Agriculture History

This text provides a compelling narrative world history through the lens of food and farmers. Tracing the world history of agriculture from earliest times to the present, Isett and Miller argue that people rather than markets have been the primary agents of agricultural change, exploring the actions taken by individuals and groups over time.

The restoration agriculture system described in this award-winning book works! It is possible for humans to produce staple foods using perennial agricultural ecosystems that actually improve the quality of the environment. This can be done on a backyard, farm, or ranch scale and is needed right now - on a global scale. Restoration Agriculture explains how we can have all of the benefits of natural, perennial ecosystems and create agricultural systems that imitate nature in form and function while still providing for our food, building, fuel, and many other needs.

Supported by meticulous research and told in a lively, accessible voice, Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World seamlessly weaves travel, history, humor, and a little adventure (and misadventure) to follow the tomato's trail through history. A fascinating story complete with heroes, con artists, conquistadors, and—no surprise—the Mafia, this book is a mouth-watering, informative, and entertaining guide to the food that has captured our hearts for generations.

According to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), each year, an estimated 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost due to erosion. That’s a whopping 3.4 tons lost every year for each person on the planet.

We have never had to feed as many people as we do today. And yet, we misunderstand the essentials of where our food really comes from, how our dietary requirements shape us, and why this impacts our planet in drastic ways. As a result, in our economic, political, and everyday choices, we take for granted and fail to prioritize the thing that makes all our lives possible: food. In this ambitious, myth-busting book, Smil investigates many of the burning questions facing the world today.

When Rudolf Steiner gave these lectures 80 years ago, industrial farming was on the rise and organic methods were being replaced in the name of science, efficiency, and technology. With the widespread alarm over the quality of food in recent years, and the growth of the organic movement and its mainstream acceptance, perceptions are changing. The qualitative aspect of food is once again on the agenda, and in this context Rudolf Steiner's only course of lectures on agriculture is critical to the current debate.

When we humans love foods, we love them a lot. In fact, we have often eaten them into extinction, whether it is the megafauna of the Paleolithic world or the passenger pigeon of the last century. In Lost Feast, food expert Lenore Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods we have loved to death and what that means for the culinary paths we choose for the future.

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood - facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf - his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.

Mark Kurlansky's first global food history since the best-selling Cod and Salt; the fascinating cultural, economic and culinary story of milk and all things dairy - with recipes throughout. According to the Greek creation myth, we are so much spilt milk; a splatter of the goddess Hera's breast milk became our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Emma Gray was just 23 when she moved to an isolated farm in Northumberland, becoming Britain's youngest solo shepherdess. In the seasons that followed, Emma fell in love with its rolling fields, sycamore trees and sturdy farmhouse, where she tended her sheep and trained her dogs - and even found romance along the way. But when Emma finds herself suddenly alone again, heartbroken, mourning the loss of loved ones and recovering from a serious accident, she can't help but wonder if her isolated existence is still such a sensible idea.

Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the 'hunter-gatherer' tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession. Accomplished author Bruce Pascoe provides compelling evidence from the diaries of early explorers that suggests that systems of food production and land management have been understated in modern retellings of Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia's past is required.

Taking on this story of heart and hardship, award-winning journalist Brian Reisinger weaves forgotten eras of American history with his own family’s four-generation fight for survival in Midwestern farm country. Listeners learn the truth about America’s most detrimental and unexplained socioeconomic crisis: How the family farms that feed us went from cutting a middle-class path through the Great Depression to barely making ends meet in modern America.

Thousands of years ago, the Mesopotamians made many discoveries that we enjoy today.

¿Quiénes llegaron primero, los olmecas o los mayas? ¿Los olmecas o los incas? Camine con nosotros entre cabezas colosales y algunas de las primeras pirámides de Mesoamérica, ¡sí! ¡Pirámides de todo el mundo desde Giza y Egipto! Acompáñenos en el viaje para descubrir dónde empezó y terminó esta asombrosa cultura, y por qué seguimos estudiando a los olmecas hoy en día. Los historiadores y los estudiosos aún se debaten sobre los orígenes—y las razones—del declive de algunas de las civilizaciones formativas de Mesoamérica.

In We Are What We Eat, Alice Waters urges us to take up the mantle of slow food culture, the philosophy at the core of her life’s work. When Waters first opened Chez Panisse in 1971, she did so with the intention of feeding people good food during a time of political turmoil. Customers responded to the locally sourced organic ingredients, to the dishes made by hand, and to the welcoming hospitality that infused the small space - human qualities that were disappearing from a country increasingly seduced by takeout, frozen dinners, and prepackaged ingredients.

As seen on the BBC’s This Farming Life. The inspirational story of Lynbreck Croft - a regenerative Scottish farm rooted in local food, community, and the dreams of two women. Lynn and Sandra left their friends, family, and jobs in England to travel north to Scotland to find a bit of land that they could call their own. They had in mind keeping a few chickens, a kitchen garden, and renting out some camping space; instead, they fell in love with Lynbreck Croft - 150 acres of opportunity and beauty, shrouded by the Cairngorms and deep in the Highlands of Scotland.

Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and yet agriculture has undergone more fundamental changes in the past 80 years than in the previous several centuries. In 1900, 30 million American farmers tilled the soil or tended livestock; today there are fewer than 4.5 million farmers who feed a population four times larger than it was at the beginning of the century.

Building on and connecting histories of food and work, literary criticism of the pastoral and georgic, histories of elite and vernacular science, and histories of reading and writing practices, among other areas of inquiry, Digging the Past offers fine-grained case studies of projects heralded as innovations both in the 17th century and in our own time: composting and soil amendment, local food, natural wine, and hedgerows.

We know that eating animals is bad for the planet and bad for our health, and yet we do it anyway. Ask anyone in the plant-based movement and the solution seems obvious: stop eating meat. But, for many people, that stark solution is neither appealing nor practical. In Meat Me Halfway, author and founder of the reducetarian movement Brian Kateman puts forth a realistic and balanced goal: mindfully reduce your meat consumption.

Fields of Antiquity offers an in-depth exploration of the agricultural practices that underpinned one of the most influential civilizations in history. This meticulously researched book delves into the farming techniques, tools, and innovations of ancient Greek society, shedding light on how agriculture not only sustained Greek city-states but also shaped their economy, culture, and religious life.