High Plains Farm

High Plains Farm PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780960564682
Category : Family farms
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
After thirty-three years, Paula Chamlee returned home to photograph and write about the farm where she grew up on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle. This document provides a look at her home place and reveals a way of life and value system that are quickly vanishing. It attempts to evoke the flavour of farm life in the twentieth century.

High Plains Farm

High Plains Farm PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780960564682
Category : Family farms
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
After thirty-three years, Paula Chamlee returned home to photograph and write about the farm where she grew up on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle. This document provides a look at her home place and reveals a way of life and value system that are quickly vanishing. It attempts to evoke the flavour of farm life in the twentieth century.

Running Out

Running Out PDF Author: Lucas Bessire
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216436
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.

The Ogallala Road

The Ogallala Road PDF Author: Julene Bair
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143127071
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A memoir of love and reckoning. A story of love, family, and the fight to keep the great plains from running dry. Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas's beautiful Smoky Valley. She means to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation, honoring her own father's wish and commandment, 'Hang on to your land!' But part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family--like other irrigators--pumps over two hundred million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer. The rapidly disappearing aquifer is the sole source of water on the vast western plains, and her family's role in its depletion haunts her. As traditional ways of life collide with industrial realities, Bair must dramatically change course.

One Size Fits None

One Size Fits None PDF Author: Stephanie Anderson
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496211944
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
2019 Midwest Book Award for Nature 2020 High Plains Book Award Finalist 2020 Silver Nautilus Book Award Winner in Green Living and Sustainability “Sustainable” has long been the rallying cry of agricultural progressives; given that much of our nation’s farm and ranch land is already degraded, however, sustainable agriculture often means maintaining a less-than-ideal status quo. Industrial agriculture has also co-opted the term for marketing purposes without implementing better practices. Stephanie Anderson argues that in order to provide nutrient-rich food and fight climate change, we need to move beyond sustainable to regenerative agriculture, a practice that is highly tailored to local environments and renews resources. In One Size Fits None Anderson follows diverse farmers across the United States: a South Dakota bison rancher who provides an alternative to the industrial feedlot; an organic vegetable farmer in Florida who harvests microgreens; a New Mexico super-small farmer who revitalizes communities; and a North Dakota midsize farmer who combines livestock and grain farming to convert expensive farmland back to native prairie. The use of these nontraditional agricultural techniques show how varied operations can give back to the earth rather than degrade it. This book will resonate with anyone concerned about the future of food in America, providing guidance for creating a better, regenerative agricultural future. Download a discussion guide (PDF).

Childhood on the Farm

Childhood on the Farm PDF Author: Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700635181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
As the United States transformed itself from an agricultural to an industrial nation, thousands of young people left farm homes for life in the big city. But even by 1920 the nation’s heartland remained predominantly rural and most children in the region were still raised on farms. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg retells their stories, offering glimpses—both nostalgic and realistic—of a bygone era. As Riney-Kehrberg shows, the experiences of most farm children continued to reflect the traditions of family life and labor, albeit in an age when middle-class urban Americans were beginning to redefine childhood as a time reserved for education and play. She draws upon a wealth of primary sources—not only memoirs and diaries but also census data—to create a vivid portrait of midwestern farm childhood from the early post–Civil War period through the Progressive Era growing pains of industrialization. Those personal accounts resurrect the essential experience of children’s work, play, education, family relations, and coming of age from their own perspectives. Steering a middle path between the myth of wholesome farm life and the reality of work that was often extremely dangerous, Riney-Kehrberg shows both the best and the worst that a rural upbringing had to offer midwestern youth a time before mechanization forever changed the rural scene and radio broke the spell of isolation. Down on the farm, truancy was not uncommon and chores were shared across genders. Yet farm children managed to indulge in inventive play—much of it homemade—to supplement store-bought toys and to get through the long spells between circuses. Filled with insightful personal stories and graced with dozens of highly evocative period photos, Childhood on the Farm is the only general history of midwestern farm children to use narratives written by the children themselves, giving a fresh voice to these forgotten years. Theirs was a way of life that was disappearing even as they lived it, and this book offers new insight into why, even if many rural youngsters became urban and suburban adults, they always maintained some affection for the farm.

Watering the Valley

Watering the Valley PDF Author: James Earl Sherow
Publisher: Development of Western Resources
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Sherow documents the attempts of the inhabitants of the High Plains section of the Arkansas River Valley to bring the river under control, the waves of new problems that followed each new "solution," and the conflict and cooperation the process engendered.

The One Hundred Circle Farm

The One Hundred Circle Farm PDF Author: Emmet Gowin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691235414
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
A powerful photographic survey of the impact of irrigation systems on the landscape of the United States In The One Hundred Circle Farm, renowned photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) presents stunning aerial images of center-pivot irrigation systems in the western and midwestern United States. This type of farming involves a method of watering crops in which equipment rotates around a centrally drilled well, creating enormous, distinct circles of irrigated land, often in the midst of dry terrain. Anyone who has taken a cross-country flight has likely seen countless acres of these iconic symbols of industrial agriculture. Through a faithful yet personal photographic survey, Gowin’s powerful images not only bear witness to the ambitions humans wield in shaping the landscape, but also attest to how such primal elements—circles, pivots, and lines—symbolize water depletion and the fragile environment. The stark photographic compositions, more than one hundred in all, were created over eight years. Fields resemble lost civilizations; crops gape like strange new suns. Hauntingly beautiful, the images highlight Earth’s nourishing geology, visual evidence of our labors. Inscribed onto the earth, these lines are reminders of the technology extracting unimaginable amounts of water that cannot be replaced, and raise questions about what large-scale irrigation must answer for when the water runs out. With an afterword by anthropologist Lucas Bessire discussing the history and impact of pivot irrigation on American farming, The One Hundred Circle Farm stands as a poetic visual record, evidence of the tenuous connections between human enterprise and our planet’s most precious resource.

Ogallala

Ogallala PDF Author: John Opie
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496207262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title The Ogallala aquifer, a vast underground water reserve extending from South Dakota through Texas, is the product of eons of accumulated glacial melts, ancient Rocky Mountain snowmelts, and rainfall, all percolating slowly through gravel beds hundreds of feet thick. Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land is an environmental history and historical geography that tells the story of human defiance and human commitment within the Ogallala region. It describes the Great Plains' natural resources, the history of settlement and dryland farming, and the remarkable irrigation technologies that have industrialized farming in the region. This newly updated third edition discusses three main issues: long-term drought and its implications, the efforts of several key groundwater management districts to regulate the aquifer, and T. Boone Pickens's failed effort to capture water from the aquifer to supply major Texas urban areas. This edition also describes the fierce independence of Texas ranchers and farmers who reject any governmental or bureaucratic intervention in their use of water, and it updates information about the impact of climate change on the aquifer and agriculture. Read Char Miller's article on theconversation.com to learn more about the Ogallala Aquifer.

Land

Land PDF Author: United States. Department of Agriculture
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description


Costs and Returns

Costs and Returns PDF Author: United States. Department of Agriculture. Economic Research Service
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 698

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Book Description