The Patrons of Husbandry—or the Grange—is the longest-lived US agricultural society and, since its founding shortly after the Civil War, has had immeasurable influence on social change as enacted by ordinary Americans. The Grange sought to relieve the struggles of small farmers by encouraging collaboration. Pathbreaking for its inclusion of women, the Grange is also well known for its association with Gilded Age laws aimed at curbing the monopoly power of railroads.
In Essentials, Unity takes as its focus Grange founder Oliver Kelley and his home organization in Minnesota. Jenny Bourne draws upon numerous historical records to present a lively picture of a fraternal organization devoted to improving the lot of farmers but whose legacies extend far beyond agriculture. From struggles over minimum wage, birth control, and environmental regulation to the conflicts surrounding the Affordable Care Act, and from lunch-counter sit-ins to Occupy Wall Street, the Grange has shaped the very notion of collective action and how it is deployed even today. As this compact book so effectively illustrates, the history of the Patrons of Husbandry exposes the classic tension between the desires for achieving overall economic success and determining how the spoils are split.
Using economic models and empirical analysis, this volume examines a wide range of agricultural and biofuel policy issues and their effects on American agricultural and related agrarian insurance markets. Beginning with a look at the distribution of funds by insurance programs—created to support farmers but often benefiting crop processors instead—the book then examines the demand for biofuel and the effects of biofuel policies on agricultural price uncertainty. Also discussed are genetically engineered crops, which are assuming an increasingly important role in arbitrating tensions between energy production, environmental protection, and the global food supply. Other contributions discuss the major effects of genetic engineering on worldwide food markets. By addressing some of the most challenging topics at the intersection of agriculture and biotechnology, this volume informs crucial debates.
Agricultural planning, individual or national, depends on an understanding of competition in farm products between one region of the United States and another. The agriculture of different parts of the United States competes constantly with that of other parts—as, for example, the early competition in cotton between the northern frontier and southern growers, later between the southwest frontier and the Old South, and recently between California and the South. There is equally strong competition between potato-growing regions. It is this inter-regional competition in a country with no trade barriers which two outstanding economists analyze in this book.
They present the results of a concrete study of one outstanding example: competition in dairy production between the Northeastern States and the Lake States of the central Midwest for the New England market for fluid milk and cream. Six selected sample areas were analyzed carefully in each region in 1935–36 and predictions were made about future production and marketing of dairy products in each of these areas. Ten years later these areas were surveyed and the production changes compared with the predictions.
The authors’ conclusions about the conditions under which New England will be able to continue to compete with the lake states for the New England market are significant in themselves. Even more important, however, is the development of a method of analysis which can be widely employed to furnish the information which is needed to guide future developments in the agriculture of the United States or in any other country. This study is therefore an important contribution to the theory of interregional and international trade.
Following the largest peasant revolution in history, Russia's urban-based Bolshevik regime was faced with a monumental task: to peacefully “modernize” and eventually “socialize” the peasants in the countryside surrounding Russia's cities. To accomplish this, the Bolshevik leadership created the People's Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem), which would eventually employ 70,000 workers. This commissariat was particularly important, both because of massive famine and because peasants composed the majority of Russia's population; it was also regarded as one of the most moderate state agencies because of its nonviolent approach to rural transformation.
Working from recently opened historical archives, James Heinzen presents a balanced, thorough examination of the political, social, and cultural dilemmas present in the Bolsheviks' strategy for modernizing of the peasantry. He especially focuses on the state employees charged with no less than a complete transformation of an entire class of people. Heinzen ultimately shows how disputes among those involved in this plan-from the government, to Communist leaders, to the peasants themselves-led to the shuttering of the Commissariat of Agriculture and to Stalin's cataclysmic 1929 collectivization of agriculture.
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