Download or read book A History of Nebraska Agriculture A Life Worth Living written by Jody L. Lamp & Melody Dobson and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once known as the "Great American Desert," Nebraska's plains and native grasslands today make it a domestic leader in producing food, feed and fuel. From Omaha to Ogallala, Nebraska's founding farmers, ranchers and agribusiness leaders endured hardships while fostering kinships that have lasted generations. While many continued on the trails leading west, others from around the world stayed, seeking a home and land to cultivate. American Doorstop Project co-founders and authors Jody L. Lamp and Melody Dobson celebrate the state's forgotten and untold agricultural history, highlighting more than a century and a half of agriculture industry, inventions and innovations in the Cornhusker State.
Download or read book New Roots for Agriculture written by Wes Jackson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1980-01-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The plowshare may well have destroyed more options for future generations than the sword," writes Wes Jackson in a review of practices that have brought U.S. agriculture to the edge of disaster. Tillage has hastened the erosion of irreplaceable topsoil everywhere and a technology based on fossil fuels has increased yields for short-term profits, leaving crops ever more vulnerable to diseases, pests, and droughts. Such, says Jackson, is "the failure of success." As high-technology agriculture becomes more wasteful and expensive, more farmers are being forced off the land or into bankruptcy. ø Jackson's major solution calls for the development of plant combinations that yield food while holding the soil and re-newing its nutrients without plowing or applying fossil-fuel-based fertilizers or pesticides. His new way of raising crops, by working with the soil's natural systems, would keep the world's bread-basket producing perpetually.
Download or read book The Fault Lines of Farm Policy written by Jonathan Coppess and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the intersection of the growing national conversation about our food system and the long-running debate about our government’s role in society is the complex farm bill. American farm policy, built on a political coalition of related interests with competing and conflicting demands, has proven incredibly resilient despite development and growth. In The Fault Lines of Farm Policy Jonathan Coppess analyzes the legislative and political history of the farm bill, including the evolution of congressional politics for farm policy. Disputes among the South, the Great Plains, and the Midwest form the primordial fault line that has defined the debate throughout farm policy’s history. Because these regions formed the original farm coalition and have played the predominant roles throughout, this study concentrates on the three major commodities produced in these regions: cotton, wheat, and corn. Coppess examines policy development by the political and congressional interests representing these commodities, including basic drivers such as coalition building, external and internal pressures on the coalition and its fault lines, and the impact of commodity prices. This exploration of the political fault lines provides perspectives for future policy discussions and more effective policy outcomes.
Download or read book American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly written by Jon Lauck and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The breathtaking number of mergers and joint ventures among agribusiness firms has left independent American farmers facing the power of an increasingly concentrated buying sector. The origin of farmers' concern with such economic concentration dates back to protests against meatpackers and railroads in the late nineteenth century. Jon Lauck examines the dimensions of this problem in the American Midwest in the decades following World War II. He analyzes the nature of competition within meat-packing and grain markets. In addition, he addresses concerns about corporate entry into production agriculture and the potential displacement of a production system defined by independent family farms. Lauck also considers the ability of farmers to organize in order to counter the market power of large-scale agribusiness buyers. He explores the use of farmer cooperatives and other mechanisms which may increase the bargaining power of farmers. The book offers the first serious historical examination of the National Farmers Organization, which fully embraced the bargaining power cause in the postwar period. Lauck finds that independent farmers' attempts at organization have been more successful than previously recognized, but he also shows that their successes have been undermined by the growing concentration and power of agri-business firms, justifying a new approach to antitrust law in agricultural markets.
Download or read book This Blessed Earth A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm written by Ted Genoways and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book American Harvest written by Marie Mutsuki Mockett and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.
Download or read book Managing Cover Crops Profitably 3rd Ed written by Andy Clark and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2008-07 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover crops slow erosion, improve soil, smother weeds, enhance nutrient and moisture availability, help control many pests and bring a host of other benefits to your farm. At the same time, they can reduce costs, increase profits and even create new sources of income. You¿ll reap dividends on your cover crop investments for years, since their benefits accumulate over the long term. This book will help you find which ones are right for you. Captures farmer and other research results from the past ten years. The authors verified the info. from the 2nd ed., added new results and updated farmer profiles and research data, and added 2 chap. Includes maps and charts, detailed narratives about individual cover crop species, and chap. about aspects of cover cropping.
Download or read book Agriculture Rural Development and Related Agencies Appropriations for 1983 Agricultural programs written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, and Related Agencies and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 1038 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Agriculture Rural Development and Related Agencies Appropriations for 1983 written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, and Related Agencies and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 1252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rhymes with Fighter written by Joseph Weber and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-12 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a hardscrabble childhood in the Great Depression on the dusty plains of rural Nebraska, Clayton Yeutter (1930-2017) rose to work for four U.S. presidents, serving in the cabinets of two of them. His challenge, posed by one of President Ronald Reagan's aides, was this: go and change the world. As U.S. trade representative he did just that, opening the global trading arena with bold efforts that led to NAFTA, the creation of the World Trade Organization, and extraordinary growth in cross-border business. Today's global trading regime began with Yeutter. A distinguished lawyer with a doctorate in economics, Yeutter also had deep business experience leading the giant futures trading organization the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, now called the CME Group. But he never forgot his family's farm roots, and those roots led him to another top job as President George H. W. Bush's secretary of agriculture. Yeutter's intellectual firepower, paired with an engaging personality and a midwesterner's beaming smile, made friends and found common ground with leaders and trade officials worldwide. Although a loyal GOP leader who served as counselor to a president and head of the Republican National Committee, Yeutter was a moderate who had admirers on both sides of the aisle. This is his life story.
