Civic Agriculture
Civic Agriculture

Author: Thomas A. Lyson

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2012-05-22

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1611683033

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A engaging analysis of food production in the United States emphasizing that sustainable agricultural development is important to community health.

Change in Agriculture
Change in Agriculture

Author: Clarence H. Danhof

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9780674107700

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American agriculture changed radically between 1820 and 1870. In turning slowly from subsistence to commercial farming, farmers on the average doubled the portion of their production places on the market, and thereby laid the foundations for today's highly productive agricultural industry. But the modern system was by no means inevitable. It evolved slowly through an intricate process in which innovative and imitative entrepreneurs were the key instruments.

Every Farm a Factory
Every Farm a Factory

Author: Deborah Kay Fitzgerald

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300111286

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Winner of the 2003 Saloutos Award for the best book on American agricultural history given by the Agricultural History Society During 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.

The Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Humans and Insects
The Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Humans and Insects

Author: Ted R Schultz

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-02-22

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0262543206

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Contributors explore common elements in the evolutionary histories of both human and insect agriculture resulting from convergent evolution. During the past 12,000 years, agriculture originated in humans as many as twenty-three times, and during the past 65 million years, agriculture also originated in nonhuman animals at least twenty times and in insects at least fifteen times. It is much more likely that these independent origins represent similar solutions to the challenge of growing food than that they are due purely to chance. This volume seeks to identify common elements in the evolutionary histories of both human and insect agriculture that are the results of convergent evolution. The goal is to create a new, synthetic field that characterizes, quantifies, and empirically documents the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that drive both human and nonhuman agriculture. The contributors report on the results of quantitative analyses comparing human and nonhuman agriculture; discuss evolutionary conflicts of interest between and among farmers and cultivars and how they interfere with efficiencies of agricultural symbiosis; describe in detail agriculture in termites, ambrosia beetles, and ants; and consider patterns of evolutionary convergence in different aspects of agriculture, comparing fungal parasites of ant agriculture with fungal parasites of human agriculture, analyzing the effects of agriculture on human anatomy, and tracing the similarities and differences between the evolution of agriculture in humans and in a single, relatively well-studied insect group, fungus-farming ants.