Download or read book Science Cultivating Practice written by H. Maat and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science Cultivating Practice is an institutional history of agricultural science in the Netherlands and its overseas territories. The focus of this study is the variety of views about a proper relationship between science and (agricultural) practice. Such views and plans materialised in the overall organisation of research and education. Moreover, the book provides case studies of genetics and plant breeding in the Netherlands, colonial rice breeding, and agricultural statistics. Ideas affected the organisation as much as the other way round. The net result was an institutional development in which the values of academic science were rated higher than the values of practice. This book is a distinctive piece of work as it treats the dynamics of science in a European as well as in a colonial context. These different ecological and social environments lead to other forms of knowledge and experimentation as well as other ways of organising science.
Download or read book Science Cultivating Practice written by Harro Maat and published by . This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Science and Practice in Farm Cultivation written by James Buckman and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Farming for Our Future written by PETER H.. ROSENBERG LEHNER (NATHAN A.) and published by . This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Farming for Our Future examines the policies and legal reforms necessary to accelerate the adoption of practices that can make agriculture in the United States climate-neutral or better. These proven practices will also make our food system more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is substantial--much more so than official figures suggest--and we will not be able to achieve our overall mitigation goals unless agricultural emissions sharply decline. Fortunately, farms and ranches can be a major part of the climate solution, while protecting biodiversity, strengthening rural communities, and improving the lives of the workers who cultivate our crops and rear our animals. The importance of agricultural climate solutions can not be underestimated; it is a critical element both in ensuring our food security and limiting climate change. This book provides essential solutions to address the greatest crises of our time.
Download or read book Cultivating Communities of Practice written by Etienne Wenger and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's marketplace is fueled by knowledge. Yet organizing systematically to leverage knowledge remains a challenge. Leading companies have discovered that technology is not enough, and that cultivating communities of practice is the keystone of an effective knowledge strategy. Communities of practice come together around common interests and expertise- whether they consist of first-line managers or customer service representatives, neurosurgeons or software programmers, city managers or home-improvement amateurs. They create, share, and apply knowledge within and across the boundaries of teams, business units, and even entire companies-providing a concrete path toward creating a true knowledge organization. In Cultivating Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder argue that while communities form naturally, organizations need to become more proactive and systematic about developing and integrating them into their strategy. This book provides practical models and methods for stewarding these communities to reach their full potential-without squelching the inner drive that makes them so valuable. Through in-depth cases from firms such as DaimlerChrysler, McKinsey & Company, Shell, and the World Bank, the authors demonstrate how communities of practice can be leveraged to drive overall company strategy, generate new business opportunities, tie personal development to corporate goals, transfer best practices, and recruit and retain top talent. They define the unique features of these communities and outline principles for nurturing their essential elements. They provide guidelines to support communities of practice through their major stages of development, address the potential downsides of communities, and discuss the specific challenges of distributed communities. And they show how to recognize the value created by communities of practice and how to build a corporate knowledge strategy around them. Essential reading for any leader in today's knowledge economy, this is the definitive guide to developing communities of practice for the benefit-and long-term success-of organizations and the individuals who work in them. Etienne Wenger is a renowned expert and consultant on knowledge management and communities of practice in San Juan, California. Richard McDermott is a leading expert of organization and community development in Boulder, Colorado. William M. Snyder is a founding partner of Social Capital Group, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Download or read book How Knowledge Grows written by Chris Haufe and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that the development of scientific practice and growth of scientific knowledge are governed by Darwin’s evolutionary model of descent with modification. Although scientific investigation is influenced by our cognitive and moral failings as well as all of the factors impinging on human life, the historical development of scientific knowledge has trended toward an increasingly accurate picture of an increasing number of phenomena. Taking a fresh look at Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in How Knowledge Grows Chris Haufe uses evolutionary theory to explain both why scientific practice develops the way it does and how scientific knowledge expands. This evolutionary model, claims Haufe, helps to explain what is epistemically special about scientific knowledge: its tendency to grow in both depth and breadth. Kuhn showed how intellectual communities achieve consensus in part by discriminating against ideas that differ from their own and isolating themselves intellectually from other fields of inquiry and broader social concerns. These same characteristics, says Haufe, determine a biological population’s degree of susceptibility to modification by natural selection. He argues that scientific knowledge grows, even across generations of variable groups of scientists, precisely because its development is governed by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, he supports the claim that this susceptibility to modification through natural selection helps to explain the epistemic power of certain branches of modern science. In updating and expanding the evolutionary approach to scientific knowledge, Haufe provides a model for thinking about science that acknowledges the historical contingency of scientific thought while showing why we nevertheless should trust the results of scientific research when it is the product of certain kinds of scientific communities.
