Amidst Mad Cow scares and consumer concerns about how farm animals are bred, fed, and raised, many farmers and homesteaders are rediscovering the traditional practice of pastoral farming. Grasses, clovers, and forbs are the natural diet of cattle, horses, and sheep, and are vital supplements for hogs, chickens, and turkeys. Consumers increasingly seek the health benefits of meat from animals raised in green paddocks instead of in muddy feedlots.
In All Flesh Is Grass: The Pleasures and Promises of Pasture Farming, Gene Logsdon explains that well-managed pastures are nutritious and palatable—virtual salads for livestock. Leafy pastures also hold the soil, foster biodiversity, and create lovely landscapes. Grass farming might be the solution for a stressed agricultural system based on an industrial model and propped up by federal subsidies.
In his clear and conversational style, Logsdon explains historically effective practices and new techniques. His warm, informative profiles of successful grass farmers offer inspiration and ideas. His narrative is enriched by his own experience as a “contrary farmer” on his artisan-scale farm near Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
All Flesh Is Grass will have broad appeal to the sustainable commercial farmer, the home-food producer, and all consumers who care about their food.
Pigs are everywhere in United States history. They cleared frontiers and built cities (notably Cincinnati, once known as Porkopolis), served as an early form of welfare, and were at the center of two nineteenth-century “pig wars.” American pork fed the hemisphere; lard literally greased the wheels of capitalism.
J. L. Anderson has written an ambitious history of pigs and pig products from the Columbian exchange to the present, emphasizing critical stories of production, consumption, and waste in American history. He examines different cultural assumptions about pigs to provide a window into the nation’s regional, racial, and class fault lines, and maps where pigs are (and are not) to reveal a deep history of the American landscape. A contribution to American history, food studies, agricultural history, and animal studies, Capitalist Pigs is an accessible, deeply researched, and often surprising portrait of one of the planet’s most consequential interspecies relationships.
A captivating story of the industry's rise in Alabama.
With a wonderful ear for dialogue and in flowing narrative style, Karni Perez weaves together oral histories collected from early hatchery owners, catfish farmers, processors, and researchers to recount the important contributions made by Alabamians to the channel catfish industry. Perez describes the struggles and glories of fish culture from its early days as an experimental venture to the thriving present-day commercial enterprise that supplies warmwater fish for the American food industry.
The connection between people and companion animals has received considerable attention from scholars. In her original and provocative ethnography Livestock/Deadstock, sociologist Rhoda Wilkie asks, how do the men and women who work on farms, in livestock auction markets, and slaughterhouses, interact with—or disengage from—the animals they encounter in their jobs?
Wilkie provides a nuanced appreciation of how those men and women who breed, rear, show, fatten, market, medically treat, and slaughter livestock, make sense of their interactions with the animals that constitute the focus of their work lives. Using a sociologically informed perspective, Wilkie explores their attitudes and behaviors to explain how agricultural workers think, feel, and relate to food animals.
Livestock/Deadstock looks at both people and animals in the division of labor and shows how commercial and hobby productive contexts provide male and female handlers with varying opportunities to bond with and/or distance themselves from livestock. Exploring the experiences of stockpeople, hobby farmers, auction workers, vets and slaughterers, she offers timely insight into the multifaceted, gendered, and contradictory nature of human roles in food animal production.
Cultivated farming advice.
Cato (M. Porcius Cato) the elder (234–149 BC) of Tusculum, statesman and soldier, was the first important writer in Latin prose. His speeches, works on jurisprudence and the art of war, his precepts to his son on various subjects, and his great historical work on Rome and Italy are lost. But we have his De Agricultura; terse, severely wise, grimly humorous, it gives rules in various aspects of a farmer’s economy, including even medical and cooking recipes, and reveals interesting details of domestic life.
