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This book considers women’s access to land and their role in food production in developing counties.Articles in this collection assert that women’s contribution to global agricultural production for food and for profit continues to be largely unacknowledged and undervalued, and that their ability to farm is constrained by lack of control of land, agricultural inputs, credit, and other essential resources. Thirty years after the first studies, women’s role in farming remains underestimated and misunderstood by development planners and policymakers. ... Read more

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Depending on who is telling it, the history of Euro-American farmers on the Great Plains has been a story of either agricultural triumph or ecological failure—an optimistic tale of taming nature for human purposes or a dire account of disrupting nature and suffering the environmental consequences.

In On the Great Plains, author Geoff Cunfer poses an alternative scenario: that people were not the masters of nature on the Great Plains. Land use in America's vast interior prairies has stayed remarkably stable throughout the twentieth century, changing little as droughts came and went, as farmers shifted from horses to tractors, and as federal subsidies and fluctuating crop prices transformed the economics of farming. An equilibrium between natural and human forces emerged as farmers plowed and planted the same amount of cropland during most of this period, maintaining two-thirds of the Great Plains in unplowed, native vegetation.

To support his theory, Cunfer looks at the entire Great Plains (450 counties in ten states), tapping historical agricultural census data paired with GIS mapping to illuminate land use on the Great Plains over 130 years. Coupled with several community and family case studies, this database allows Cunfer to reassess the interaction between farmers and nature in the Great Plains agricultural landscape. ... Read more

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The process of nation-building in Latin America transformed the relations between the state, the economy, and nature. Between 1760 and 1940, the economies of most countries in the Spanish Caribbean came to depend heavily on the export of plant products, such as coffee, tobacco, and sugar. After the mid-nineteenth century, this model of export-led economic growth also became a central tenet of liberal projects of nation-building. As international competition grew and commodity prices fell over this period, Latin American growers strove to remain competitive by increasing agricultural production. By the turn of the twentieth century, their pursuit of export-led growth had generated severe environmental problems, including soil exhaustion, erosion, and epidemic outbreaks of crop diseases and pests. This book traces the history of the intersections between nature, economy, and nation in the Spanish Caribbean through a history of the agricultural and botanical sciences. Growers and governments in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, and Costa Rica turned to scientists to help them establish practical and ideological control over nature. They hoped to use science to alleviate the pressing environmental and economic stresses, without having to give up their commitment to export-led growth. Starting from an overview of the relationship among science, nature, and development throughout the export boom of 1760 to 1930, Stuart McCook examines such topics as the relationship between scientific plant surveys and nation-building, the development of a "creole science" to address the problems of tropical agriculture, the ecological rationalization of the sugar industry, and the growth of technocratic ideologies of science and progress. He concludes with a look at how the Great Depression of the 1930s changed the paradigms of economic and political development and the role of science and nature in these paradigms. ... Read more

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An Inspiring Vision
In his classic simple language Jackson describes the costs of our current way of doing agriculture. He focuses on soil loss with emphasizing the fact that our dependence has gone from "soil to oil" for energy and fertilizer.

This book outlines Jackson's idea for a perennial, herbaceous, polyculture agriculture that mimics the natural environment instead of our current annual, herbaceous, monoculture. Jackson also gives a broad view of decentralizing our societies and distributing people across land according to its ability to support them in the proper concentration.

The critiques of current agricultural practices is well done but simple enough for the laymen to understand. Simple computations are used to illustrate the ecological and financial costs of capital/oil intensive agriculture.

The discussion of values and religion in chapter 8, though it has a good direction, is lacking in comparison to Jackson's other topics. ... Read more

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The failures of “free-market” capitalism are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the production and distribution of food. Although modern human societies have attained unprecedented levels of wealth, a significant amount of the world's population continues to suffer from hunger or food insecurity on a daily basis. In Agriculture and Food in Crisis, Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar have assembled an exceptional collection of scholars from around the world to explore this frightening long-term trend in food production. While approaching the issue from many angles, the contributors to this volume share a focus on investigating how agricultural production is shaped by a system that is oriented around the creation of profit above all else, with food as nothing but an afterthought.

As the authors make clear, it is technically possible to feed to world's people, but it is not possible to do so as long as capitalism exists. Toward that end, they examine what can be, and is being, done to create a human-centered and ecologically sound system of food production, from sustainable agriculture and organic farming on a large scale to movements for radical land reform and national food sovereignty. This book will serve as an indispensible guide to the years ahead, in which world politics will no doubt come to be increasingly understood as food politics.

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In 1860 farmers accounted for 60 percent of the American workforce; in 1910, 30.5 percent; by 1994, there were too few to warrant a separate census category. The changes wrought by the decline of family farming and the rise of industrial agribusiness typically have been viewed through historical, economic, and political lenses. But as William Conlogue demonstrates, some of the most vital and incisive debates on the subject have occurred in a site that is perhaps less obvious--literature.