Download or read book Farming for Us All written by Michael Mayerfeld Bell and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change. Habitat loss. Soil erosion. Groundwater depletion. Toxins in our food. Inhumane treatment of farm animals. Increasing farm worker exploitation. Hunger and malnutrition in the midst of plenty. What will it take for farmers in the United States to embrace sustainable practices? Michael Mayerfeld Bell’s Farming for Us All first tackled this question twenty years ago, providing crucial insight into how the structure of US agriculture created this situation and exploring, by contrast, the practices of farmers who are working together to radically change how they think, learn, and grow. This updated edition of his now-classic work reflects on the lessons learned over the past two decades. Constrained by an oppressive nexus of markets, regulations, subsidies, and technology, farmers find themselves undermining their own economic and social security as well as the security of the land. Bell turns to Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), that state’s largest sustainable-agriculture group. He traces how PFI creates an agriculture that engages others—farmers, researchers, officials, and consumers—in a common conversation about what agriculture could look like. Through dialogue, PFI members crossbreed knowledge, discovering pragmatic solutions to help crops grow in ways that sustain families, communities, societies, economies, and environments. Farming for Us All makes the case that for sustainable farming to flourish, new social relations are as important to cultivate as new crops. This book is necessary—and hopeful—reading for anyone concerned about the present and future of food and farming.
Download or read book Getting to the Heart of Science Communication written by Faith Kearns and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists today working on controversial issues from climate change to drought to COVID-19 are finding themselves more often in the middle of deeply traumatizing or polarized conflicts they feel unprepared to referee. It is no longer enough for scientists to communicate a scientific topic clearly. They must now be experts not only in their fields of study, but also in navigating the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of members of the public they engage with, and with each other. And the conversations are growing more fraught. In Getting to the Heart of Science Communication, Faith Kearns has penned a succinct guide for navigating the human relationships critical to the success of practice-based science. This meticulously researched volume takes science communication to the next level, helping scientists to see the value of listening as well as talking, understanding power dynamics in relationships, and addressing the roles of trauma, loss, grief, and healing.
Download or read book The Grapevine written by Patrick Iland and published by . This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Grapevine explores the links between the scientific principles and the practice of viticulture. It will be of great interest to anyone involved in viticulture and winemaking as, while it focuses on theory, it also contains practical aspects of growing vines for wine. It covers the basic principles of the molecular, physiological, biochemical and practical aspects of growing vines for wine.
Download or read book Big Farms Make Big Flu written by Rob Wallace and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Soilless Culture Theory and Practice written by Michael Raviv and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2007-12-27 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plant production in hydroponics and soilless culture is rapidly expanding throughout the world, raising a great interest in the scientific community. For the first time in an authoritative reference book, authors cover both theoretical and practical aspects of hydroponics (growing plants without the use of soil). This reference book covers the state-of-the-art in this area, while offering a clear view of supplying plants with nutrients other than soil. Soilless Culture provides the reader with an understanding of the properties of the various soiless media and how these properties affect plant performance in relation to basic horticultural operations, such as irrigation and fertilization. This book is ideal for agronomists, horticulturalists, greenhouse and nursery managers, extension specialists, and people involved with the production of plants. * Comprehensive discussion of hydroponic systems, irrigation, and control measures allows readers to achieve optimal performance* State-of-the-art book on all theoretical aspects of hydroponics and soilless culture including a thorough description of the root system, its functions and limitation posed by restricted root volume* Critical and updated reviews of current analytical methods and how to translate their results to irrigation and fertilization practices * Definitive chapters on recycled, no-discharge systems including salinity and nutrition management and pathogen eradication * Up-to-date description of all important types of growing media
Download or read book Science and Practice in Farm Cultivation written by James Buckman and published by . This book was released on 1863 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Agricultural Enlightenment written by Peter M. Jones and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural Enlightenment explores the modernization of the rural economy in Europe through the lens of the Enlightenment. It focuses on the second half of the eighteenth century and emphasizes the role of useful knowledge in the process of agrarian change and agricultural development. As such it invites economic historians to respond to the challenge issued by Joel Mokyr to look beyond quantitative data and to take seriously the argument that cultural factors, broadly understood, may have aided or hindered the evolution of agriculture in the early modern period (what people knew and believed had a direct bearing on their economic behavior [Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy]). Evidence in support of the idea that a readily accessible supply of agricultural knowledge helps to explain the trajectory of the rural economy is drawn from all of the countries of Europe. The book includes two cases studies of rapid rural modernization in Scotland and Denmark where Agricultural Enlightenment was swiftly followed by full-scale Agricultural Revolution.
