Fostering on the Farm

Fostering on the Farm
Author: Megan Birk
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2015-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252097297

From 1870 until after World War I, reformers led an effort to place children from orphanages, asylums, and children's homes with farming families. The farmers received free labor in return for providing room and board. Reformers, meanwhile, believed children learned lessons in family life, citizenry, and work habits that institutions simply could not provide. Drawing on institution records, correspondence from children and placement families, and state reports, Megan Birk scrutinizes how the farm system developed--and how the children involved may have become some of America's last indentured laborers. Between 1850 and 1900, up to one-third of farm homes contained children from outside the family. Birk reveals how the nostalgia attached to misplaced perceptions about healthy, family-based labor masked the realities of abuse, overwork, and loveless upbringings endemic in the system. She also considers how rural people cared for their own children while being bombarded with dependents from elsewhere. Finally, Birk traces how the ills associated with rural placement eventually forced reformers to transition to a system of paid foster care, adoptions, and family preservation.

Foster the Family

Foster the Family
Author: Jamie C. Finn
Publisher: Baker Books
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 149343442X

There are great rewards that come along with being a foster parent, yet there are also great challenges that can leave you feeling depleted, alone, and discouraged. The many burdens of a foster parent's day--hurting children, struggling biological parents, and a broken system--are only compounded by the many burdens of a foster parent's heart--confusion, anxiety, heartache, anger, and fear. With the compassion and insight of a fellow foster parent, Jamie C. Finn helps you see your struggles through the lens of the gospel, bringing biblical truths to bear on your unique everyday realities. In these short, easy-to-read chapters, you'll find honest, personal stories and practical lessons that provide encouragement and direction from God's Word as you walk the journey of foster parenting.

Build Your Own Farm Tools

Build Your Own Farm Tools
Author: Josh Volk
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1635863201

Josh Volk, author of the best-selling Compact Farms, offers small-scale farmers an in-depth guide to building customized equipment that will save time and money and introduce much-needed efficiencies to their operations. Volk begins with the basics, such as setting up a workshop and understanding design principles, mechanical principles, and materials properties, then presents plans for making 15 tools suited to small-farm tasks and processes. Each project includes an explanation of the tool’s purpose and use, as well as the time commitment, skill level, and equipment required to build it. Projects range from the super-simple (requiring a half-day to build) to the more complex, and include how-to photographs and illustrations with variations for customizing the finished implement. Along with instructions for building items such as simple seedling benches, a mini barrel washer, a DIY germination chamber, and a rolling pack table, Volk addresses systems design for farm efficiency, including how to design an effective drip irrigation system and how to set up spreadsheets for collecting important planning, planting, and market data.

The Fundamental Institution

The Fundamental Institution
Author: Megan Birk
Publisher:
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2022-03-16
Genre:
ISBN: 9780252044380

By the early 1900s, the poor farm had become a ubiquitous part of America's social welfare system. Megan Birk's history of this foundational but forgotten institution focuses on the connection between agriculture, provisions for the disadvantaged, and the daily realities of life at poor farms. Conceived as an inexpensive way to provide care for the indigent, poor farms in fact attracted wards that ranged from abused wives and the elderly to orphans, the disabled, and disaster victims. Most people arrived unable rather than unwilling to work, some because of physical problems, others due to a lack of skills or because a changing labor market had left them behind. Birk blends the personal stories of participants with institutional histories to reveal a loose-knit system that provided a measure of care to everyone without an overarching philosophy of reform or rehabilitation. In-depth and innovative, The Fundamental Institution offers an overdue portrait of rural social welfare in the United States.

Boundaries of Touch

Boundaries of Touch
Author: Jean Halley
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0252091450

A history of the shifting and conflicting ideas about when, where, and how we should touch our children Discussing issues of parent-child contact ranging from breastfeeding to sexual abuse, Jean O'Malley Halley traces the evolution of mainstream ideas about touching between adults and children over the course of the twentieth century in the United States. Debates over when a child should be weaned and whether to allow a child to sleep in the parent's bed reveal deep differences in conceptions of appropriate adult-child contact. Boundaries of Touch shows how arguments about adult-child touch have been politicized, simplified, and bifurcated into "naturalist" and "behaviorist" viewpoints, thereby sharpening certain binary constructions such as mind/body and male/female. Halley discusses the gendering of ideas about touch that were advanced by influential social scientists and parenting experts including Benjamin Spock, Alfred C. Kinsey, and Luther Emmett Holt. She also explores how touch ideology fared within and against the post-World War II feminist movements, especially with respect to issues of breastfeeding and sleeping with a child versus using a crib. In addition to contemporary periodicals and self-help books on child rearing, Halley uses information gathered from interviews she conducted with mothers ranging in age from twenty-eight to seventy-three. Throughout, she reveals how the parent-child relationship, far from being a private or benign subject, continues as a highly contested, politicized affair of keen public interest.

