The Nature of the Future

The Nature of the Future
Author: Emily Pawley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2022-06-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226820025

"In the seemingly mundane Northern farm of early America and the people who sought to improve its productivity and efficiency, Emily Pawley finds a world rich with innovative practices and marked by a developing interrelationship between scientific knowledge, industrial methods, and capitalism. Agricultural "improvers" became increasingly scientistic, driving tremendous increases in the range and volume of agricultural output-and transforming American conceptions of expertise, success, and exploitation. Pawley's focus on soil, fertilizer, apples, mulberries, agricultural fairs, and experimental stations shows each nominally dull subject to have been an area of intellectual ferment and sharp contestation: mercantile, epistemological, and otherwise"--

Participatory Research and Development for Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management

Participatory Research and Development for Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management
Author: Julian F. Gonsalves
Publisher: IDRC
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2005
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1552501817

Intended for aspiring and new practitioners of Participatory Research and Development (PR&D) as well as field-based researchers in developing countries. Highlights that agricultural research and development has become a joint approach to deal with diverse biophysical environments, multiple livelihood goals, rapid changes in local and global economies, and an expanded range for stakeholders over agriculture and natural resources.

Principles of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources

Principles of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources
Author: John S. Rayfield
Publisher: Goodheart-Wilcox Publisher
Total Pages: 1087
Release: 2021-10-27
Genre:
ISBN: 9781637760963

Written by leaders in agriculture education, Principles of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources is a user-friendly, visual introduction to the systems and concepts that define modern agriculture, including food systems and natural resources. This text is aligned to AFNR standards, providing practical information on building leadership, communication, and career-ready skills while integrating pedagogical tools designed for learner success. Using a modern approach to learning design, information is delivered in smaller sections so students can process and then interact with assessment and review to foster application, analysis, evaluation, and creation. This comprehensive text welcomes today's learners to the diverse and exciting world of agriscience and FFA opportunities, encouraging students to participate in their school, communities, and enroll in advanced courses.

Nature's Matrix

Nature's Matrix
Author: Ivette Perfecto
Publisher: Earthscan
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1849770131

Landscapes are frequently seen as fragments of natural habitat surrounded by a 'sea' of agriculture. But recent ecological theory shows that the nature of these fragments is not nearly as important for conservation as is the nature of the matrix of agriculture that surrounds them. Local extinctions from conservation fragments are inevitable and must be balanced by migrations if massive extinction is to be avoided. High migration rates only occur in what the authors refer to as 'high quality' matrices, which are created by alternative agroecological techniques, as opposed to the industrial monocultural model of agriculture. The authors argue that the only way to promote such high quality matrices is to work with rural social movements. Their ideas are at odds with the major trends of some of the large conservation organizations that emphasize targeted land purchases of protected areas. They argue that recent advances in ecological research make such a general approach anachronistic and call, rather, for solidarity with the small farmers around the world who are currently struggling to attain food sovereignty.Nature's Matrix proposes a radically new approach to the conservation of biodiversity based on recent advances in the science of ecology plus political realities, particularly in the world's tropical regions.

Subsistence Agriculture in the US

Subsistence Agriculture in the US
Author: Ashley Colby
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2020-09-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000193802

Focusing on ethnography and interviews with subsistence food producers, this book explores the resilience, innovation and creativity taking place in subsistence agriculture in America. To date, researchers interested in alternative food networks have often overlooked the somewhat hidden, unorganized population of household food producers. Subsistence Agriculture in the US fills this gap in the existing literature by examining the lived experiences of people taking part in subsistence food production. Over the course of the book, Colby draws on accounts from a broad and diverse network of people who are hunting, fishing, gardening, keeping livestock and gathering and looks in depth at the way in which these practical actions have transformed their relationship to labor and land. She also explores the broader implications of this pro-environmental activity for social change and sustainable futures. With a combination of rigorous academic investigation and engagement with pressing social issues, this book will be of great interest to scholars of sustainable consumption, environmental sociology and social movements.

Subtle Agroecologies

Subtle Agroecologies
Author: Julia Wright
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2021-06-29
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0429804512

This book is about the invisible or subtle nature of food and farming, and also about the nature of existence. Everything that we know (and do not know) about the physical world has a subtle counterpart which has been scarcely considered in modernist farming practice and research. If you think this book isn’t for you, if it appears more important to attend to the pressing physical challenges the world is facing before having the luxury of turning to such subtleties, then think again. For it could be precisely this worldview – the one prioritises the physical-material dimension of reality - that helped get us into this situation in the first place. Perhaps we need a different worldview to get us out? This book makes a foundational contribution to the discipline of Subtle Agroecologies, a nexus of indigenous epistemologies, multidisciplinary advances in wave-based and ethereal studies, and the science of sustainable agriculture. Not a farming system in itself, Subtle Agroecologies superimposes a non-material dimension upon existing, materially-based agroecological farming systems. Bringing together 43 authors from 12 countries and five continents, from the natural and social sciences as well as the arts and humanities, this multi-contributed book introduces the discipline, explaining its relevance and potential contribution to the field of Agroecology. Research into Subtle Agroecologies may be described as the systematic study of the nature of the invisible world as it relates to the practice of agriculture, and to do this through adapting and innovating with research methods, in particular with those of a more embodied nature, with the overall purpose of bringing and maintaining balance and harmony. Such research is an open-minded inquiry, its grounding being the lived experiences of humans working on, and with, the land over several thousand years to the present. By reclaiming and reinterpreting the perennial relationship between humans and nature, the implications would revolutionise agriculture, heralding a new wave of more sustainable farming techniques, changing our whole relationship with nature to one of real collaboration rather than control, and ultimately transforming ourselves.