Agriculture Economics

With the current administration pausing funding for agricultural projects and farming support, the issues discussed in this book are more urgent and relevant than ever before. The system of agriculture needs to be reimagined. This book is the best place to begin. There’s no denying it: we...

“Reading Kuni makes me want to dive into rural Japan...this book reminds me that leaders emerge when and where you least expect it.” — ALICE WATERS, founder of Chez Panisse restaurant, activist, and author A guide to reviving and revitalizing forgotten places and communities through the...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE WINNER OF THE 2025 ZÓCALO BOOK PRIZE A humanitarian leader with more than two decades of experience working for the United Nations takes aim at the global food crisis—revealing how hunger anywhere affects lives everywhere and what steps we...

No Meat Required is a bestselling culinary and cultural history of plant-based eating in the United States that delves into the subcultures and politics that have defined alternative food—Diet for a Small Planet for a new generation The vegan diet used to be associated only with eccentric...

With 750 million people living in villages, India has the largest rural population in the world. Based on his Indian experience, Dr Kalam recommends a sustainable and inclusive development system called PURA—Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas—to uplift the rural masses not by subsidies...

Before the global financial meltdown of 2008, India's economy was thriving and its GDP growth was cruising at an impressive 8.8 per cent. The economic boom impacted a large section of Indians, even if unequally. With sustained high growth over an extended period, India could have achieved what...

A riveting true story of industrial espionage in which a Chinese-born scientist is pursued by the U.S. government for trying to steal trade secrets, by a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. In September 2011, sheriff’s deputies in Iowa encountered three ethnic Chinese men near a...

A bold yet realistic vision of how technology and social change are creating a food system in which we no longer use animals to produce meat, dairy, or eggs. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals brought widespread attention to the disturbing...

Are GMOs really that bad? A prominent environmental journalist takes a fresh look at what they actually mean for our food system and for us. In the past two decades, GMOs have come to dominate the American diet. Advocates hail them as the future of food, an enhanced method of crop breeding...

"Every year, our planet loses over 150 species of plants and animals, and India is very much in the midst of this mass ‘sixth extinction’. We are losing species in our backyard—where are the once ubiquitous sparrows, or the fireflies that lit up our nights? And in the forests, iconic...

"A moral dilemma gripped Anil K. Gupta when he was invited by the Bangladeshi government to help restructure their agricultural on-farm research sector in 1985. He noticed how the marginalized farmers were being paid poorly for their otherwise unmatched knowledge. The gross injustice of this...

Native and imported, sacred and ordinary, culinary and floral, favourites of various kings and commoners over the centuries, trees are the most visible signs of nature in cities, fundamentally shaping their identities. Trees are storehouses of the complex origins and histories of city growth...

The riveting story of the entrepreneurs and renegades fighting to bring lab-grown meat to the world. The trillion-dollar meat industry is one of our greatest environmental hazards; it pollutes more than all the world's fossil-fuel-powered cars. Global animal agriculture is responsible for...

Venkat Iyer was living a fast-paced life in the IT world in Mumbai when he decided to stop and take a long, hard look at where he was headed. Disheartened by his stressful existence in the city, he decided to give it all up and take up organic farming in a small village near Mumbai. But...

The story of the "Lentil Underground" begins on a 280-acre homestead rooted in America's Great Plains: the Oien family farm. Forty years ago, corporate agribusiness told small farmers like the Oiens to "get big or get out." But 27-year-old David Oien decided to take a stand, becoming the first in his conservative Montana county to plant a radically different crop: organic lentils. Unlike the chemically dependent grains American farmers had been told to grow, lentils make their own fertilizer and tolerate variable climates, so their farmers aren't beholden to industrial methods.

One of the most influential economists of the decade-and the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Stagnation-boldly argues that just about everything you've heard about food is wrong. Food snobbery is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, says economist, preeminent social...

This groundbreaking study of agriculture's role in the war defies long-held notions that Northern industrialization and urbanization led to clashes between North and South. Huston argues that the ideological chasm between plantation owners in the South and family farmers in the North led to the political eruption of 1854-1856 and the birth of a sectionalized party system.

Biotechnology crop production area increased from 1.7 million hectares to 148 million hectares worldwide between 1996 and 2010. While genetically modified food is a contentious issue, the debates are usually limited to health and environmental concerns, ignoring the broader questions of social control that arise when food production methods become corporate-owned intellectual property.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A business leader and esteemed economic thinker outlines simple solutions to America’s five most pressing public policy issues, from healthcare to education to inequality. America today confronts a host of urgent problems, many of them seemingly intractable, but...

In partnership with Texas Monthly, Tom Foster's "The Shelf Life of John Mackey" is now available as an audio download, where the length and timeliness of a podcast meets the high-quality production of a full-length audio program. On June 16, 2017, Whole Foods agreed to sell itself to Amazon for...