Showing titles in Agricultural & Food Sciences

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Green Grass in the Spring: A Cowboy's Guide for Saving the World and learn about land stewardship and holistic land management.

Profitable winter market gardening – the complete practical guide to growing vegetables year-round in northern climates for local markets. Many small farms shut down during the dark winter months. Yet with the right techniques, equipment, and cultivars, year-round growing can produce the highest quality and tastiest fresh local vegetables, all while banking a profit.

With predictions of a human population of more than nine billion by the middle of this century and 11 billion by 2100, we stand at a crossroads in our agricultural evolution. In this clear and engaging book, wildlife biologist John M. Marzluff takes a personal approach to sustainable agriculture. He travels to farms and ranches across North and Central America, including a Nebraska corn and soybean farm, California vineyards, cattle ranches in Montana, and small sustainable farms in Costa Rica, to understand the unique challenges and solutions to sustainable food production.

No 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 supplemental PDF is included with this audiobook.

Several years ago, ecologist Lauren E. Oakes set out from California for Alaska's old-growth forests to hunt for a dying tree: the yellow-cedar. With climate change as the culprit, the death of this species meant loss for many Alaskans. Oakes and her research team wanted to chronicle how plants and people could cope with their rapidly changing world. Amidst the standing dead, she discovered the resiliency of forgotten forests, flourishing again in the wake of destruction, and a diverse community of people who persevered to create new relationships with the emerging environment.

As China comes into its own as a world economic power, a new, huge consumer class is emerging, hungry for all things Western. In this land where 25 years ago most of the population had never tasted chocolate, five icons of Western business are now slugging it out in a battle royal to see which will become the Emperor of Chocolate in China.

This book is your guide and assistant in your journey to becoming a full-fledged chicken lady. It walks you through the whole process–from getting started and making decisions about your backyard coop to maintenance and keeping your flock healthy.

Many of us want to increase our self-sufficiency, but few have access to the ideal five gently sloping acres of rich, loamy, well-drained soil. Jenni Blackmore presents a highly entertaining, personal account of how permaculture can be practiced in adverse conditions, allowing anyone to learn to live more sustainably in a less-than-perfect world.

Professor Erika Szymanski makes wine science accessible to non-experts. Rather than approach wine science as body of facts about wine, Szymanski explores how wine science can open up multiple ways of seeing, understanding, and appreciating wine. Too often, wine science is presented as a comprehensive body of knowledge that enthusiasts aiming to become experts should memorize. This book instead uses scientific research to explore wine as an endlessly rich cultural phenomenon.

It’s all but certain that the next 50 years will bring enormous, not to say cataclysmic, disruptions to our present way of life. World oil reserves will be exhausted within that time frame, as will the lithium that powers today’s most sophisticated batteries, suggesting that transportation is equally imperiled. Farming for the Long Haul is about building a viable small-farm economy that can withstand the economic, political, and climatic shock waves that the 21st century portends.

Many people will remember that Rachel Carson predicted a silent spring, but she also warned of a fruitless fall, a time with no pollination and no fruit. The fruitless fall nearly became a reality when, in 2007, beekeepers watched 30 billion bees mysteriously die. And they continue to disappear. The remaining pollinators, essential to the cultivation of a third of American crops, are now trucked across the country and flown around the world, pushing them ever closer to collapse.

Farming has been in John Connell's family for generations, but he never intended to follow in his father's footsteps. Until, one winter, after more than a decade away, he finds himself back on the farm. Connell records the hypnotic rhythm of the farming day - cleaning the barns, caring for the herd, tending to sickly lambs, helping the cows give birth. Alongside the routine events, there are the unforeseen moments when things go wrong: when a calf fails to thrive, when a sheep goes missing, when an argument between father and son erupts and things are said that cannot be unsaid.

Within a decade, nearly half of all American farmland will change hands as an older generation of farmers steps aside. In their place, a groundswell of new growers will face numerous challenges, including soil degradation, insufficient income, and investors devouring farmland at a staggering pace.

With chronic disorders among American children reaching epidemic levels, hundreds of thousands of parents are desperately seeking solutions to their children's declining health, often with little medical guidance from the experts. What's Making Our Children Sick? convincingly explains how agrochemical industrial production and genetic modification of foods is a culprit in this epidemic.

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.

Charles E. Hires and the Drink That Wowed a Nation chronicles the humble origin and meteoric business success of this extraordinary entrepreneur. Author Bill Double uses published interviews, correspondence, newspaper reports, magazine articles, financial data, and a small family archive to tell this story of native ingenuity. Here, the rough-hewn capitalism of the gilded age, the evolution of the neighborhood drugstore, the rise of advertising in creating mass markets, and the emerging temperance movement all come together in a biography that fizzes with entrepreneurial spirit.

Mason Bee Revolution explains how docile, hard-working, solitary mason bees (and their compatriots, the leafcutter bees) are even more productive pollinators than honeybees, and keeping them can be a fun, easy, backyard hobby for gardeners, conservationists, foodies, and families everywhere. While scientists search for answers to save the honeybee, Dave Hunter and his company, Crown Bees, are leading the effort to increase the population of other highly efficient pollinators.

Are you ready to dive into the fulfilling world of backyard poultry? Your journey towards becoming a self-reliant, poultry-raising expert begins here. This comprehensive guide is your key to unlocking a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle, right in the comfort of your home.

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 (or listens to), and enjoys that previous work, will benefit from this additional information.

Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political.