Conlogue refutes the critical tendency to treat farm-centered texts as pastorals, arguing that such an approach overlooks the diverse ways these works explore human relationships to the land. His readings of works by Willa Cather, Ruth Comfort Mitchell, John Steinbeck, Luis Valdez, Ernest Gaines, Jane Smiley, Wendell Berry, and others reveal that, through agricultural narratives, authors have addressed such wide-ranging subjects as the impact of technology on people and land, changing gender roles, environmental destruction, and the exploitation of migrant workers. In short, Conlogue offers fresh perspectives on how writers confront issues whose site is the farm but whose impact reaches every corner of American society. ... Read more

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Set in the context of a sophisticated critique of the privileged epistemological position oachieved by modern science, whereby it both aspires to provide technological solutions for social and political problems while at the same time disclaiming responsibility for the new problems which it creates in its wake, the author looks to the future in an analysis of the new project to apply the latest Gene Revolution technology to India and warns of the further environmental and social damage which will ensue. ... Read more

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Providesa comprehensive, analytical account of theprinciples as well as the practical implications of agroforestry.Focuses on understanding how agroforestry systems function while taking into account the conflicts and compromises that arise because of farmers' requirements. ... Read more

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A great book for the seriously interested
I would highly recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in persuing tropical agroforestry. It is full of information, covers social and political ramifications and obstacles to tropical agroforestry, BUT, it is USD114, which is quite high. Having said that, it is a fantastic book and well written, refuting some of the hype of the 1980s, but still very optimistic about agroforestry. For anyone who wants to know the nuts and bolts of these systems, this is your book.
I work in organic cacao production, and know much about TA, however, nearly every page has me learning new things, realizing that the problems we face here are problems shared by others elsewhere, or seeing things in a new light.
The writer is well informed and clearlyu empathetizes with small scale producers. ... Read more

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This innovative volume is the first collective effort by archaeologists and ethnographers to use concepts and models from human behavioral ecology to explore one of the most consequential transitions in human history: the origins of agriculture. Carefully balancing theory and detailed empirical study, and drawing from a series of ethnographic and archaeological case studies from eleven locations--including North and South America, Mesoamerica, Europe, the Near East, Africa, and the Pacific--the contributors to this volume examine the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding using a broad set of analytical models and concepts. These include diet breadth, central place foraging, ideal free distribution, discounting, risk sensitivity, population ecology, and costly signaling. An introductory chapter both charts the basics of the theory and notes areas of rapid advance in our understanding of how human subsistence systems evolve. Two concluding chapters by senior archaeologists reflect on the potential for human behavioral ecology to explain domestication and the transition from foraging to farming. ... Read more

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Did Early Farmers Forage Optimally?
This book presents eleven case studies that apply optimal foraging theory and other ecological models to early agriculture.It also contains an excellent introduction and two really superior final chapters analyzing the cases.
The studies are solid, sensible, and well done.The advantage of ecological theory seems to be that it makes scholars take serious account of large, comprehensive data sets, and provides tools to analyze these.Conclusions are properly modest, being usually confined to particular regions and time frames.One problem tackled by several writers is the very long delay--typically thousands of years--between the origins of deliberate cultivation and the coming of actual dependence on agriculture for staple food.This is a perfect problem for optimal foraging theory.It can model the ways in which people can intensify their hunting, gathering, and foraging.Typically, people could do this more quickly and easily than they can domesticate a new crop or invent a new cultivation technology.
The problem with this book is that it focuses too narrowly on immediate needs for food.Storage is not much discussed, yet a major difference between agriculture and foraging is that agriculture requires extensive storage--at least of seeds for future planting. We know that agriculture, wherever well documented, has provided luxuries and status goods, feast foods, ceremonial foods, fibres, and even furry pets.Above all, it has always provided valuable goods for trade.Agriculture originated in precisely those areas of the planet that were most central to great trade routes, and that farming spread along those routes.Surely, one reason to farm was to have a handy and defensible supply of foods for trade.
All these matters can be modeled within behavioral ecology, or closely related microeconomic frameworks, so there is no excuse for oversimiplifying.One hopes that future work will develop along such lines, expanding the models given herein.
That said, this is an excellent book that makes many valuable contributions.The wonderful summaries of regional archaeological findings, the challenging models, and the eminent common sense of most articles and above all the two commentaries, make the book well worth reading for anyone interested in early agriculture. ... Read more

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The development and business communities recently have experienced a tremendous resurgence of interest in promoting value chains development as a way to add value, lower transaction costs, diversify rural economies, and contribute to increasing rural household incomes. This Guide is designed for those who want to know more about value chain-based approaches and how to use them in ways that can contribute to sound operational decisions, improved market linkages, and results for enterprise and industry development.Using real examples, mostly from African countries, this book reviews and iillustrates a range of concepts, analytical tools, and methodologies centered on the value chain that can be used to design, implement, and evaluate agricultural and agribusiness development initiatives that strive to enhance productivity and competitiveness. ... Read more

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Essential Part of American History
Best one volume history of American agriculture by dean of American agricultural historians; much superior to Danbom, Born in the County, which attempts a similar brief summary.Good bibliographies of additional readings.Although America was primarily an agricultual county for 250 years, most conventional histories ignore this fact.This book supply an essential missing dimentsion, although the reader still has to do a good deal of work to relate it to political,cultural, and economic history that was going on at the same time. ... Read more

