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239 books match the query 'Agriculture' and 5 start with r

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R. F. D.

Ohio University Press, 1998

“This book,” the author tells us in his preface, “is intended to be a picture of life on a farm in Southern Ohio in the 1930s.” It is a faithful portrait of farm life as thousands of men and women experienced it from one end of the country to the other and from pioneering times to the present century.

Originally published in 1938 to enthusiastic reviews and commercial success, RFD is the story of one couple’s trials with leaving the comforts of city life for a chance to get back to the land.

From his farm near Chillicothe, Ohio, Charles Allen Smart gives a realistic rendering of what it meant to farm in the 1930s. It is part of the book’s intrinsic honesty that it could not be as good as Walden. Thoreau had worked out a philosophy that suited him and that he was ready to recommend to others. Mr. Smart had no prescription for the general ailments, beyond a belief that creating things is important and that owning, buying, and selling things are unimportant.

What he tells us throughout this unusual book is that for him life on this particular farm, in this particular house, with this particular set-up of friends, neighbors, dogs, sheep, hens, cattle, trees, corn, vegetables, grass, and weather, costs less in human values than life in New York City—or in Chillicothe.

Ohio University Press is especially pleased to reissue this midwestern classic with a new foreword by noted farm writer Gene Logsdon.

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Red Revolution, Green Revolution

Scientific Farming in Socialist China

Sigrid Schmalzer

University of Chicago Press, 2016

In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term “green revolution” to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger around the world—and forestall the spread of more “red,” or socialist, revolutions. Yet in China, where modernization and scientific progress could not be divorced from politics, green and red revolutions proceeded side by side.

In Red Revolution, Green Revolution, Sigrid Schmalzer explores the intersection of politics and agriculture in socialist China through the diverse experiences of scientists, peasants, state agents, and “educated youth.” The environmental costs of chemical-intensive agriculture and the human costs of emphasizing increasing production over equitable distribution of food and labor have been felt as strongly in China as anywhere—and yet, as Schmalzer shows, Mao-era challenges to technocracy laid important groundwork for today’s sustainability and food justice movements. This history of “scientific farming” in China offers us a unique opportunity not only to explore the consequences of modern agricultural technologies but also to engage in a necessary rethinking of fundamental assumptions about science and society.

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Resource Allocation and Productivity in National and International Agricultural Research

Thomas Arndt

University of Minnesota Press, 1977

Resource Allocation and Productivity in National and International Agricultural Research was first published in 1977.Agricultural research in developing countries has grown rapidly in recent years. As the research system has expanded, questions about the productivity of research and the allocation of research resources have become important issues for development planners, science managers, donor agencies, and other individuals and institutions concerned with research operations and opportunities.In this volume, forty contributors - natural and social scientists and research administrators - provide a comprehensive analysis of the implications of agricultural science and technology for agricultural development. They examine recent evidence on the returns to investment in national and international agricultural research systems and explore the relevance of social and economic factors for the organization and management of these systems. In a final section they discuss research strategy and management issues that will affect the future productivity and organization of both the international and the national research systems.The material is based on papers given at a conference held at Airlie House, Virginia, sponsored by the Agricultural Development Council. Funding was provided through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), support of the Council’s Research Training and Network Program, and by additional assistance from the World Bank.

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Rivers of Change

Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America

Bruce D. Smith

University of Alabama Press, 2007

Organized into four sections, the twelve chapters of Rivers of Change are concerned with prehistoric Native American societies in eastern North America and their transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to a reliance on food production. Written at different times over a decade, the chapters vary both in length and topical focus. They are joined together, however, by a number of shared “rivers of change.”

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