Farming for Our Future examines the policies and legal reforms necessary to accelerate the adoption of practices that can make agriculture in the United States climate-neutral or better. These proven practices will also make our food system more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is substantial--much more so than official figures suggest--and we will not be able to achieve our overall mitigation goals unless agricultural emissions sharply decline. Fortunately, farms and ranches can be a major part of the climate solution, while protecting biodiversity, strengthening rural communities, and improving the lives of the workers who cultivate our crops and rear our animals. The importance of agricultural climate solutions can not be underestimated; it is a critical element both in ensuring our food security and limiting climate change. This book provides essential solutions to address the greatest crises of our time.
First published in 1982. Until the nineteenth-century the history of agriculture was the history of mankind but it has not perhaps received the wide attention that this importance justifies. In this study, the author reviews for the student of agricultural history successive attempts to describe and explain agricultural changes that are not specific to a limited area or a particular time. In a sense The Dynamics of Agricultural Change is a systematic historical geography of agriculture. Some of the models the author explores have been developed within agricultural history; some, drawn from other disciplines, can be applied fruitfully to it. What is the relationship between population growth and agricultural development? Between environmental changes and those in agriculture? What was the effect of the industrial revolution? And has there been an agricultural revolution? This book suggests to university students of economic history, historical geography and agriculture, a number of stimulating ways of interpreting and reinterpreting agricultural history.
In a time of great agricultural and rural change, the notion of 'multifunctionality' has remained under-theorized and poorly linked to the debates in the social sciences. This book analyses the extent to which the proposed transition towards post-productivist agriculture holds up to scientific scrutiny, and proposes a new transition theory.
The dramatic increases in food prices experienced over the last four years, and their effects of hunger and food insecurity, as well as human-induced climate change and its implications for agriculture, food production and food security, are key topics within the field of agronomy and agricultural research. Contested Agronomy addresses these issues by exploring key developments since the mid-1970s, focusing in particular on the emergence of the neoliberal project and the rise of the participation and environmental agendas, taking into consideration how these have had profound impacts on the practice of agronomic research in the developing world especially over the last four decades. This book explores, through a series of case studies, the basis for a much needed ‘political agronomy’ analysis that highlights the impacts of problem framing and narratives, historical disjunctures, epistemic communities and the increasing pressure to demonstrate ‘success’ on both agricultural research and the farmers, processors and consumers it is meant to serve. Whilst being a fascinating and thought-provoking read for professionals in the Agriculture and Environmental sciences, it will also appeal to students and researchers in agricultural policy, development studies, geography, public administration, rural sociology, and science and technology studies.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.
Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World is the first comprehensive exploration of key emerging issues facing developing-country agriculture today, from rapid urbanization to rural transformation to climate change. In this four-part volume, top experts offer the latest research in the field of agricultural development. Using new lenses to examine today’s biggest challenges, contributors address topics such as nutrition and health, gender and household decision-making, agrifood value chains, natural resource management, and political economy. The book also covers most developing regions, providing a critical global perspective at a time when many pressing challenges extend beyond national borders. Tying all this together, Agricultural Development explores policy options and strategies for developing sustainable agriculture and reducing food insecurity and malnutrition. The changing global landscape combined with new and better data, technologies, and understanding means that agriculture can and must contribute to a wider range of development outcomes than ever before, including reducing poverty, ensuring adequate nutrition, creating strong food value chains, improving environmental sustainability, and promoting gender equity and equality. Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World, with its unprecedented breadth and scope, will be an indispensable resource for the next generation of policymakers, researchers, and students dedicated to improving agriculture for global wellbeing.
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. It principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change, a process Geertz terms "involution". Written for a US-funded project on the local developments and following the modernization theory of Walt Whitman Rostow, Geertz examines in this book the agricultural system in Indonesia and its two dominant forms of agriculture, swidden and sawah. In addition to researching its agricultural systems, the book turns to an examination of their historical development. Of particular note is Geertz's discussion of what he famously describes as the process of "agricultural involution" in Java, where both the external economic demands of the Dutch rulers and the internal pressures due to population growth led to intensification rather than change.