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Winner of the 2003 Saloutos Award for the best book on American agricultural history given by the Agricultural History SocietyDuring the early decades of the twentieth century, agricultural practice in America was transformed from a pre-industrial to an industrial activity. In this book Deborah Fitzgerald argues that farms became modernized in the 1920s because they adopted not only new machinery but also the financial, cultural, and ideological apparatus of industrialism.Fitzgerald examines how bankers and emerging professionals in engineering and economics pushed for systematic, businesslike farming. She discusses how factory practices served as a template for the creation across the country of industrial or corporate farms. She looks at how farming was affected by this revolution and concludes by following several agricultural enthusiasts to the Soviet Union, where the lessons of industrial farming were studied. ... Read more

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In an age of uncertainty about how climate change may affect the global food supply, industrial agribusiness promises to keep the world fed. Through the use of factory “farms,” genetic engineering, and the widespread application of chemicals, they put their trust in technology and ask consumers to put our trust in them. However, a look behind the curtain reveals practices that put our soil, water, and health at risk. What are the alternatives? And can they too feed the world?
 
The rapidly growing alternative food system is made up of people reclaiming their connections to their food and their health. A forty-year veteran of this movement, Mark Winne introduces us to innovative “local doers” leading the charge to bring nutritious, sustainable, and affordable food to all. Heeding Emerson’s call to embrace that great American virtue of self-reliance, these leaders in communities all across the country are defying the authority of the food conglomerates and taking matters into their own hands. They are turning urban wastelands into farms, creating local dairy collectives, preserving farmland, and refusing to use genetically modified seed. They are not only bringing food education to children in elementary schools, but also offering cooking classes to adults in diabetes-prone neighborhoods—and taking the message to college campuses as well.  Such efforts promote food democracy and empower communities to create local food-policy councils, build a neighborhood grocery store in the midst of a food desert, or demand healthier school lunches for their kids. Winne’s hope is that all of these programs, scaled up and adopted more widely, will ultimately allow the alternative food system to dethrone the industrial.
 
Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas challenges us to go beyond eating local to become part of a larger solution, demanding a system that sustains body and soul.

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The greatest agricultural state
The American Midwest is justly celebrated for its agricultural wealth. But surprisingly to many, the largest agricultural state is California. This guidebook explains the sheer diversity and volume of California farming. Above all, the Central Valley dominates the state's agriculture. We get a comprehensive exposition of the state's crops and livestock, with an emphasis on the Central Valley.

All this is not done in adry, tabular format. The authors have taken care to also provide an interesting narrative, if you are willing to delve into this subject. The text is judiciously interleaved with maps and photos for added context.

Space is also given to explaining various private and public organisations involved in farming. From farm cooperatives to trade associations and retailers. Plus, of course, the vital role of educational institutions in performing research into ever improving techniques and disease prevention. Not surprising, considering the book was put together by the University of California. ... Read more

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Over the past two decades, how has urban agriculture changed in sub-Saharan Africa? Is city farming now better integrated into environmental management and city governance? And, looking ahead, how might urban agriculture address the needs of the low-income households and modernizing cities of Africa?In this book, leading specialists in the fields of urban agriculture and urban environment present a unique collection of case studies that examines the growing role of local food production in urban livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa. Amongst many issues, the authors probe the changing role of urban agriculture, the risks and benefits of crop–livestock systems, and the opportunities for making locally produced food more easily available and more profitable. Concluding chapters reflect on the policy and governance implications of greater integrationof urban natural resources and the built environment, an expanded role for urban agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa and the crucial role of women in urban food systems.African Urban Harvest will be of interest to decision-makers, development professionals, researchers, academics, and students and educators in urban planning, development studies, African studies, and environmental studies. ... Read more

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Agricultural areas in industrial and urban regions will in the future no longer be seen merely as functional space but rather as islands of the beautiful and the useful. In the extremely densely built Ruhr region, two projects explore the space between postindustrial forest landscape and useful agricultural landscape: the Industrial Forest of Rhine-Elbe and the Ornamental Farm of Mechtenberg. In Mechtenberg, Paolo Bürgi, the renowned landscape architect from the Ticino, has designed sequential interventions to accompany the seasonal cycle of land on the grain fields. Starting from these fascinating examples, the book presents exemplary concepts for the cooperation of landscape architecture, agriculture and Land Art. ... Read more

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Those are not your grandfather's potato chips.

As debate rages over the costs and benefits of genetically engineered crops, noted agroecologist Miguel Altieri lucidly examines some of the issue's most basic and pressing questions:

* Are transgenic crops similar to conventionally bred crops?

* Are transgenic crops safe to eat?

* Does biotechnology increase yields?

* Does it reduce pesticide use?

* What are the costs to American farmers?

* Will biotechnology benefit poor farmers?

* Can biotechnology coexist with other forms of agriculture?

* What are the known and potential environmental and biological risks?

* What alternatives do we have to genetically modified crops? ... Read more