Bet the Farm

Bet the Farm

Author: Beth Hoffman

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 164283159X

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"Eloquent and detailed...It's hard to have hope, but the organized observations and plans of Hoffman and people like her give me some. Read her book -- and listen." -- Jane Smiley, The Washington Post In her late 40s, Beth Hoffman decided to upend her comfortable life as a professor and journalist to move to her husband's family ranch in Iowa--all for the dream of becoming a farmer. There was just one problem: money. Half of America's two million farms made less than $300 in 2019, and many struggle just to stay afloat. Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth's eyes. She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. Growing oats is good for the environment but ends up being very bad for the wallet. And finding somewhere, in the midst of COVID-19, to slaughter grass finished beef is a nightmare. If Beth can't make it, how can farmers who confront racism, lack access to land, or don't have other jobs to fall back on hack it? Bet the Farm is a first-hand account of the perils of farming today and a personal exploration of more just and sustainable ways of producing food.


Women and Farming

Women and Farming

Author: S. Shortall

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1999-06-30

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0333983718

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Arguing that property and power are central to understanding the position of women in farming and using comparative examples, this book considers the transfer of land between men, the changed role of women in the dairy industry in the nineteenth century, women in farming organisations, women in agricultural education programmes, and the role of the state in shaping the lives of farm women. The common themes of power and property underpin all the chapters.


Danger for Old Ruff

Danger for Old Ruff

Author: Vesta Seek

Publisher: Chariot Victor Publishing

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13: 9781555133603

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The whole family saddens when their beloved dog is bitten by a rattle snake and becomes very ill; but, through God's goodness, Ruff knows how to heal himself.


Danger, Man Working

Danger, Man Working

Author: Michael Perry

Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0870208411

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"Every writer has advice for aspiring writers. Mine is predicated on formative years spent cleaning my father’s calf pens: Just keep shoveling until you’ve got a pile so big, someone has to notice. The fact that I cast my life’s work as slung manure simply proves that I recognize an apt metaphor when I accidentally stick it with a pitchfork. . . . Poetry was my first love, my gateway drug—still the poets are my favorites—but I quickly realized I lacked the chops or insights to survive on verse alone. But I wanted to write. Every day. And so I read everything I could about freelancing, and started shoveling." The pieces gathered within this book draw on fifteen years of what Michael Perry calls "shovel time"—a writer going to work as the work is offered. The range of subjects is wide, from musky fishing, puking, and mountain-climbing Iraq War veterans to the frozen head of Ted Williams. Some assignments lead to self-examination of an alarming magnitude (as Perry notes, "It quickly becomes obvious that I am a self-absorbed hypochondriac forever resolving to do better nutritionally and fitness-wise but my follow-through is laughable.") But his favorites are those that allow him to turn the lens outward: "My greatest privilege," he says, "lies not in telling my own story; it lies in being trusted to tell the story of another."


Elwood Farm Friends in Danger

Elwood Farm Friends in Danger

Author: David Paul

Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore

Published: 2013-07-31

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 1490700137

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This pair of stories features the adventures of two brave girlsEmily and Sarahand their brushes with intense, life-threatening danger. In The Girls and the Gang Emily Wood cant decide if she is happier here at the farm or if she was happier at her home in Melbourne before the move. Its a good thing her best friend Sarah is able to visit so often. Emily is glad to have her friend aroundand glad not to be alone when she and Sarah accidentally stumble upon an outlaw group of smugglers called the Gang, who land their boat nearby. Together, Emily and Sarah decide to spy on the band of ruffiansa decision they come to regret when theyre caught eavesdropping. The only clues to their whereabouts are their horses, both of which escaped during the capture of their riders. Now captives of the angry criminals, Emily and Sarah must escape in order to survive. The Return of the Gang continues the adventures of Emily and Sarah as members of the Gang plot their revenge on the two girls. The criminalsnow free on a technicalityplan to kidnap the girls and hold them hostage. What will happen to Emily and Sarah if the Gang carries out their plot?


