Showing titles in Agricultural & Food Sciences

Join the Nicholson family for this heartwarming journey through a typical springtime on their South Yorkshire farm. Throughout the book, they reflect on the childhood stories, testing times, poignant memories and enriching experiences that have shaped the lives they lead today. With the coming of a new season, Roger and Cynthia Nicholson and their sons Richard, Robert and David show how the farming year is shaped around the arrival of baby goats, lambs, calves and piglets galore.

This second edition of Viticulture is an introduction to the professional world of growing grapes for wine production and is aimed at the serious student in the wine trade, WSET diploma student, or Master of Wine candidate. It is also aimed at anybody considering owning or planting a vineyard who wants a basic primer on the subject. It is written in an easy-to-digest style, arranged in 14 relatively short chapters, and illustrated with 100 photographs and charts. Viticulture is all you need to know about grape growing.

In this fascinating and easily digestible book, The One Show's resident scientist Marty Jopson takes us on a mouthwatering tour of the 21st-century kitchen and the everyday food miracles that we all take for granted. Ever wondered what modified starch is and why it's in so much of the food we buy? What do instant mash and freeze-dried coffee have in common? What's the real truth behind the five-second rule?

If you are interested in beginning the rewarding path of keeping hens in your backyard, is now the ideal time for you to do so? Raising Chicks for Beginners is a thorough book that includes all you need to know to produce chicks that are safe, healthy, and prolific, regardless of your level of experience. Your first flock may be started with its assistance, or your abilities could be improved.

The war is over, the RAF uniform has been handed in and James Herriot goes back where he ought to be - at work in the dales around Darrowby. Much has changed, but the blunt-spoken Yorkshire folk and the host of four-legged patients are still the same. So is their vet, who doesn't yet know that literary success is just around the corner.

One of the few voices to challenge The Guardian's George Monbiot on the future of food and farming (and the restoration of nature) is academic, farmer and author of A Small Farm Future Chris Smaje. In Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, Smaje presents his defense of small-scale farming and a robust critique of Monbiot’s vision for an urban and industrialized future.

Fossil fuels and livestock grazing are often targeted as major culprits behind climate change and desertification. But Allan Savory, cofounder of the Savory Institute, begs to differ. The bigger problem, he warns, is our mismanagement of resources. Livestock grazing is not the problem; it's how we graze livestock. If we don't change the way we approach land management, irreparable harm from climate change could continue long after we replace fossil fuels.

Learn a road map to healthy soil and revitalized food systems for powerfully addressing these times of challenge. This audiobook equips producers with knowledge, skills, and insights to regenerate ecosystem health and grow farm/ranch profits. Globally recognized soil advocate and agroecologist Nicole Masters delivers the solution to rewind the clock on this increasingly critical soil crisis in her first book For the Love of Soil. She argues we can no longer treat soil like dirt.

There is a major disconnect between what we wear and our knowledge of its impact on land, air, water, labor, and human health. Even those who value access to safe, local, nutritious food have largely overlooked the production of fiber, dyes, and the chemistry that forms the backbone of modern textile production. While humans are 100 percent reliant on their second skin, it’s common to think little about the biological and human cultural context from which our clothing derives.

A series of glasses of transparent liquids is in front of you: but which will quench your thirst and which will kill you? And why? Why does one liquid make us drunk and another power a jumbo jet? Sometimes dangerous, often delightful and always fascinating, discover the secret lives of liquids, from one of our best known scientists. From the best-selling author of Stuff Matters comes a fascinating tour of the world of these surprising or sinister substances - the droplets, heartbeats and ocean waves we encounter day to day.

A few months of married bliss, a lovers' nest in Darrowby and the wonders of home cooking are rudely interrupted for James Herriot by the Second World War. James Herriot's fifth volume of memoirs relocates him to a training camp somewhere in England. And in between square pounding and digging for victory, he dreams of the people and livestock he left behind him.

Medicine has become inhuman, to disastrous effect. The doctor-patient relationship - the heart of medicine - is broken: doctors are too distracted and overwhelmed to truly connect with their patients, and medical errors and misdiagnoses abound. In Deep Medicine, leading physician Eric Topol reveals how artificial intelligence can help. AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment, greatly cutting down the cost of medicine and reducing human mortality.

We have never had so much information at our fingertips, and yet most of us simply don't understand how our world really works. Professor Vaclav Smil is not a pessimist or an optimist, he is a scientist, and this book is a much-needed reality check on topics ranging from food production and nutrition, through energy and the environment, to globalisation and the future. For example, the carbon footprint of meat is well known, but did you know that the equivalent of five tablespoons of diesel fuel goes into the production of each greenhouse-grown, medium-size, supermarket-bought tomato?

Call it "Zen and the Art of Farming" or a "Little Green Book", Masanobu Fukuoka's manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book "is valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical."

More than a practical guide, Start Your Farm is a hopeful call to action for anyone who aspires to grow wholesome, environmentally sustainable food for a living. Take it from Forrest Pritchard and Ellen Polishuk: Making this dream a reality is not for the faint of heart, but it's well within reach - and there's no greater satisfaction under the sun.

This book is a call to action. It warns that unless we learn to accept and respect our social, cultural and political differences as town and country people, we are never going to solve the chronic problems in our food system and environment. As we stare down the barrel of climate change, only farmers - who manage two thirds of the UK's landscape - working together with conservation groups can create a healthier food system and bring back nature in diverse abundance.

A Soil Owner's Manual: How to Restore and Maintain Soil Health is about restoring the capacity of your soil to perform all the functions it was intended to perform. This book is not another fanciful guide on how to continuously manipulate and amend your soil to try and keep it productive. This book will change the way you think about and manage your soil.

When you're cooking, you're a chemist! Every time you follow or modify a recipe you are experimenting with acids and bases, emulsions and suspensions, gels and foams. In your kitchen you denature proteins, crystallize compounds, react enzymes with substrates, and nurture desired microbial life while suppressing harmful microbes. And unlike in a laboratory, you can eat your experiments to verify your hypotheses.

Robert Pavlis, a gardener for over four decades, debunks common soil myths, explores the rhizosphere, and provides a personalized soil fertility improvement program in this three-part popular science guidebook. Soil Science for Gardeners is an accessible, science-based guide to understanding soil fertility and, in particular, the rhizosphere - the thin layer of liquid and soil surrounding plant roots, so vital to plant health.

Beware! The sordid lives of plants behaving badly. A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. Amy Stewart, best-selling author of Flower Confidential, takes on over two hundred of Mother Nature's most appalling creations in an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend.