It wouldn't be at all unusual to find American author/professor Jonah Raskin laboring with migrant workers in the fields at Oak Hill Farm in Sonoma, Calif. Raskin, 67, who split the university scene to explore radical '60s and '70s counterculture and went on to write rather eloquently about it (American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation and For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman) — has a knack for embedding himself almost entirely with his subject matter.

In his newest book, Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), Raskin tackles the organic-farming phenomenon (or revolution, depending on whom you talk to and what books you read) that is once again taking deep roots in Northern California. Raskin's year at Oak Hill Farm wasn't his first encounter with agriculture; in fact, it has always been in his blood. Raskin's father — an outspoken Communist before the second wave of the Red Scare hit in the late '40s and early '50s — grew up on a farm, and Jonah's boyhood experiences along the formerly barn-speckled fields of Huntington, Long Island, included a small-yet-productive organic garden tended by his parents. When the Raskin family moved to California upon Jonah's father's retirement from practicing law, they took with them the farming practices that had served them so well in Long Island. Unfortunately, "progress" quickly began enveloping the Raskins's new life in California. About those years, Jonah writes, " ... suburbia grew around them once again, and in watching the disappearance of their farming community I experienced the loss of a kind of childhood innocence ... the coming of suburbia altered the landscape beyond recognition, and I experienced a sense of profound displacement."

That feeling, or some nagging bit of it, carried over into Jonah Raskin's accomplished adulthood, and in 2006, he once again dropped out of his normal life — this time as a communications professor at Sonoma State University — in search of something more profound: "I wanted to get out and explore, before it was too late, before life passed me by ... to regain something I felt I had lost," he writes, "and to work alongside men and women who were cultivating the earth."

Field Days — which began as a photography project but morphed into a full-blown memoir after an encounter between the author and Santa Rosa farmer Sharon Grossi (of Valley End Farm) — is a fly-on-the-wall look at contemporary sustainable farming, and living, in Sonoma. Raskin introduces us to the characters, both alive and dead, who have contributed to the resurgence of the organic revolution in Northern California. Through Raskin's experiences with growers, migrant workers, vintners, farm-to-table and farm-to-school activists, armchair ecological theorists, chefs, community leaders, throwback hippies, and even a few dead authors (Jack London and M.F.K. Fisher, among them), the terms "sustainability" and "locavore" are finally demystified and taken off their pop-culture-lexicon pedestals.

Field Days honors migrant workers without turning them into second-class citizens, and some of the author's most earnest writing comes in chapters where the farm laborer is the focus. The larger debate over immigration is set aside in favor of familiarizing readers with a small group of influential migrant workers, legal or otherwise, whose positive impact on modern organic farming in California is undeniable. The migrant worker has been grossly underappreciated in books about American organic farming and winemaking — until now.

Throughout his enchanting and well-structured narrative, Raskin not only takes the time to examine big agribusiness from an ecological and financial perspective, but from a humanistic one as well. However hard they may try to resist it, where the growers come from informs the choices they make on their farms every day. Raskin addresses the modern organic farmer's duty to expand environmental stewardship and local-meets-global consciousness through education and hands-on learning opportunities.

Without stooping to New Age claptrap and holier-than-thou admonishments, Raskin reminds us through his experiences with farmers that we are all creatures of habit, and that it's easier to instill good habits early on than it is to break bad ones much later in life.

After reading Field Days, you'll think harder about where that flavorless stuff in your refrigerator's crisper actually came from. It will also make you reconsider shopping at large grocery chains operating under the misleading banners "natural," "sustainable" and "organic." The book will compel you to at least sample the bounty of organic produce offered at your nearest farmers market, and it may also help explain why those markets have become so expensive.

It might even inspire you (even if you're cursed with the blackest of thumbs) to plunge your own hands into rich, organic soil, and plant a few seeds for yourself — and the future.