Download or read book The Science of Citizen Science written by Katrin Vohland and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book discusses how the involvement of citizens into scientific endeavors is expected to contribute to solve the big challenges of our time, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, growing inequalities within and between societies, and the sustainability turn. The field of citizen science has been growing in recent decades. Many different stakeholders from scientists to citizens and from policy makers to environmental organisations have been involved in its practice. In addition, many scientists also study citizen science as a research approach and as a way for science and society to interact and collaborate. This book provides a representation of the practices as well as scientific and societal outcomes in different disciplines. It reflects the contribution of citizen science to societal development, education, or innovation and provides and overview of the field of actors as well as on tools and guidelines. It serves as an introduction for anyone who wants to get involved in and learn more about the science of citizen science.
Download or read book Dirt to Soil written by Gabe Brown and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A regenerative no-till pioneer."—NBC News "We need to reintegrate livestock and crops on our farms and ranches, and Gabe Brown shows us how to do it well."—Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation See Gabe Brown—author and farmer—in the Netflix documentary Kiss the Ground Gabe Brown didn’t set out to change the world when he first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But as a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their farm. Brown—in an effort to simply survive—began experimenting with new practices he’d learned about from reading and talking with innovative researchers and ranchers. As he and his family struggled to keep the farm viable, they found themselves on an amazing journey into a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture. Brown dropped the use of most of the herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers that are a standard part of conventional agriculture. He switched to no-till planting, started planting diverse cover crops mixes, and changed his grazing practices. In so doing Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life—starting with the soil and working his way up, one plant and one animal at a time. In Dirt to Soil Gabe Brown tells the story of that amazing journey and offers a wealth of innovative solutions to restoring the soil by laying out and explaining his "five principles of soil health," which are: Limited Disturbance Armor Diversity Living Roots Integrated Animals The Brown’s Ranch model, developed over twenty years of experimentation and refinement, focuses on regenerating resources by continuously enhancing the living biology in the soil. Using regenerative agricultural principles, Brown’s Ranch has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years! The 5,000-acre ranch profitably produces a wide variety of cash crops and cover crops as well as grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured laying hens, broilers, and pastured pork, all marketed directly to consumers. The key is how we think, Brown says. In the industrial agricultural model, all thoughts are focused on killing things. But that mindset was also killing diversity, soil, and profit, Brown realized. Now he channels his creative thinking toward how he can get more life on the land—more plants, animals, and beneficial insects. “The greatest roadblock to solving a problem,” Brown says, “is the human mind.”
Download or read book The Craft and Science of Coffee written by Britta Folmer and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2016-12-16 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Craft and Science of Coffee follows the coffee plant from its origins in East Africa to its current role as a global product that influences millions of lives though sustainable development, economics, and consumer desire. For most, coffee is a beloved beverage. However, for some it is also an object of scientifically study, and for others it is approached as a craft, both building on skills and experience. By combining the research and insights of the scientific community and expertise of the crafts people, this unique book brings readers into a sustained and inclusive conversation, one where academic and industrial thought leaders, coffee farmers, and baristas are quoted, each informing and enriching each other. This unusual approach guides the reader on a journey from coffee farmer to roaster, market analyst to barista, in a style that is both rigorous and experience based, universally relevant and personally engaging. From on-farming processes to consumer benefits, the reader is given a deeper appreciation and understanding of coffee's complexity and is invited to form their own educated opinions on the ever changing situation, including potential routes to further shape the coffee future in a responsible manner. Presents a novel synthesis of coffee research and real-world experience that aids understanding, appreciation, and potential action. Includes contributions from a multitude of experts who address complex subjects with a conversational approach. Provides expert discourse on the coffee calue chain, from agricultural and production practices, sustainability, post-harvest processing, and quality aspects to the economic analysis of the consumer value proposition. Engages with the key challenges of future coffee production and potential solutions.
Download or read book Make It Stick written by Peter C. Brown and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-14 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To most of us, learning something "the hard way" implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners. Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned. Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.
