farming

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.

“Cooperating with nature, instead of fighting nature. To observe nature and ascertain which plants support one another.” These are key concepts for organic farmer Sepp Holzer and the founding principles of permaculture.

This exploration of the deepening crisis of food security in India looks at four case studies, dealing respectively with Punjab, Warangal, Kalahandi, and Bellary. These are interspersed by insights into a movement in the Himalayas that may offer alternatives in the form of sustainable agricultural systems, which revive traditional agricultural practices (Beej Bachao Andolan).

A political thriller about GMOs and freedom of speech.

Animal feed dealer Josef Feilmeier supplies 500 Bavarian farmers, from Straubing to Passau, with non-GM animal feed. This film profiles his approach to farming.