The New Farm

The New Farm

Author: Brent Preston

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2018-03-27

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1683353021

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This “must-read” memoir of human-scale agriculture offers an insider’s view of today’s food system by a leading voice in sustainable farming (Daniel Boulud). After years of working at the ends of the earth in human rights and development, Brent Preston and his wife were die-hard city dwellers. But when their second child arrived, the shine came off urban living. In 2003 they bought a hundred acres and a rundown farmhouse, determined to build a farm that would sustain their family, nourish their community, heal their environment—and turn a profit. The New Farm is Preston’s memoir of a decade of toil and perseverance. Farming is a complex and precarious business, and they made plenty of mistakes along the way. But as they learned how to grow food, and to succeed at the business of farming, they also found that a small, sustainable, organic farm could be an engine for change, a path to a more just and sustainable food system. Today, The New Farm supplies top restaurants, supports community food banks, hosts events with leading chefs, and grows extraordinary produce. Told with humor and heart, The New Farm is a joy, a passionate book by an important new voice.


This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm

This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm

Author: Ted Genoways

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0393292584

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Winner of the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize 2019 selection for the One Book One Nebraska and All Iowa state reading programs "Genoways gives the reader a kitchen-table view of the vagaries, complexities, and frustrations of modern farming…Insightful and empathetic." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, and yet its future is in peril. Rick Hammond grew up on a farm, and for forty years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation homestead in Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their family farm—and their entire way of life—are under siege on many fronts, from shifting trade policies, to encroaching pipelines, to climate change. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores the rapidly changing world of small, traditional farming operations. He creates a vivid, nuanced portrait of a radical new landscape and one family’s fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.


Big Farms Make Big Flu

Big Farms Make Big Flu

Author: Rob Wallace

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2016-06-30

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1583675914

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The first collection to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics, and the nature of science together Thanks to breakthroughs in production and food science, agribusiness has been able to devise new ways to grow more food and get it more places more quickly. There is no shortage of news items on hundreds of thousands of hybrid poultry—each animal genetically identical to the next—packed together in megabarns, grown out in a matter of months, then slaughtered, processed and shipped to the other side of the globe. Less well known are the deadly pathogens mutating in, and emerging out of, these specialized agro-environments. In fact, many of the most dangerous new diseases in humans can be traced back to such food systems, among them Campylobacter, Nipah virus, Q fever, hepatitis E, and a variety of novel influenza variants. Agribusiness has known for decades that packing thousands of birds or livestock together results in a monoculture that selects for such disease. But market economics doesn't punish the companies for growing Big Flu—it punishes animals, the environment, consumers, and contract farmers. Alongside growing profits, diseases are permitted to emerge, evolve, and spread with little check. “That is,” writes evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, “it pays to produce a pathogen that could kill a billion people.” In Big Farms Make Big Flu, a collection of dispatches by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations. Wallace details, with a precise and radical wit, the latest in the science of agricultural epidemiology, while at the same time juxtaposing ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless chickens, microbial time travel, and neoliberal Ebola. Wallace also offers sensible alternatives to lethal agribusiness. Some, such as farming cooperatives, integrated pathogen management, and mixed crop-livestock systems, are already in practice off the agribusiness grid. While many books cover facets of food or outbreaks, Wallace's collection appears the first to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics and the nature of science together. Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political economies of disease and science to derive a new understanding of the evolution of infections. Highly capitalized agriculture may be farming pathogens as much as chickens or corn.


A Dangerous Day on the Farm

A Dangerous Day on the Farm

Author: Hedley Griffin

Publisher: Andrews UK Limited

Published: 2011-07-25

Total Pages: 34

ISBN-13: 190835206X

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Harey and his friends visit a farm. After many accidents and dangers, involving a farmer, an angry cow and a pool of pig-muck, Harey manages to set a barn alight and runs into a grain silo to hide. Fortunately, it is not full and he is dug out safely by the Fire Brigade. A picture book to promote safety of children on the farm.