As Alice Waters hovers in the wings as a muse for the Obama era, inspiring the White House garden and healthy school lunches, the fantasy of a pastoral life far from derivatives and emissions and other excreta of our times abounds.

Right on track are these two memoirs by journalist Jonah Raskin and novelist Brad Kessler. Each provides vicarious and delicious adventures for those of us more likely to buy locally at farmstands or plant a garden patch than respond to the call of the land at full bore.

Raskin, author of "The Radical Jack London" and "American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' and the Making of the Beat Generation," sketches Northern California's organic farming lineage quickly.

He includes Warren Weber of Marin County's Star Route Farm, and makes it clear that Sonoma County's farms have supplied Waters' restaurant for decades and impressed Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement.

"Field Days" begins as a search for "the perfect farm," and is in some ways a meandering, a gathering of facts to fill a reporter's notebook (numbers of acres in organic farming in California, an on-the-ground update of the state of farmworkers' rights, a survey of organic farms and wineries in Northern California).

When Raskin finds Oak Hill Farm, the pace quickens. "...even at first sight I felt a sense of being enclosed and protected within the Oak Hill world that surrounded me, and I wanted to embrace it in return."

He has found what he calls the "hero" of his book and the profile of the farm becomes the centerpiece of his labors.

As it turns out, he mentions offhandedly, this is hallowed literary ground, with legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher's house within view.

Through July and August, Raskin spends his days laboring in the fields at Oak Hill Farm. The work is transforming. At day's end, he writes:

"I felt exhilarated and clean at the core of my being.... in the Valley of the Moon, I felt reattached to the earth and infused with a new appreciation for the land and the soil. Belonging was uplifting."

"Field Days" is a skeptic's journey, making its discoveries all the more potent.

Kessler is author of the moving novel "Birds in Fall," which won the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His new book is:

"A story about what it's like to live with animals who directly feed you."

"Goat Song" also is a novelist's revel. This memoir impresses most when he records in lyrical terms his sheer love of being in the company of his herd.

The first taste of his own home-made fresh chevre, for instance. "... it tasted like nothing we'd ever eaten before ... . It seemed we were eating not a cheese, but a meadow."

Kessler turns serious about his cheesemaking. He travels to the Ferme de Rouze in the Pyranees, a village whose surroundings seem most compatible with his flinty Vermont location, and studies with a French master who gives him the protocol, step by step.

"I knew at last what kind of cheese I'd make back in Vermont ... cheese made from goats and clouds, humility and mountain air."

In these fresh, impassioned reports from the fields, Raskin and Kessler remind us that the farming Renaissance has been rooting in this country for decades.

Their explorations, eloquently reported, remind us of the simple pleasures of growing things, of herding, of re-entering the natural landscape so thoroughly that human concerns regain their proper scale.

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