The Mekong Delta of Vietnam is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. The Mekong River fans out over an area of about 40,000 sq kilometers and over the course of many millennia has produced a region of fertile alluvial soils and constant flows of energy. Today about a fourth of the Delta is under rice cultivation, making this area one of the premier rice granaries in the world. The Delta has always proven a difficult environment to manipulate, however, and because of population pressures, increasing acidification of soils, and changes in the Mekong’s flow, environmental problems have intensified. The changing way in which the region has been linked to larger flows of commodities and capital over time has also had an impact on the region: For example, its re-emergence in recent decades as a major rice-exporting area has linked it inextricably to global markets and their vicissitudes. And most recently, the potential for sea level increases because of global warming has added a new threat. Because most of the region is on average only a few meters above sea level and because any increase of sea level will change the complex relationship between tides and down-river water flow, the Mekong Delta is one of the areas in the world most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. How governmental policy and resident populations have in the past and will in coming decades adapt to climate change as well as several other emerging or ongoing environmental and economic problems is the focus of this collection.
This is the first of three planned volumes which deal with the techniques and technology of agriculture in Europe in the period from 600 A.D. down to the 17th century. The focus of this first volume is Scandinavia, the British Isles, Northern Germany, the Low Countries and Northern France. The volume discusses methodological approaches and their limitations, the development of medieval agriculture in terms of the transmission of technological ideas, improvements in productivity, regional variations, social responses to agricultural technology, and those common trends that unite the Northwest European region.The volume integrates material derived from the great advances made in medieval archaeology and the historical study of landscapes during the past 30 years and has a supranational character. It will be of interest to all those working on the social, economic and political history of Northwest Europe in the medieval and early modern periods as well as to those undertaking research in the specific field of the history of technology.Technology and Change in HistoryThis new series of scholarly surveys is intended to offer an updating of the discussion of questions regarding the nature of technology and technological change first broached in the nine-volume survey by R. Forbes: Studies in Ancient Technology. The series will however take in not only the original scope of Forbes' work, namely the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, but will extend beyond this to cover the medieval and early modern periods.7The volumes in the series will be in English, of 300-800 pp., divided into 10-15 topical chapters and aim to present to scholars, graduate students and to non-specialist scholars the current state of knowledge in the various fields in the history of technology. They collect, assimilate and present facts, opinion, sources, and literature in the accessible way that Forbes did, but will also identify issues that have not been plainly addressed and will in doing so indicate where the field might profitably be going.Including notes and numerous illustrations, the volumes address questions of a primarily historical nature, such as: 1. what technological options were open to peoples at different times and different places? 2. what options did they choose and why? 3. what impact did this have on their contemporaries and successors (and on their technological choices)?Questions and problems more proper to political, social and economic history will also be touched upon, but the starting point and focus of this new series is the history of technology.Volumes planned in the series include:R.J. Curtis: Food Technology in Antiquity (1999)M.-C. Deprez-Masson and N.J. Mayhew (eds.): Metal Technology: 600-1800 A.D. (2001)P. Squatriti (ed.): Medieval Hydrotechnology (2001)O. Wikander (ed.): Ancient Water Technology (1998)G.R.H. Wright: Ancient Building Technology (1999)J. Langdon and G. Astill (eds.): Agrarian Technology in the Middle Ages: Northwest Europe (1996)
Shifting cultivation is one of the oldest forms of subsistence agriculture and is still practised by millions of poor people in the tropics. Typically it involves clearing land (often forest) for the growing of crops for a few years, and then moving on to new sites, leaving the earlier ground fallow to regain its soil fertility. This book brings together the best of science and farmer experimentation, vividly illustrating the enormous diversity of shifting cultivation systems as well as the power of human ingenuity. Some critics have tended to disparage shifting cultivation (sometimes called 'swidden cultivation' or 'slash-and-burn agriculture') as unsustainable due to its supposed role in deforestation and land degradation. However, the book shows that such indigenous practices, as they have evolved over time, can be highly adaptive to land and ecology. In contrast, 'scientific' agricultural solutions imposed from outside can be far more damaging to the environment and local communities. The book focuses on successful agricultural strategies of upland farmers, particularly in south and south-east Asia, and presents over 50 contributions by scholars from around the world and from various disciplines, including agricultural economics, ecology and anthropology. It is a sequel to the much praised "Voices from the Forest: Integrating Indigenous Knowledge into Sustainable Upland Farming" (RFF Press, 2007), but all chapters are completely new and there is a greater emphasis on the contemporary challenges of climate change and biodiversity conservation.