Another Good Dog

Another Good Dog
Author: Cara Sue Achterberg
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2018-08-07
Genre: Pets
ISBN: 1681778394

In 2015, Cara Achterberg’s Pennsylvania farm became a haven for Operation Paws for Homes, which rescues dogs from high-kill shelters in the rural south and shuttles them north to foster homes. Nine puppies arrived with less than a day’s notice; a heart-worm positive dog; a deeply traumatized stray pup from Iraq; and countless others who just needed a gentle touch and a warm place to sleep. The stories of these remarkable dogs—including an eighty-pound bloodhound who sang arias for the neighbors—and the joy they bring to Cara and her family (along with a few chewed sofa cushions) fill the pages of this touching and inspiring book.When asked how she can possibly say goodbye to that many lovable pups, Cara says, “If I don’t give this one away, I can’t possibly save another.” Filled with humanity and hope, Another Good Dog will take the reader on a journey of smiles, laughs, and tears—and lead us to wonder how many other good dogs are out there and what we can do to help.

The Resilient Farm and Homestead

The Resilient Farm and Homestead
Author: Ben Falk
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2013
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 1603584447

The Resilient Farm and Homestead is a manual for developing durable, beautiful, and highly functional human habitat systems fit to handle an age of rapid transition. Ben Falk is a land designer and site developer whose permaculture-research farm has drawn national attention. The site is a terraced paradise on a hillside in Vermont that would otherwise be overlooked by conventional farmers as unworthy farmland. Falk's wide array of fruit trees, rice paddies (relatively unheard of in the Northeast), ducks, nuts, and earth-inspired buildings is a hopeful image for the future of regenerative agriculture and modern homesteading. The book covers nearly every strategy Falk and his team have been testing at the Whole Systems Research Farm over the past decade, as well as experiments from other sites Falk has designed through his off-farm consulting business. The book includes detailed information on earthworks; gravity-fed water systems; species composition; the site-design process; site management; fuelwood hedge production and processing; human health and nutrient-dense production strategies; rapid topsoil formation and remineralization; agroforestry/silvopasture/grazing; ecosystem services, especially regarding flood mitigation; fertility management; human labor and social-systems aspects; tools/equipment/appropriate technology; and much more, complete with gorgeous photography and detailed design drawings. The Resilient Farm and Homestead is more than just a book of tricks and techniques for regenerative site development, but offers actual working results in living within complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the "great thinkers" in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with "unlikely" farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what's possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.

Playbook Farm

Playbook Farm
Author: Corina Fletcher
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN: 9780857631244

A pop-up storybook and 3D farmyard playmat all in one! This brilliant and ingenious novelty package comprises a pop-up storybook, which then unfolds and transforms into a 3D farmyard landscape playmat, with cut-out cardboard animals and a tractor for total fun on the farm! Then fold it away and store it in its own box-style slipcase - perfect portable fun for journeys, playdates and bedtime too. Created by the highly acclaimed paper engineer Corina Fletcher and brought to life through vibrant and detailed pictures from the hugely talented Britta Teckentrup.

Faith to Foster

Faith to Foster
Author: T.J. Menn
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2017-06-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1683502752

Faith to Foster is a candid look into the life of ordinary foster parents TJ and Jenn Menn. It is a journey chronicling their decision making process, how the children arrived, the birth parents struggle to rehabilitate, help from friends and family, emotional goodbyes, and how faith in Jesus empowered them through it all. This is a story they wished they’d read before starting their foster parenting adventure. TJ and Jenn share their experiences and feelings in a way that encourages any reader to serve their neighbors, not just foster parents. Faith to Foster reminds Christians how God can use them to make a difference in their community.

Foster

Foster
Author: Claire Keegan
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2022-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802160158

An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas’ house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end. Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the US in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan’s great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.