Farming for Our Future

Farming for Our Future PDF Author: PETER H.. ROSENBERG LEHNER (NATHAN A.)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781585762378
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Farming for Our Future examines the policies and legal reforms necessary to accelerate the adoption of practices that can make agriculture in the United States climate-neutral or better. These proven practices will also make our food system more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is substantial--much more so than official figures suggest--and we will not be able to achieve our overall mitigation goals unless agricultural emissions sharply decline. Fortunately, farms and ranches can be a major part of the climate solution, while protecting biodiversity, strengthening rural communities, and improving the lives of the workers who cultivate our crops and rear our animals. The importance of agricultural climate solutions can not be underestimated; it is a critical element both in ensuring our food security and limiting climate change. This book provides essential solutions to address the greatest crises of our time.

Farming for Our Future

Farming for Our Future PDF Author: PETER H.. ROSENBERG LEHNER (NATHAN A.)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781585762378
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
Farming for Our Future examines the policies and legal reforms necessary to accelerate the adoption of practices that can make agriculture in the United States climate-neutral or better. These proven practices will also make our food system more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is substantial--much more so than official figures suggest--and we will not be able to achieve our overall mitigation goals unless agricultural emissions sharply decline. Fortunately, farms and ranches can be a major part of the climate solution, while protecting biodiversity, strengthening rural communities, and improving the lives of the workers who cultivate our crops and rear our animals. The importance of agricultural climate solutions can not be underestimated; it is a critical element both in ensuring our food security and limiting climate change. This book provides essential solutions to address the greatest crises of our time.

Research and the Future of U.S. Agriculture

Research and the Future of U.S. Agriculture PDF Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. Subcommittee on Research, Nutrition, and General Legislation
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description


Economics of Research and Innovation in Agriculture

Economics of Research and Innovation in Agriculture PDF Author: Petra Moser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022677905X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
"The challenges facing agriculture are plenty. Along with the world's growing population and diminishing amounts of water and arable land, the gradual increase in severe weather presents new challenges and imperatives for producing new, more resilient crops to feed a more crowded planet in the twenty-first century. Innovation has historically helped agriculture keep pace with earth's social, population, and ecological changes. In the last 50 years, mechanical, biological, and chemical innovations have more than doubled agricultural output while barely changing input quantities. The ample investment behind these innovations was available because of a high rate of return: a 2007 paper found that the median ROI in agriculture was 45 percent between 1965 and 2005. This landscape has changed. Today many of the world's wealthier countries have scaled back their share of GDP devoted to agricultural R&D amid evidence of diminishing returns. Universities, which have historically been a major source of agricultural innovation, increasingly depend on funding from industry rather than government to fund their research. As Upton Sinclair wrote of the effects industry influences, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In this volume of the NBER Conference Report series, editor Petra Moser offers an empirical, applied-economic framework to the different elements of agricultural R&D, particularly as they relate to the shift from public to private funding. Individual chapters examine the sources of agricultural knowledge and investigate challenges for measuring the returns to the adoption of new agricultural technologies, examine knowledge spillovers from universities to agricultural innovation, and explore interactions between university engagement and scientific productivity. Additional analysis of agricultural venture capital point to it as an emerging and future source of resource in this essential domain"--

Cities Farming for the Future

Cities Farming for the Future PDF Author: International Development Research Centre (Canada)
Publisher: IDRC
ISBN: 1552502163
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description


In Defense of Farmers

In Defense of Farmers PDF Author: Jane Gibson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496206738
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Industrial agriculture is generally characterized as either the salvation of a growing, hungry, global population or as socially and environmentally irresponsible. Despite elements of truth in this polarization, it fails to focus on the particular vulnerabilities and potentials of industrial agriculture. Both representations obscure individual farmers, their families, their communities, and the risks they face from unpredictable local, national, and global conditions: fluctuating and often volatile production costs and crop prices; extreme weather exacerbated by climate change; complicated and changing farm policies; new production technologies and practices; water availability; inflation and debt; and rural community decline. Yet the future of industrial agriculture depends fundamentally on farmers’ decisions. In Defense of Farmers illuminates anew the critical role that farmers play in the future of agriculture and examines the social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities of industrial agriculture, as well as its adaptations and evolution. Contextualizing the conversations about agriculture and rural societies within the disciplines of sociology, geography, economics, and anthropology, this volume addresses specific challenges farmers face in four countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. By concentrating on countries with the most sophisticated production technologies capable of producing the largest quantities of grains, soybeans, and animal proteins in the world, this volume focuses attention on the farmers whose labors, decision-making, and risk-taking throw into relief the implications and limitations of our global industrial food system. The case studies here acknowledge the agency of farmers and offer ways forward in the direction of sustainable agriculture.

Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education in the Field

Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education in the Field PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309045789
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Interest is growing in sustainable agriculture, which involves the use of productive and profitable farming practices that take advantage of natural biological processes to conserve resources, reduce inputs, protect the environment, and enhance public health. Continuing research is helping to demonstrate the ways that many factorsâ€"economics, biology, policy, and traditionâ€"interact in sustainable agriculture systems. This book contains the proceedings of a workshop on the findings of a broad range of research projects funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The areas of study, such as integrated pest management, alternative cropping and tillage systems, and comparisons with more conventional approaches, are essential to developing and adopting profitable and sustainable farming systems.

Sustainable Intensification

Sustainable Intensification PDF Author: Jules N. Pretty
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136529276
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Continued population growth, rapidly changing consumption patterns and the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are driving limited resources of food, energy, water and materials towards critical thresholds worldwide. These pressures are likely to be substantial across Africa, where countries will have to find innovative ways to boost crop and livestock production to avoid becoming more reliant on imports and food aid. Sustainable agricultural intensification - producing more output from the same area of land while reducing the negative environmental impacts - represents a solution for millions of African farmers. This volume presents the lessons learned from 40 sustainable agricultural intensification programmes in 20 countries across Africa, commissioned as part of the UK Government's Foresight project. Through detailed case studies, the authors of each chapter examine how to develop productive and sustainable agricultural systems and how to scale up these systems to reach many more millions of people in the future. Themes covered include crop improvements, agroforestry and soil conservation, conservation agriculture, integrated pest management, horticulture, livestock and fodder crops, aquaculture, and novel policies and partnerships.

Farming for Us All

Farming for Us All PDF Author: Michael Mayerfeld Bell
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046327
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Farming for Us All gives us the opportunity to explore the possibilities for social, environmental, and economic change that practical, dialogic agriculture presents.

Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century

Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309148960
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
In the last 20 years, there has been a remarkable emergence of innovations and technological advances that are generating promising changes and opportunities for sustainable agriculture, yet at the same time the agricultural sector worldwide faces numerous daunting challenges. Not only is the agricultural sector expected to produce adequate food, fiber, and feed, and contribute to biofuels to meet the needs of a rising global population, it is expected to do so under increasingly scarce natural resources and climate change. Growing awareness of the unintended impacts associated with some agricultural production practices has led to heightened societal expectations for improved environmental, community, labor, and animal welfare standards in agriculture. Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century assesses the scientific evidence for the strengths and weaknesses of different production, marketing, and policy approaches for improving and reducing the costs and unintended consequences of agricultural production. It discusses the principles underlying farming systems and practices that could improve the sustainability. It also explores how those lessons learned could be applied to agriculture in different regional and international settings, with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. By focusing on a systems approach to improving the sustainability of U.S. agriculture, this book can have a profound impact on the development and implementation of sustainable farming systems. Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century serves as a valuable resource for policy makers, farmers, experts in food production and agribusiness, and federal regulatory agencies.

The Nature of the Future

The Nature of the Future PDF Author: Emily Pawley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226820025
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
"In the seemingly mundane Northern farm of early America and the people who sought to improve its productivity and efficiency, Emily Pawley finds a world rich with innovative practices and marked by a developing interrelationship between scientific knowledge, industrial methods, and capitalism. Agricultural "improvers" became increasingly scientistic, driving tremendous increases in the range and volume of agricultural output-and transforming American conceptions of expertise, success, and exploitation. Pawley's focus on soil, fertilizer, apples, mulberries, agricultural fairs, and experimental stations shows each nominally dull subject to have been an area of intellectual ferment and sharp contestation: mercantile, epistemological, and otherwise"--