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Book A New Technological Era for American Agriculture

Download or read book A New Technological Era for American Agriculture written by United States. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book A New Technological Era for American Agriculture

Download or read book A New Technological Era for American Agriculture written by United States. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book A New Technological Era for American Agriculture

Download or read book A New Technological Era for American Agriculture written by United States. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment and published by Office of Technology Assessment. This book was released on 1992 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Technology Public Policy and the Changing Structure of American Agriculture

Download or read book Technology Public Policy and the Changing Structure of American Agriculture written by United States. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1986 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book A Revolution Down on the Farm

Download or read book A Revolution Down on the Farm written by Paul K. Conkin and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when food is becoming increasingly scarce in many parts of the world and food prices are skyrocketing, no industry is more important than agriculture. Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and yet agriculture has undergone more fundamental changes in the past 80 years than in the previous several centuries. In 1900, 30 million American farmers tilled the soil or tended livestock; today there are fewer than 4.5 million farmers who feed a population four times larger than it was at the beginning of the century. Fifty years ago, the planet could not have sustained a population of 6.5 billion; now, commercial and industrial agriculture ensure that millions will not die from starvation. Farmers are able to feed an exponentially growing planet because the greatest industrial revolution in history has occurred in agriculture since 1929, with U.S. farmers leading the way. Productivity on American farms has increased tenfold, even as most small farmers and tenants have been forced to find other work. Today, only 300,000 farms produce approximately ninety percent of the total output, and overproduction, largely subsidized by government programs and policies, has become the hallmark of modern agriculture. A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929 charts the profound changes in farming that have occurred during author Paul K. Conkin's lifetime. His personal experiences growing up on a small Tennessee farm complement compelling statistical data as he explores America's vast agricultural transformation and considers its social, political, and economic consequences. He examines the history of American agriculture, showing how New Deal innovations evolved into convoluted commodity programs following World War II. Conkin assesses the skills, new technologies, and government policies that helped transform farming in America and suggests how new legislation might affect farming in decades to come. Although the increased production and mechanization of farming has been an economic success story for Americans, the costs are becoming increasingly apparent. Small farmers are put out of business when they cannot compete with giant, non-diversified corporate farms. Caged chickens and hogs in factory-like facilities or confined dairy cattle require massive amounts of chemicals and hormones ultimately ingested by consumers. Fertilizers, new organic chemicals, manure disposal, and genetically modified seeds have introduced environmental problems that are still being discovered. A Revolution Down on the Farm concludes with an evaluation of farming in the twenty-first century and a distinctive meditation on alternatives to our present large scale, mechanized, subsidized, and fossil fuel and chemically dependent system.

Book The Development of American Agriculture

Download or read book The Development of American Agriculture written by Willard W. Cochrane and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Ancient Agricultural Technology

Download or read book Ancient Agricultural Technology written by Michael Woods and published by Twenty-First Century Books. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the technology used by ancient farmers, covering the evolution of farming tools, irrigation methods, animal breeding, and the processing of crops, including the ancient civilizations of China, Greece, Rome, India, and the Middle East.

Book The Changing Scale of American Agriculture

Download or read book The Changing Scale of American Agriculture written by John Fraser Hart and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few Americans know much about contemporary farming, which has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. In The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, the award-winning geographer and landscape historian John Fraser Hart describes the transformation of farming from the mid-twentieth century, when small family farms were still viable, to the present, when a farm must sell at least $250,000 of farm products each year to provide an acceptable level of living for a family. The increased scale of agriculture has outmoded the Jeffersonian ideal of small, self-sufficient farms. In the past farmers kept a variety of livestock and grew several crops, but modern family farms have become highly specialized in producing a single type of livestock or one or two crops. As farms have become larger and more specialized, their number has declined. Hart contends that modern family farms need to become integrated into tightly orchestrated food-supply chains in order to thrive, and these complex new organizations of large-scale production require managerial skills of the highest order. According to Hart, this trend is not only inevitable, but it is beneficial, because it produces the food American consumers want to buy at prices they can afford. Although Hart provides the statistics and clear analysis such a study requires, his book focuses on interviews with farmers: those who have shifted from mixed crop-and-livestock farming to cash-grain farming in the Midwest agricultural heartland; beef, dairy, chicken, egg, turkey, and hog producers around the periphery of the heartland; and specialty crop producers on the East and West Coasts. These invaluable case studies bring the reader into direct personal contact with the entrepreneurs who are changing American agriculture. Hart believes that modern large-scale farmers have been criticized unfairly, and The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, the result of decades of research, is his attempt to tell their side of the story.

Book American Farming Culture and the History of Technology

Download or read book American Farming Culture and the History of Technology written by Joshua T. Brinkman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a history of agriculture in the American Corn Belt, this book argues that modernization occurred not only for economic reasons but also because of how farmers use technology as a part of their identity and culture. Histories of agriculture often fail to give agency to farmers in bringing about change and ignore how people embed technology with social meaning. This book, however, shows how farmers use technology to express their identities in unspoken ways and provides a framework for bridging the current rural-urban divide by presenting a fresh perspective on rural cultural practices. Focusing on German and Jeffersonian farmers in the 18th century and Corn Belt producers in the 1920s, the Cold War, and the recent period of globalization, this book traces how farmers formed their own versions of rural modernity. Rural people use technology to contest urban modernity and debunk yokel stereotypes and women specifically employed technology to resist urban gender conceptions. This book shows how this performance of rural identity through technological use impacts a variety of current policy issues and business interests surrounding contemporary agriculture from the controversy over genetically modified organisms and hog confinement facilities to the growth of wind energy and precision technologies. Inspired by the author's own experience on his family’s farm, this book provides a novel and important approach to understanding how farmers’ culture has changed over time, and why machinery is such a potent part of their identity. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of agricultural history, technology and policy, rural studies, the history of science and technology, and the history of farming culture in the USA.