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.


From the Family Farm to Agribusiness

From the Family Farm to Agribusiness

Author: Donald J. Pisani

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2021-05-28

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 0520368207

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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 1984.


A Small Farm Future

A Small Farm Future

Author: Chris Smaje

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2020-10-22

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1603589031

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A modern classic of the new agrarianism "Chris Smaje...shows that the choice is clear. Either we have a small farm future, or we face collapse and extinction."—Vandana Shiva "Every young person should read this book."—Richard Heinberg In a groundbreaking debut, farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje argues that organizing society around small-scale farming offers the soundest, sanest and most reasonable response to climate change and other crises of civilisation—and will yield humanity’s best chance at survival. Drawing on a vast range of sources from across a multitude of disciplines, A Small Farm Future analyses the complex forces that make societal change inevitable; explains how low-carbon, locally self-reliant agrarian communities can empower us to successfully confront these changes head on; and explores the pathways for delivering this vision politically. Challenging both conventional wisdom and utopian blueprints, A Small Farm Future offers rigorous original analysis of wicked problems and hidden opportunities in a way that illuminates the path toward functional local economies, effective self-provisioning, agricultural diversity and a shared earth. Perfect for readers of both Wendell Berry and Thomas Piketty, A Small Farm Future is a refreshing, new outlook on a way forward for society—and a vital resource for activists, students, policy makers, and anyone looking to enact change.


Gaining Ground

Gaining Ground

Author: Forrest Pritchard

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013-05-21

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0762794380

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With humor and pathos, Forrest Pritchard recounts his ambitious and often hilarious endeavors to save his family’s seventh-generation farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Through many a trial and error, he not only saves Smith Meadows from insolvency but turns it into a leading light in the sustainable, grass-fed, organic farm-to-market community. There is nothing young Farmer Pritchard won’t try. Whether he’s selling firewood and straw, raising free-range chickens and hogs, or acquiring a flock of Barbados Blackbelly sheep, his learning curve is steep and always entertaining. Pritchard’s world crackles with colorful local characters—farm hands, butchers, market managers, customers, fellow vendors, pet goats, policemen—bringing the story to warm, communal life. His most important ally, however, is his renegade father, who initially questions his son's career choice and eschews organic foods for the generic kinds that wreak havoc on his health. Soon after his father’s death, the farm becomes a recognized success and Pritchard must make a vital decision: to continue serving the local community or answer the exploding demand for his wares with lucrative Internet sales and shipping deals. More than a charming story of honest food cultivation and farmers’ markets, Gaining Ground tugs on the heartstrings, reconnecting us to the land and the many lives that feed us.


A Family Farm

A Family Farm

Author: Robert L. Switzer

Publisher: Center for American Places

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781935195344

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Switzer's memoir covers four generations of life on the family farm in Illinois. The tale is enhanced with photographs plus watercolors and woodblock prints by the author's wife and son. Frank E. Barmore adds information about the nineteenth-century history of this family farm, the Barmore family, and the settling of that area of Illinois.


Farm (and Other F Words)

Farm (and Other F Words)

Author: Sarah K Mock

Publisher:

Published: 2021-04-26

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9781636768205

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We love The American Farmer. We trust them to grow our food, to be part of children's nursery rhymes, to provide the economic backbone of rural communities, and to embody a version of the American dream. At the same time, we know that "corporate farms" are disrupting the agrarian way of life that we so admire, and that we've got to do something to stop it. So what's our plan for saving the farms we love? In Farm (and Other F Words), Sarah K Mock dismantles misconceptions about American farms and discovers what makes small family farms work, or why they don't. While exploring the intersection of farming and wealth, Mock offers an alternative perspective on American agricultural history, and outlines a path to a more equitable food system moving forward. Calling for change, Farm (and Other F Words) tackles questions like: Do farmers really get paid not to farm? Are "big corporate farms" the future? How much good has the food movement done for small family farmers? Ultimately, Mock suggests a solution without putting the onus for change on struggling consumers and reminds us that, "the future of American agriculture is not yet decided."


Eating Tomorrow

Eating Tomorrow

Author: Timothy A. Wise

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2019-02-05

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1620974231

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"A powerful polemic against agricultural technology." —Nature A major new book that shows the world already has the tools to feed itself, without expanding industrial agriculture or adopting genetically modified seeds, from the Small Planet Institute expert Few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—at a time when climate change is making it increasingly difficult to successfully grow crops. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise's Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests. Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what and how to grow food. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward as the world warms and population increases. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims in the climate drama but protagonists who have much to teach us all.


Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia

Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia

Author: Barun Deb Pal

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 9811081719

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This book discusses various climate smart agro-technologies, their technical and economic feasibility across heterogeneous agro-climatic conditions, assessing farmers’ willingness to adopt those technologies, impact of climate smart technology in agricultural production and possible policy and investment opportunities to upscale it. Containing eight chapters, the book starts with a discussion about the methodological aspects of priority setting of the farm technologies across various regions of South Asia including Eastern Indo-Gangetic plain, Western Indo-Gangetic Plain and arid regions. Using data from field based trials and expert solicitations, the book next deliberates on a list of feasible technologies, assessed by constructing climate smart Feasibility Index. Further on, there is an analysis, using stated preference method, of the behaviour of farmers in adopting climate smart technologies. Preference of women farmers has been given a special focus in this book. After discussing the method priority setting of the farm technologies, impact of climate smart technologies has been analysed using real time data. Government policies have been reviewed with the view of achieving climate smart agriculture in South Asia. The book also describes the optimization modelling framework for investment allocation and technology prioritization. The model integrates both the bio-physical and the economic optimization model to capture the agro-climatic heterogeneity within the region and the variability of technical feasibility across regions and crops. Results of this model will help policy makers to identify how much to invest, where to invest and what technologies to prioritize for investments.


The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics

The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics

Author: Anne Barnhill

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 817

ISBN-13: 0199372268

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Academic food ethics incorporates work from philosophy but also anthropology, economics, the environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. Scholars from these fields have been producing work for decades on the food system, and on ethical, social, and policy issues connected to the food system. Yet in the last several years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical work on these issues-work that draws on multiple literatures within practical ethics, normative ethics and political philosophy. This handbook provides a sample of that philosophical work across multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption; food justice; food politics; food workers; and, food and identity.