Best Agricultural Science History Books
Here you will get Best Agricultural Science History Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
Author: by Frank Dikötter
Bloomsbury Paperbacks
English
448 pages
An unprecedented, groundbreaking history of China’s Great Famine that recasts the era of Mao Zedong and the history of the People’s Republic of China.”Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than fifteen years.
The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives.”So opens Frank Diktter’s riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented, as access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians.
A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that “fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era.”Diktter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world’s superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction.
2. The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach
Author: by Ben Falk
Chelsea Green Publishing
English
320 pages
A practical, comprehensive, and essential how-to manual with information on growing perennial crops, soil fertility, water security, nutrient dense food, and more! “Essential reading for the serious prepper as well as for everyone interested in creating a more resilient lifestyle.”Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener The Resilient Farm and Homestead is for readers ready to not just survive, but thrive in changing, unpredictable times.
It offers the tools to develop durable, beautiful, and highly functional human habitat systems anchored by preparation, regeneration, and resiliency. Ben Falk is a land designer and site developer whose 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 unworkable.
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.
3. The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
Author: by Wendell Berry
Counterpoint
English
240 pages
Since its publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families.
As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the landfrom the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. Although this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong, Berry writes, there are people working to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.
Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.
4. The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food
Author: by Dan Barber
Penguin Books
English
496 pages
Not since Michael Pollan has such a powerful storyteller emerged to reform American food. The Washington PostToday’s optimistic farm-to-table food culture has a dark secret: the local food movement has failed to change how we eat. It has also offered a false promise for the future of food.
In his visionary New York Timesbestselling book, chef Dan Barber, recently showcased on Netflix’s Chef’s Table, offers a radical new way of thinking about food that will heal the land and taste good, too. Looking to the detrimental cooking of our past, and the misguided dining of our present, Barber points to a future third plate: a new form of American eating where good farming and good food intersect.
Barber’s The Third Plate charts a bright path forward for eaters and chefs alike, daring everyone to imagine a future for our national cuisine that is as sustainable as it is delicious.
5. The Lean Farm: How to Minimize Waste, Increase Efficiency, and Maximize Value and Profits with Less Work
Author: by Ben Hartman
Chelsea Green Publishing
English
256 pages
A practical, systems-based approach for a more sustainable farming operation To many people today, using the words factory and farm in the same sentence is nothing short of sacrilege. In many cases, though, the same sound business practices apply whether you are producing cars or carrots.
Author Ben Hartman and other young farmers are increasingly finding that incorporating the best new ideas from business into their farming can drastically cut their wastes and increase their profits, making their farms more environmentally and economically sustainable. By explaining the lean system for identifying and eliminating waste and introducing efficiency in every aspect of the farm operation, The Lean Farm makes the case that small-scale farming can be an attractive career option for young people who are interested in growing food for their community.
Working smarter, not harder, also prevents the kind of burnout that start-up farmers often encounter in the face of long, hard, backbreaking labor. Lean principles grew out of the Japanese automotive industry, but they are now being followed on progressive farms around the world.
6. Compact Farms: 15 Proven Plans for Market Farms on 5 Acres or Less; Includes Detailed Farm Layouts for Productivity and Efficiency
Author: by Josh Volk
English
240 pages
1612125948
Small is beautiful, and these 15 real farm plans show that small-scale farmers can have big-time success. Compact Farms is an illustrated guide for anyone dreaming of starting, expanding, or perfecting a profitable farming enterprise on five acres or less. The farm plans explain how to harness an area’s water supply, orientation, and geography in order to maximize efficiency and productivity while minimizing effort.
Profiles of well-known farmers such as Eliot Coleman and Jean-Martin Fortier show that farming on a small scale in any region, in both urban and rural settings, can provide enough income to turn the endeavor from hobby to career. These real-life plans and down-and-dirty advice will equip you with everything you need to actually realize your farm dreams.
7. The Independent Farmstead: Growing Soil, Biodiversity, and Nutrient-Dense Food with Grassfed Animals and Intensive Pasture Management
Author: by Beth Dougherty
Chelsea Green Publishing
English
336 pages
With in-depth information on electric fencing, watering, and husbandry for ruminants, poultry, and pigs, plus butchering, dairying, and more If we work hard, we sleep well. Twenty years ago, when authors Shawn and Beth Dougherty purchased the land they would come to name the Sow’s Ear, the state of Ohio designated it not suitable for agriculture.
Today, their family raises and grows 90% of their own food. Such self-sufficiency is largely the result of basing their farming practices around intensive pasture management. Pioneered by such luminaries as Allan Savory, Greg Judy, and Joel Salatin, the tenets of holistic grazingemployed mostly by larger-scale commercial operationshave been adapted by the Doughertys to fit their family’s needs.
In The Independent Farmstead, The Sow’s Ear model for regenerating the land and growing foodthe best you ever tastedis elucidated for others to use and build upon. In witty and welcoming style, The Independent Farmstead covers everything from choosing a species of ruminant and incorporating it into a grass-based system to innovative electric fencing and watering systems, to what to do with all of the milk, meat, and, yes, manure that the self-sustaining farm produces.
8. Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation
Author: by Andrea Wulf
Vintage
English
368 pages
From the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature, a fascinating look at the Founding Fathers like none you’ve seen before. For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions: a conjoined interest as deeply ingrained in their characters as the battle for liberty and a belief in the greatness of their new nation.