Download or read book Agrarian Women written by Deborah Fink and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1992 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agrarian Women challenges the widely held assumption that frontier farm life in the United States made it easier for women to achieve rough equality with men. Using as her example the family farm in rural Nebraska from the 1880s until the eve of Wo
Download or read book Nebraska written by Bradley H. Baltensperger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nebraska is the first comprehensive examination of the patterns of Nebraska’s resources, population, economy, climate, and landscape to be published in many years. Focusing especially on the people of Nebraska and the interaction between the environment and human use of the earth, Professor Baltensperger begins with a discussion of the physical environment and resources of the state and ties early patterns of development to the need to adjust settlement systems and agricultural practices to a subhumid climate. The role of energy-intensive agriculture in the state’s economy is a central aspect of the book’s examination of human interaction with the environment: The impact of modern technology on Nebraska’s agricultural system and on its population receives considerable attention, as do the problems associated with recent agricultural developments. Also scrutinized are the land-use conflicts generated by urban growth and by the demands of an urban society on rural Nebraska.
Download or read book In Defense of Farmers written by Jane Gibson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Industrial agriculture is generally characterized as either the salvation of a growing, hungry, global population or as socially and environmentally irresponsible. Despite elements of truth in this polarization, it fails to focus on the particular vulnerabilities and potentials of industrial agriculture. Both representations obscure individual farmers, their families, their communities, and the risks they face from unpredictable local, national, and global conditions: fluctuating and often volatile production costs and crop prices; extreme weather exacerbated by climate change; complicated and changing farm policies; new production technologies and practices; water availability; inflation and debt; and rural community decline. Yet the future of industrial agriculture depends fundamentally on farmers’ decisions. In Defense of Farmers illuminates anew the critical role that farmers play in the future of agriculture and examines the social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities of industrial agriculture, as well as its adaptations and evolution. Contextualizing the conversations about agriculture and rural societies within the disciplines of sociology, geography, economics, and anthropology, this volume addresses specific challenges farmers face in four countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. By concentrating on countries with the most sophisticated production technologies capable of producing the largest quantities of grains, soybeans, and animal proteins in the world, this volume focuses attention on the farmers whose labors, decision-making, and risk-taking throw into relief the implications and limitations of our global industrial food system. The case studies here acknowledge the agency of farmers and offer ways forward in the direction of sustainable agriculture.
Download or read book One Size Fits None written by Stephanie Anderson and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 Midwest Book Award for Nature 2020 High Plains Book Award Finalist 2020 Silver Nautilus Book Award Winner in Green Living and Sustainability “Sustainable” has long been the rallying cry of agricultural progressives; given that much of our nation’s farm and ranch land is already degraded, however, sustainable agriculture often means maintaining a less-than-ideal status quo. Industrial agriculture has also co-opted the term for marketing purposes without implementing better practices. Stephanie Anderson argues that in order to provide nutrient-rich food and fight climate change, we need to move beyond sustainable to regenerative agriculture, a practice that is highly tailored to local environments and renews resources. In One Size Fits None Anderson follows diverse farmers across the United States: a South Dakota bison rancher who provides an alternative to the industrial feedlot; an organic vegetable farmer in Florida who harvests microgreens; a New Mexico super-small farmer who revitalizes communities; and a North Dakota midsize farmer who combines livestock and grain farming to convert expensive farmland back to native prairie. The use of these nontraditional agricultural techniques show how varied operations can give back to the earth rather than degrade it. This book will resonate with anyone concerned about the future of food in America, providing guidance for creating a better, regenerative agricultural future. Download a discussion guide (PDF).
Download or read book Family Farming written by and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2008-06-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans decry the decline of family farming but stand by helplessly as industrial agribusiness takes over. The prevailing sentiment is that family farms should survive for important social, ethical, and economic reasons. But will they? This timely book exposes the biases in American farm policies that irrationally encourage expansion, biases evident in federal commodity programs, income tax provisions, and subsidized credit services. Family Farming also exposes internal conflicts, particularly the conflict between the private interests of individual farmers and the public interest in family farming as a whole. It challenges the assumption that bigger is better, critiques the technological basis of modern agriculture, and calls for farming practices that are ethical, economical, and ecologically sound. The alternative policies discussed in this book could yet save the family farm, and the ways and means of saving it are argued here with special urgency. ø This Bison Books edition includes a new introduction by the author providing a more national perspective, underscoring the repetitive cycles of American agriculture over the decade, and assessing the major policy issues that have dominated agriculture in recent years.
Download or read book Publications Catalog of the U S Department of Commerce written by United States. Department of Commerce. Office of Publications and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bibliography of Agriculture written by and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 1732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
