farming

Brian Donahue offers an innovative, accessible, and authoritative history of the early farming practices of Concord, Massachusetts.

This chapter argues that transforming knowledge requires a radical shift away from the existing top-down and increasingly corporate-controlled research system and toward an approach which devolves more responsibility and decision-making power to farmers, food workers, and consumers/citizens for the production of knowledge in the natural and social sciences.

This chapter explores processes that can help claim active forms of citizenship, including learning from the rich history of face-to-face democracy, strengthening local organizations, using the potential of community controlled media (such as digital video, radio, press, and Internet), and engaging in deliberative and inclusive processes (DIPs) that can significantly enhance citizen voice and agency in decision-making today.

This chapter provides empirical evidence about the importance of local organizations for sustaining food systems, livelihoods, and the environment.

For the past 60 years, mainstream neoliberal policy has encouraged and justified the elimination of small-scale food producers in both industrially developed and developing countries. This process of undermining and eliminating small-scale food producers is linked with the expansion of a development model that considers small and medium-scale farming, artisanal fishing, nomadic pastoralists, and indigenous communities to be outside “modernity.” This chapter uses the latest information available to summarize the high social and environmental costs of this model of development.

Taking a historical, cross-cultural, and trans-disciplinary perspective, this e-book includes some of the most recent references in the scholarly and policy literature on food, agriculture, environment, and livelihoods. The photos and the embedded video clips, animations, and audio recordings show farmers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, fishers, food workers, urban farmers, and consumers all working to promote food sovereignty, highlighting the importance of locally controlled food systems to sustain people and nature in a diversity of rural and urban contexts.

Most contributors to Agrarmodernisierung und Ökologische Folgen deal with the ecological consequences of farming and agriculture in twentieth-century Germany.

Stoll traces the origins of nineteenth-century conservation, which grew out of a rich and heated discussion, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, about soil fertility, plant nutrition, and livestock management. More fundamental than any other resource, soil “became the focal point for a conception of nature as strictly limited.” The problem gave rise to a major disagreement about the wisdom of territorial expansion.

This book engages debates on the timing and location of the agricultural revolution by focusing on the process of enclosure in the southern English counties of Dorset, Hampshire, Sussex, and Wiltshire.

Using case studies from Austria and Kansas, this paper compares the socioecological structures of the agricultural communities immigrants left to those that they found and created on the other side of the Atlantic.