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.
Download or read book Another Revolution in U S farming written by Lyle P. Schertz and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book America s Transition from Agriculture to Industry written by Greg Roza and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes how America changed its agricultural practices as a result of the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution.
Download or read book Another Revolution in U S Farming written by Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Economics, Statistics and Cooperatives Service. National Economics Division and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Founding Gardeners written by Andrea Wulf and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature, a fascinating look at the Founding Fathers like none you've seen before. “Illuminating and engrossing.... The reader relives the first decades of the Republic ... through the words of the statesmen themselves.” —The New York Times Book Review For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions: a conjoined interest as deeply ingrained in their characters as the battle for liberty and a belief in the greatness of their new nation. Founding Gardeners is an exploration of that obsession, telling the story of the revolutionary generation from the unique perspective of their lives as gardeners, plant hobbyists, and farmers. Acclaimed historian Andrea Wulf describes how George Washington wrote letters to his estate manager even as British warships gathered off Staten Island; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of environmentalism. Through these and other stories, Wulf reveals a fresh, nuanced portrait of the men who created our nation.
Download or read book Another Revolution in U S Farming written by United States. Department of Agriculture. Economics, Statistics, and Cooperatives Service and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Another revolution in U S farming a summary analysis of the structure of U S farming written by United States. Department of Agriculture and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fewer Larger U S Farms by Year 2000 and Some Consequences written by and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Another Revolution in U S Farming written by United States. Department of Agriculture. Economics, Statistics, and Cooperatives Service and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Another Revolution in U S Farming written by and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Farm written by Brent Preston and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Letters from an American Farmer written by Hector de Crèvecoeur and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-02-28 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur was a farmer and diplomat in New England during the American Revolutionary War. These are his valuable observations of rural life and ordinary citizens of a nation soon to attain independence. While the military skirmishes and personalities of the era - such as the Founding Fathers - are well-recorded, everyday living in America at the time the United States burst into existence is not nearly as known by historians. These eloquent accounts of how average Americans lived amid the upheaval of Revolution are unique, memorable and authentic. It is fortunate that the honest observations of de Crèvecoeur survive as an abiding portrait of citizens in a Republic struggling for recognition and independence. The New England of the 18th century was a rural society; industry was scarce and undeveloped, and the peoples worked with their hands rather than with machines. Many labored hard for years to buy their own parcel of land; the author's depictions of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard are vivid - the behaviors, manners and trading are detailed in a plain yet enjoyable style. The society of 1780s America is, thanks to de Crèvecoeur's eloquence, easy to visualize. The native wildlife - which the farmers lived in close proximity to - include snakes and birds majestic in their beauty. The author's serene observations at times stray to the philosophical, as the reader sees the beginnings of a new nation unfurl day-by-day, person-by-person.
Download or read book Red Revolution Green Revolution written by Sigrid Schmalzer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-01-20 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term “green revolution” to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger around the world—and forestall the spread of more “red,” or socialist, revolutions. Yet in China, where modernization and scientific progress could not be divorced from politics, green and red revolutions proceeded side by side. In Red Revolution, Green Revolution, Sigrid Schmalzer explores the intersection of politics and agriculture in socialist China through the diverse experiences of scientists, peasants, state agents, and “educated youth.” The environmental costs of chemical-intensive agriculture and the human costs of emphasizing increasing production over equitable distribution of food and labor have been felt as strongly in China as anywhere—and yet, as Schmalzer shows, Mao-era challenges to technocracy laid important groundwork for today’s sustainability and food justice movements. This history of “scientific farming” in China offers us a unique opportunity not only to explore the consequences of modern agricultural technologies but also to engage in a necessary rethinking of fundamental assumptions about science and society.
Download or read book The Agricultural Revolution of the 20th Century written by Don Paarlberg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-02-28 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book for a varied audience: college students of agriculture and sociology; high school students of vocation agriculture; members of the American Agricultural Economics Association; people with a long-standing background in agriculture; and other readers interested in 20th century agriculture. The book reads like a story and is supplemented with excellent photographs, contrasting past practices with modern technology.
Download or read book The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century written by Richard L. Bushman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating study of America’s agricultural society during the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Founding eras In the eighteenth century, three†‘quarters of Americans made their living from farms. This authoritative history explores the lives, cultures, and societies of America’s farmers from colonial times through the founding of the nation. Noted historian Richard Bushman explains how all farmers sought to provision themselves while still actively engaged in trade, making both subsistence and commerce vital to farm economies of all sizes. The book describes the tragic effects on the native population of farmers’ efforts to provide farms for their children and examines how climate created the divide between the free North and the slave South. Bushman also traces midcentury rural violence back to the century’s population explosion. An engaging work of historical scholarship, the book draws on a wealth of diaries, letters, and other writings—including the farm papers of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington—to open a window on the men, women, and children who worked the land in early America.
Download or read book The Diaries V 6 Jan 1790 Dec 1799 written by George Washington and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington was rarely isolated from the world during his eventful life. His diary for 1751-52 relates a voyage to Barbados when he was nineteen. The next two accounts concern the early phases of the French and Indian War, in which Washington commanded a Virginia regiment. By the 1760s when Washington's diaries resume, he considered himself retired from public life, but George III was on the British throne and in the American colonies the process of unrest was beginning that would ultimately place Washington in command of a revolutionary army. Even as he traveled to Philadelphia in 1787 to chair the Constitutional Convention, however, and later as president, Washington's first love remained his plantation, Mount Vernon. In his diary, he religiously recorded the changing methods of farming he employed there and the pleasures of riding and hunting. Rich in material from this private sphere, The Diaries of George Washington offer historians and anyone interested in Washington a closer view of the first president in this bicentennial year of his death.
Download or read book Letters from an American Farmer written by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and published by . This book was released on 2018-08-17 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur was a farmer and diplomat in New England during the American Revolutionary War. These are his valuable observations of rural life and ordinary citizens of a nation soon to attain independence. While the military skirmishes and personalities of the era - such as the Founding Fathers - are well-recorded, everyday living in America at the time the United States burst into existence is not nearly as known by historians. These eloquent accounts of how average Americans lived amid the upheaval of Revolution are unique, memorable and authentic. The New England of the 18th century was a rural society; industry was scarce and undeveloped, and the peoples worked with their hands rather than with machines. Many labored hard for years to buy their own parcel of land; the author's depictions of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard are vivid - the behaviors, manners and trading are detailed in a plain yet enjoyable style.