Founding Gardeners is an exploration of that obsession, telling the story of the revolutionary generation from the unique perspective of their lives as gardeners, plant hobbyists, and farmers. Acclaimed historian Andrea Wulf describes how George Washington wrote letters to his estate manager even as British warships gathered off Staten Island; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of environmentalism.
Through these and other stories, Wulf reveals a fresh, nuanced portrait of the men who created our nation.
9. The Egg and I
Author: by Betty MacDonald
Harper Perennial
English
288 pages
A work of real comic genius…. A wonderful, funny, warm, honest book, and, to use a much overused word, a classic. Michael Korda, author of Country MattersWhen Betty MacDonald married a marine and moved to a small chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, she was largely unprepared for the rigors of life in the wild.
With no running water, no electricity, a house in need of constant repair, and days that ran from four in the morning to nine at night, the MacDonalds had barely a moment to put their feet up and relax. And then came the children.
Yet through every trial and pitfallthrough chaos and catastrophethis indomitable family somehow, mercifully, never lost its sense of humor. A beloved literary treasure for more than half a century, Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I is a heartwarming and uproarious account of adventure and survival on an American frontier.
10. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962
Author: by Yang Jisheng
0374533997
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
English
The much-anticipated definitive account of China’s Great Famine An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early ’60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as “the three years of natural disaster.” As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father.
Finding no natural causes, Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China’s totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest. Tombstone is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed by those in power.
Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, Tombstone is written both as a memorial to the lives lostan enduring tombstone in memory of the deadand in hopeful anticipation of the final demise of the totalitarian system.
11. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
Author: by James C. Scott
B0747RTP2W
Yale University Press
August 22, 2017
An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrative Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today’s states?
Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative.
The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal familyall of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction.
Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor.
12. The King Of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of A Secret American Empire
Author: by Mark Arax
PublicAffairs
English
592 pages
The fascinating story of a cotton magnate whose voracious appetite for land drove him to create the first big agricultural empire of the Central Valley of California, and shaped the landscape for decades to come.J.G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America.
He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate “factory in the fields.” The King of California is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s,drained one of America ‘s biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world.
Indeed, the sophistication of Boswell ‘s agricultural operation -from lab to field to gin – is unrivaled anywhere. Much more than a business story, this is a sweeping social history that details the saga of cotton growers who were chased from the South by the boll weevil and brought their black farmhands to California.
13. Your Successful Farm Business: Production, Profit, Pleasure
Author: by Joel Salatin
Polyface (August 15, 2017)
English
300 pages
Twenty years ago Joel Salatin wrote You Can Farm, which has launched thousands of farm entrepreneurs around the world. With another 20 years of experience under his belt, bringing him to the half-century mark as a full-time farmer, he decided to build on that foundation with a sequel, a graduate level curriculum.
Everyone who reads and enjoys that previous work will benefit from this additional information. In those 20 years, Polyface Farm progressed from a small family operation to a 20-person, 6,000-customer, 50-restaurant business, all without sales targets, government grants, or an off-farm nest egg.
As a germination tray for new farmers ready to take over the 50 percent of America’s agricultural equity that will become available over the next two decades, Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley stands as a beacon of hope in a food and farming system floundering in dysfunction: toxicity, pathogenicity, nutrient deficiency, bankruptcy, geezers, and erosion.
Speaking into that fear and confusion, Salatin offers a pathway to success, with production, profit, and pleasure thrown in for good measure.
14. The Profitable Hobby Farm, How to Build a Sustainable Local Foods Business
Author: by Sarah Beth Aubrey
Howell Book House
English
288 pages
Turn your hobby farm into a successful businessNo experience in farming?No problem! The Profitable Hobby Farm gives you all the tools you need to launch a thriving hobby farm business. Based on the author’s expert guidance and the motivating experiences of other small farmers, it shows you how to blend strategy, marketing, and money management in order to prosper.
The Profitable Hobby Farm provides sound, friendly start-up advice on a variety of topics essential to making an initial foray into a local foods venture. A must-read book for raising and selling local, sustainable foodsIncludes sample business plan, grant application, marketing and advertising plan, and other formsLengthy resources section directs you to additional readingAlso by Aubrey: Starting & Running Your Own Small Farm BusinessWhether it’s growing heirloom tomatoes, raising free-range chickens for their eggs, or making organic wine or cheese, this book shows you how to turn your hobby into a profit.
15. The Bumpy Road: Farm Life in the Great Depression
Author: by Quentin F. Veit
B088BGKYM8
English
234 pages
Step back in time to the tiny farm community of Osage Bend, Missouri, circa 1930-1945Part memoir, part how-to manual, The Bumpy Road paints a vivid picture of life on the farm during the Great Depression. The author, recounting stories from his boyhood, brings to life the everyday trials and tribulations of his family and neighbors as they struggle to survive under daunting economic conditions.
The hard work they put in was a given (to them), and their solutions to everyday problems were ingenious by necessity. And yet, they still found time to socialize and make the church the center of their lives. These tenacious people always looked to the future with hope and determination, and that comes shining through in this book.
Depression-era, yes, depressing, no! So, discover the many facets of running a farm, how chores were done, the importance of family, and the many things that tied the community together. Marvel at the strength and resourcefulness of these rural Missouriansand take some of that for yourself as we endure our own difficult times today.
