Doug Fine’s Catalog of Books

Offer a Wealth of Hemp and Regenerative Farming Knowledge

Expert’s journey from suburbanite to goat rancher

to hemp farmer bursts with humor and know-how.

(LOS ANGELES) Before Doug Fine was producing a television show about life as a hemp farmer, he was an author, journalist and solar-powered goat rancher. After his first two books—Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man and the Boston GlobeBestseller Farewell, My Subaru—followed his metamorphosis from East Coast suburbanite to Alaska rugged individualist to New Mexican goat rancher, Fine became an established hemp farmer. As he learned more about the versatile and vital plant, it became the muse for his next four books: Too High to Fail, Hemp Bound, First Legal Harvest, and American Hemp Farmer.

The shift in focus occurred while Fine was working on Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution (Avery, 2012) and he watched police raid his retiree-neighbor’s then-illegal small cannabis garden. It was a watershed moment for Fine.

“It was shocking to watch someone I knew arrested for growing a plant,” Fine says. “All these automatic weapons and helicopters in our quiet valley put my family in danger. I had to do something to stop this taxpayer funded war on cannabis.” He was compelled to study hemp’s long history in America and how the psychoactive and non-psychoactive plant became vilified just before World War II. Fine’s research led to him writing Too High To Fail and Hemp Bound (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014).

With those two books, Fine—who already lived a regenerative lifestyle on his Funky Butte Ranch in New Mexico—became one of the hemp’s most avid and educated advocates. He is a sought-after speaker on hemp and continues to earn praise from industry peers.

On Hemp Bound’s back cover, Willie Nelson writes that the book “tells us with detail and humor how to get to the environmental Promised Land. Doug has created a blueprint for the America of the future.”

In a New York Times piece, Bill Maher called Too High To Fail, “a well-researched and eye-opening book that makes the moral case for ending cannabis prohibition by burying it inside the economic case.”

 

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When Fine published his first book in 2004, he’d already earned a reputation for informative, entertaining, and award-winning journalism from five continents with the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR. In Not Really An Alaskan Mountain Man (Alaska Northwest Books), Fine tells of his (mis)adventures after moving from the suburbs to a one-room cabin in Alaska and trying to survive.

Fine’s next book Farewell, My Subaru (Villard, 2009) found him relocating to New Mexico from Alaska and successfully adopting a regenerative, environmentally and locally-minded lifestyle—despite not having any farming or solar power experience and even as his goats constantly busted into his kitchen. Engaging and hilarious, the book became a Boston Globe bestseller and earned Fine a Tonight Show appearance.

After Too High to Fail and Hemp Bound, Fine published First Legal Harvest (Tree Free Hemp, 2015). In the 20-page monograph printed on hemp paper, Fine recounts his six-week journey participating in harvests in Slovenia, Kentucky, Colorado, and Oregon. Five years later, Fine dropped his newest bestseller, American Hemp Farmer: Adventures and Misadventures in the Cannabis Trade (Chelsea Green, 2020).

In American Hemp Farmer, while getting his fingers and knees dirty, Fine humorously breaks down the joys and trials of an entire hemp season. He takes readers through each stage: soil preparation, seed acquisition, harvest, and creating his own hemp products in a regenerative mode. Fine accomplishes this with riveting real-life anecdotes, including opening the book with the tale about a bear attack that killed his goats during a massive wildfire in New Mexico.

Fine makes a well-researched and compelling case for hemp as a solution to the serious problem of climate change—and for hemp farming as the “hottest profession in the digital age and the most fun you can have outside the bedroom.” And he teaches that the regenerative lifestyle isn’t beyond the average person. “If I can do it,” says the former suburbanite, “anyone can.”

To further spread his message, Fine is developing a docuseries based on his book. American Hemp Farmer sees Fine sharing his hard-won regenerative hemp farming expertise on Native American tribal lands–including a recent expedition to the Rosebud Sioux Tribe where he counsels the tribe on their organic hemp harvest–as well as at George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate, and in interviews with researchers who bring hemp to the International Space Station.v While working on the series, Fine continues to write, speak, and teach hemp. Often that means tearing himself away from his family, goats, hummingbirds, and bees at his idyllic Funky Butte Ranch.

His remaining 2021 engagements include a headlining spot in the hemp track at the Hawaii Farmers Union Convention on November 11. And on December 8, Fine will deliver a keynote at the Acres USA 50th Anniversary Conference in Cincinnati which will be broadcast nationally on C-SPAN. Fine also recently gave other keynotes at the Southern Hemp Expo in Raleigh, NC, the Montana State Hemp and Cannabis Festival, and the Southwest Colorado Tribal Hemp Symposium. He’s available for bookings in winter/spring 2022. And aspiring hemp farmers can take Doug’s online hemp course at DougFine.com

“Humanity is in the bottom of the ninth with two outs,” he writes in American Hemp Farmer, “but you’ve got to have fun along the way.” The Washington Post adds, “Fine is a storyteller in the mold of Douglas Adams.”

A website of Doug Fine’s print and radio work, United Nations testimony, television appearances and TED Talk is at dougfine.com. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter at @organiccowboy.

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