Suchergebnisse

Book reviewed in this article: The Farm Labor Movement in the Midwest: Social Change and Adaptation among Migrant Farmworkers. W. K. Barger and Ernesto M. Rezo. Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation. Brjj V. Lai, Doug Munro, and Edward D. Beechert, eds.

In the last forty years, agriculture in the industrialised countries has undergone a revolution. That has dramatically increased yields, but it has also led to extensive rural depopulation; widespread degradation of the environment; contamination of food with agrochemicals and bacteria; more routine maltreatment of farm animals; and the undermining of Third World economies and livelihoods through unfair trading systems. Confronted by mounting evidence of environmental harm and social impacts, mainstream agronomistis and policy-makers have debatedly recognized the need for change. 'Sustainable

"Cattle Beet Capital explores the economic, cultural, and environmental processes and contingencies that shaped the evolution of industrial agriculture in northern Colorado"--

Over the last century, the United States has seen dramatic consolidation of its agricultural lands despite a century's worth of research that demonstrates lower productivity of large farms. Using Veblen's Absentee Ownership as a starting point, this paper follows the politics of agricultural policies and subsidies for capital and energy use, which have encouraged the concentration of agricultural landownership. Economies of scale in agriculture are dissipated sooner than expected, and most of the existing scale economies arise from the fixed costs of labor-replacing technologies, which have been favored by such policies and R&D. Shifts in tax policies, as well as increased agricultural R&D and extension services that support alternative technologies, would allow small-scale operations to gain a competitive advantage over industrial farms, mitigating the ecological and social costs of the current farm structure.

Charting the political, social, and environmental history of efforts to conserve crop diversity. Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly dominated farm fields. Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens. In Endangered Maize, historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.