Varro (M. Terentius) of Reate (116–27 BC), renowned for his vast learning, was an antiquarian, historian, philologist, student of science, agriculturist, and poet. He was a republican who was reconciled to Julius Caesar and was marked out by him to supervise an intended national library. Of Varro’s more than seventy works involving hundreds of volumes we have only one on agriculture and country affairs (Rerum Rusticarum) and part of his work on the Latin language (De Lingua Latina; LCL 333, 334), though we know much about his Satires. Each of the three books on country affairs begins with an effective mise en scene and uses dialogue. The first book deals with agriculture and farm management, the second with sheep and oxen, the third with poultry and the keeping of other animals large and small, including bees and fish ponds. There are lively interludes and a graphic background of political events.
A Roman farmer on farming.
Columella (Lucius Iunius Moderatus) of Gades (Cadiz) lived in the reigns of the first emperors to about AD 70. He moved early in life to Italy where he owned farms and lived near Rome. It is probable that he did military service in Syria and Cilicia and that he died at Tarentum.
Columella’s On Agriculture (De re rustica) is the most comprehensive, systematic, and detailed of Roman agricultural works. Book 1 covers choice of farming site; water supply; buildings; staff. 2: Plowing; fertilizing; care of crops. 3–5: Cultivation, grafting, and pruning of fruit trees, vines, and olives. 6: Acquisition, breeding, and rearing of oxen, horses, and mules; veterinary medicine. 7: Sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs. 8: Poultry; fish ponds. 9: Bee-keeping. 10 (in hexameter poetry): Gardening. 11: Duties of the overseer of a farm; calendar for farm work; more on gardening. 12: Duties of the overseer’s wife; manufacture of wines; pickling; preserving. There is also a separate treatise, Trees (De arboribus), on vines and olives and various trees, perhaps part of an otherwise lost work written before On Agriculture.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Columella is in three volumes.
A Roman farmer on farming.
Columella (Lucius Iunius Moderatus) of Gades (Cadiz) lived in the reigns of the first emperors to about AD 70. He moved early in life to Italy where he owned farms and lived near Rome. It is probable that he did military service in Syria and Cilicia and that he died at Tarentum.
Columella’s On Agriculture (De re rustica) is the most comprehensive, systematic, and detailed of Roman agricultural works. Book 1 covers choice of farming site; water supply; buildings; staff. 2: Plowing; fertilizing; care of crops. 3–5: Cultivation, grafting, and pruning of fruit trees, vines, and olives. 6: Acquisition, breeding, and rearing of oxen, horses, and mules; veterinary medicine. 7: Sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs. 8: Poultry; fish ponds. 9: Bee-keeping. 10 (in hexameter poetry): Gardening. 11: Duties of the overseer of a farm; calendar for farm work; more on gardening. 12: Duties of the overseer’s wife; manufacture of wines; pickling; preserving. There is also a separate treatise, Trees (De arboribus), on vines and olives and various trees, perhaps part of an otherwise lost work written before On Agriculture.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Columella is in three volumes.
A Roman farmer on farming.
Columella (Lucius Iunius Moderatus) of Gades (Cadiz) lived in the reigns of the first emperors to about AD 70. He moved early in life to Italy where he owned farms and lived near Rome. It is probable that he did military service in Syria and Cilicia and that he died at Tarentum.
Columella’s On Agriculture (De re rustica) is the most comprehensive, systematic, and detailed of Roman agricultural works. Book 1 covers choice of farming site; water supply; buildings; staff. 2: Plowing; fertilizing; care of crops. 3–5: Cultivation, grafting, and pruning of fruit trees, vines, and olives. 6: Acquisition, breeding, and rearing of oxen, horses, and mules; veterinary medicine. 7: Sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs. 8: Poultry; fish ponds. 9: Bee-keeping. 10 (in hexameter poetry): Gardening. 11: Duties of the overseer of a farm; calendar for farm work; more on gardening. 12: Duties of the overseer’s wife; manufacture of wines; pickling; preserving. There is also a separate treatise, Trees (De arboribus), on vines and olives and various trees, perhaps part of an otherwise lost work written before On Agriculture.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Columella is in three volumes.
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