. In American Pastoral, Philip Roth uses 60 enthralling pages to describe leather gloves—a dazzling accomplishment. I figured, if Roth could captivate me with leather gloves, I could certainly put some pizzazz into the description of a horse-drawn plow.