History of Agriculture
The Arguments of Agriculture presents the major issues, questions, and conflicting opinions of influential policymakers and critics concerning the role and future of modern agriculture. The author urges the reader to weight and consider all positions and supplies a primer in the basic arguments of agriculture. Each chapter begins with a series of hypothetical cases that illustrate the range of theoretical issues discussed in the chapter. The next section analyzes the basic issues, and the section entitled "Review" summarizes and contrasts the opinions of a number of prominent critics. Each chapter concludes with a list of recommended readings.
John Harrison Skinner was a mainstay at Purdue University for more than thirty years. From the student to the professor, from the head to the Dean, he saw the inside workings of Purdue agriculture like no others of his time. He was a student, professor, administrator, and loyal supporter of everything agricultural-related at Purdue University. In ways, he was a very focused, single-minded man who understood from his own background growing up that growers needed help more than ever. He decided that agriculture needed more faculty to find answers to the questions asked by growers, and that the School of Agriculture deserved more faculty, buildings, lands and money. He started with one building and 150 acres when he was dean and soon turned a bare campus into ten buildings and a thousand acres. The livestock on the farms increased four fold, and he showed his knowledge of livestock breeding by winning many times at the International Livestock Exposition. Agriculture was in his mind the number one industry, and that Indiana should do everything in its power to address their needs both in college, on the farm, and in industry. What he left behind was a agricultural program that today still remains largely intact as he built it. But in the end his most impressive and enduring legacy is that what’s good for growers of Indiana is also good for the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
R. Douglas Hurt's brief history of American agriculture, from the prehistoric period through the twentieth century, is written for anyone coming to this subject for the first time. It also provides a ready reference to the economic, social, political, scientific, and technological changes that have most affected farming in America. American Agriculture is a story of considerable achievement and success, but it is also a story of greed, racism, and violence. Hurt offers a provocative look at a history that has been shaped by the best and worst of human nature. Here is the background essential for understanding the complexity of American agricultural history, from the transition to commercial agriculture during the colonial period to the failure of government policy following World War II. Hurt includes the contributions of African Americans, Native Americans, and women. This revised edition closes with an examination of the troubled landscape at the turn of the twenty-first century. This survey will serve as a text for courses in the history of American agriculture and rural studies as well as a supplementary text for economic history and rural sociology courses. It is illustrated with maps, drawings, and over seventy splendid photographs.
What do beer-swilling swine, predator-friendly sheep, and David Letterman have in common? They are all part of agriculture's first evolution in 10,000 years. As population growth levels off, production yields continue to grow and demands on agriculture change, the focus of agriculture is moving from just feeding a growing planet to feeding a planet with environmental concerns. Eco-entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the new business opportunities arising from these changes. Applying solutions from the creative to the mundane, they are greening both their pocketbooks and the vistas around them.In The Ecological Agrarian, J. Bishop Grewell and Clay Landry share stories of the numerous eco-entrepreneurs at work, the challenges they face, and the benefits they hope to reap. Beginning in 8500 B.C., Grewell and Landry provide a brief overview of how agriculture not only shaped history, but made written history and civilization even possible. From there, they explain how we are entering an unprecedented era where the race to feed the planet is no longer the lone driving force behind agriculture. That battle, they argue, has largely been won.A new age of agriculture presents new challenges and opportunities. Grewell and Landry document agriculture's response and then draw conclusions from successes and failures to determine what institutions best foster the entrepreneurs trailblazing agriculture's future.
An Ecological History of Agriculture, 10,000 B.C.-A.D. 10,000 opens with the first known agriculture and ends in a future in which we might have to use fewer resources to feed more people. The book describes past and present agriculture and looks at future possibilities.
Using environment, population, and available energy sources as the principal determinants of agricultural systems, this is the first survey to cover preindustrial agriculture and pastoralism on all inhabited continents and from equatorial forest to tundra. The tropics present a tapestry: slash-and-burn in the forests, multistoried gardens of trees and annuals, combinations of cultivation and nomadic pastoralism, and a variety of "wet" systems on land that is part field and part swamp. The parallels among dry lands and dry summer lands are striking; peoples thousands of miles apart evolve like means to divert, deliver, and conserve water. In humid temperate climes there is more divergence than convergence; East Asians, Europeans, and American Indians find very different ways to exploit similar environments.
An Ecological History of Agriculture, 10,000 B.C.-A.D. 10,000 will be of special interest to agriculturalists, agricultural historians, anthropologists, geographers, and anyone concerned with agriculture and its history.
The Harvest Story depicts the life of rural American threshermen. This collection of first-person narratives chronicles the eyewitness accounts of people who threshed grain with steam engines. The book selects anecdotes from over 50 volumes of material published in The Iron-Men Album Magazine and arranges them in a coherent recitation. The result is a story of hard, honest work, of heartfelt cooperation and of triumph not unmarred by tragedy. Readers hear the recollections of those who pitched the bundles of grain onto the horse-drawn wagons, unloaded these bundles into the threshing machine and saw the stream of clean wheat cascade from the grain auger. Readers encounter the wit and humor that characterized yesteryear's harvests. They learn about the vast industries that supported the agricultural enterprise, and they discover the dangers posed by mechanical equipment. The Harvest Story concludes by examining the birth and development of a movement to rescue the agrarian past from oblivion. This book captures authentic voices from the era of steam-powered threshing and offers readable interpretation and explanation, including detailed appendices.
These essays were prepared for a conference held in Tallinn, Ethiopia, under the auspices of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the International Research and Exchanges Board.
Examines the economic development of the United States from colonial times through the mid-Twentieth Century and uses elementary economic analysis as a tool for illuminating historical events and their economic origins and consequences. It will consider how the economy has grown over time as well as how and why the structure of the American economy has changed over time. Throughout American economic history various public and private policies have at times been successful and at other times failed. Accordingly the prevailing theme of economic history can be expressed as the idea that any particular policy is not destined to succeed or fail but rather that there are always viable choices. Indeed, economic history is a record of those choices and their effects. The aim of this course is not to provide you with conventional and one-dimensional interpretations but rather to offer you alternative economic views of historical events. Ideally this course will help you understand and apply economic analysis to historical events as well as to ascertain probable implications for current and future policies.