THE SIMPLE LIFE, INC.

MaryJane Butters lives at the end of a long dirt road in the black-soil region of northern Idaho. The road, which she named Wild Iris Lane, passes through wheat fields that are spread like a green duvet and buzzed by crop dusters, and the wooden sign for MaryJanesFarm is gaily painted in Butters's thematic colors--buttermilk yellow, barn red, and forest green. The same colors beautify the goat barn and the outhouse, which until two years ago was the only toilet among the collection of small assorted buildings on the fifty-acre farm. Butters manufactures a line of some sixty mail-order instant and quick-prep organic foods, and the farm serves as her assembly plant. Attempts to raise and process organic legumes and grains have been expensive and disappointing, and so, aside from a few herbs, she doesn't actually grow the ingredients herself. But, still, she says, "It was always my dream to be a farmer. I think of myself as a food scientist and a farmer and a good cook and an advocate of farmers. I'm really proud to call myself a farmer. I think I've earned it. I love that I'm a woman farmer, and an organic woman farmer."

Butters is a farmer in the same way that Martha Stewart is a housewife. One of her favorite books is "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing." Another is "The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR." Five years ago, she started MaryJanesFarm, an aspirational country-life magazine filled with autobiographical snippets and photographs of the farm, to sell her packaged foods and a line of rural-made goods. It now has a circulation of some sixty thousand and is available in ten thousand grocery stores and bookstores; she plans to print a hundred thousand copies of her next issue, which comes out in November. "I branded myself so people would ask, 'Who is this MaryJane?' " she says. "It creates a forum for me to talk about farming." So far, the most immediate and tangible dividend of her branding has been a $1.35-million deal she signed with Clarkson Potter last fall for a series of books about life on the farm, the first of which, "MaryJane's Ideabook, Cookbook, Lifebook," will come out next summer.

Butters wants to "put a face to food," and on her packaging that face belongs to a smiling blue-eyed gal in Western gear, adapted from a nineteen-forties label she found at a thrift store in Oregon. Butters herself is fifty-one and petite, with long ash-blond hair that sometimes hangs in a braid all the way down her back and sometimes is swept into a wispy bun and pinned at the crown of her head. She has periwinkle-blue eyes and a heart-shaped face, and favors Capri pants, hand-stitched pastel-colored hostess aprons, and round-toed Mary Janes with eyelet applique and wooden soles. To describe her aesthetic, which involves the liberal use of doilies and clothespins, dropped "g"s, and anything Amish, she invented the term "farmgirl"--as in "Farmgirl is a condition of the heart." It's an expression that, she has found, is inclusive enough to stimulate the longings of both urban apartment dwellers who buy MaryJanesFarm at Whole Foods and rural women who buy it at Wal-Mart.

Before her book advance, Butters had been scraping by--a few years ago, she and her husband, Nick Ogle, had a combined income of eighteen thousand dollars, and were forced to lay off several employees--but now she has more than quadrupled her staff, to eighteen. She has hired another designer for the magazine, a girl Friday, and a recipe tester and food stylist. In the spring, she brought on a woman to do research and development, special events, and merchandising. More recently, Butters hired two seasonal farmhands, Austin Goodman and Erik Jacobson, to help maintain the gardens, where she grows spinach, arugula, basil, carrots, sunflowers, strawberries, asparagus, rhubarb, squash, shallots, irises, gladiolus, zinnias, peonies, lilies, sunchokes, lovage, cherries, walnuts, and Asian pears, along with her prize crop, a field of sinuous, pale-green heirloom garlic plants. For the time being, Butters is too engrossed in writing the book and taking photographs to spend much time in the garden--"me, physically, out there hoeing."

Goodman and Jacobson are both trained photographers, and often find themselves shooting the produce with one of Butters's two new digital cameras, one for still photography and one for B-roll, in the likely event that she decides to do a television show or a series of how-to DVDs. In any case, jobs at the farm are fluid. Butters doesn't hesitate to assign a graphic designer to clean the chicken coop--she thinks of it as farmgirl training--or to ask a farmhand to wallpaper it with an old-fashioned nosegay pattern, to please the visiting editors of House & Garden. "So much here is about presentation and making it look beautiful," Goodman says. "So much of what she's doing is geared toward people's ideas of a farm." In the refrigerator of the test kitchen, eggs and vegetables often have signs posted on them saying "Photo Shoot--Do Not Eat."

One evening in early July, Butters's twenty-four-year-old daughter, Megan, arrived from Spokane with her fiance, Lucas, and a U-Haul full of their possessions. They were moving to Kansas, where Lucas had been offered a job as a college basketball coach. Megan and her brother Emil, who is twenty and works as a mechanic in nearby Moscow, grew up on the farm, and Butters thinks they will both end up living there someday. She expects Megan to take over her business: "You ...