Author: Gregory Allen Barton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199642532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Roots of the organic challenge -- The cultural soil of organic farming -- Albert Howard and the world as Shropshire -- The Howards in India -- The search for pre-modern wisdom -- The compost wars -- To the empire and beyond -- The globalization of organic farming -- The 1980s to the present -- Organic farming and the challenge of globalization
Author: Gregory A. Barton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192542591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Organic farming is a major global movement that is changing land-use and consumer habits around the world. This book tells the untold story of how the organic farming movement nearly faltered after an initial flurry of scientific interest and popular support. Drawing on newly-unearthed archives, Barton argues that organic farming first gained popularity in an imperial milieu before shifting to the left of the political spectrum after decolonization and served as a crucial middle stage of environmentalism. Modern organic protocols developed in British India under the guidance of Sir Albert Howard before spreading throughout parts of the British Empire, Europe, and the USA through the advocacy of his many followers and his second wife Louise. Organic farming advocates before and during World War II challenged the industrialization of agriculture and its reliance on chemical fertilizers. They came tantalizingly close to influencing government policy. The decolonization of the British Empire, the success of industrial agriculture, and the purging of holistic ideas from medicine side-lined organic farming advocates who were viewed increasingly as cranks and kooks. Organic farming advocates continued to spread their anti-chemical farming message through a small community that deeply influenced Rachel Carson's ideas in Silent Spring, a book that helped to legitimize anti-chemical concerns. The organic farming movement re-entered the scientific mainstream in the 1980s only with the reluctant backing of government policy. It has continued to grow in popularity ever since and explains why organic farming continues to inspire those who seek to align agriculture and health.
Author: Gregory Allen Barton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191851186
Category : TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This book uncovers the untold history of the organic farming movement and its massive impact on the world of agriculture and society; how it changed our consumer habits and our ethics, pointing back to the inspiration of the agricultural past, and demanding that we think about how our food is grown and the effect our daily habits have on nature.
Author: William Lockeretz
Publisher: CABI
ISBN: 1845932897
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
This book discusses organic farming with regards to the origins and principles, policies and markets, organizations and institutions, and future concepts.
Author: Matthew Reed
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136531866
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
This book investigates the emergence of organic food and farming as a social movement. Using the tools of political sociology it analyzes and explains how both people and ideas have shaped a movement that from its inception aimed to change global agriculture. Starting from the British Empire in the 1930's, where the first trans-national roots of organic farming took hold, through to the internet-mediated social protests against genetically modified crops at the end of the twentieth century, the author traces the rise to prominence of the movement. As well as providing a historical account, the book explains the movement's on-going role in fostering and organising alternatives to the dominant intensive and industrial forms of agriculture, such as promoting local food produce and animal welfare. By considering it as a trans-national movement from its inception, aiming at cultural and social change, the book highlights what is unique about the organic movement and why it has risen only relatively recently to public attention. The author reports original research findings, focusing largely on the English-speaking world. The work is grounded in academic enquiry and theory, but also provides a narrative through which the movement can be understood by the more general interested reader.
Author: Sapna E. Thottathil
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609382773
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Should you buy organic food? Is it just a status symbol, or is it really better for us? Is it really better for the environment? What about organic produce grown thousands of miles from our kitchens, or on massive corporately owned farms? Is “local” or “small-scale” better, even if it’s not organic? A lot of consumers who would like to do the right thing for their health and the environment are asking such questions. Sapna Thottathil calls on us to rethink the politics of organic food by focusing on what it means for the people who grow and sell it—what it means for their health, the health of their environment, and also their economic and political well-being. Taking readers to the state of Kerala in southern India, she shows us a place where the so-called “Green Revolution” program of hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and rising pesticide use had failed to reduce hunger while it caused a cascade of economic, medical, and environmental problems. Farmers burdened with huge debts from buying the new seeds and chemicals were committing suicide in troubling numbers. Farm laborers suffered from pesticide poisoning and rising rates of birth defects. A sharp fall in biodiversity worried environmental activists, and everyone was anxious about declining yields of key export crops like black pepper and coffee. In their debates about how to solve these problems, farmers, environmentalists, and policymakers drew on Kerala’s history of and continuing commitment to grassroots democracy. In 2010, they took the unprecedented step of enacting a policy that requires all Kerala growers to farm organically by 2020. How this policy came to be and its immediate economic, political, and physical effects on the state’s residents offer lessons for everyone interested in agriculture, the environment, and what to eat for dinner. Kerala’s example shows that when done right, this kind of agriculture can be good for everyone in our global food system.
Author: Pamela C. Ronald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199756694
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
By the year 2050, Earth's population will double. If we continue with current farming practices, vast amounts of wilderness will be lost, millions of birds and billions of insects will die, and the public will lose billions of dollars as a consequence of environmental degradation. Clearly, there must be a better way to meet the need for increased food production. Written as part memoir, part instruction, and part contemplation, Tomorrow's Table argues that a judicious blend of two important strands of agriculture--genetic engineering and organic farming--is key to helping feed the world's growing population in an ecologically balanced manner. Pamela Ronald, a geneticist, and her husband, Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer, take the reader inside their lives for roughly a year, allowing us to look over their shoulders so that we can see what geneticists and organic farmers actually do. The reader sees the problems that farmers face, trying to provide larger yields without resorting to expensive or environmentally hazardous chemicals, a problem that will loom larger and larger as the century progresses. They learn how organic farmers and geneticists address these problems. This book is for consumers, farmers, and policy decision makers who want to make food choices and policy that will support ecologically responsible farming practices. It is also for anyone who wants accurate information about organic farming, genetic engineering, and their potential impacts on human health and the environment.
Author: Venus Bivar
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469641194
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
France is often held up as a bastion of gastronomic refinement and as a model of artisanal agriculture and husbandry. But French farming is not at all what it seems. Countering the standard stories of gastronomy, tourism, and leisure associated with the French countryside, Venus Bivar portrays French farmers as hard-nosed businessmen preoccupied with global trade and mass production. With a focus on both the rise of big agriculture and the organic movement, Bivar examines the tumult of postwar rural France, a place fiercely engaged with crucial national and global developments. Delving into the intersecting narratives of economic modernization, the birth of organic farming, the development of a strong agricultural protest movement, and the rise of environmentalism, Bivar reveals a movement as preoccupied with maintaining the purity of the French race as of French food. What emerges is a story of how French farming conquered the world, bringing with it a set of ideas about place and purity with a darker origin story than we might have guessed.
Author: Allen V. Barker
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 100035220X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Chapters on soil fertility and plant nutrition explain the chemistry of the plant, the soil, and the soil solution and outline the importance of plant macronutrients and micronutrients. The book offers practical information on using of green manures, composts and lime to maintain soil fertility; introduces methods of tillage of land; provides organic methods of controlling weeds, insects, and diseases; and suggests how food produce can be stored without refrigeration. The text provides information on how to assess and govern the nutritional status of crops and the fertility and condition of soil and presents guidelines, recommendations, and procedures for determining the best fertility recommendations for individual situations. This edition includes an entirely new chapter on hydroponics that explains organic approaches to hydroponic crop production.
Author: E. Somasundaram
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000533697
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
Principles of Organic Farming is a practical oriented text about organic crop management that provides background information as well as details of ecology-improving practices. This book is meant to give the reader a holistic appreciation of the principles and importance of organic farming and to suggest ecologically sound practices that help to develop and maintain sustainable agriculture. This book is intended as a professional basic textbook for undergraduate level students and will specifically meet the requirement of the students of organic farming being taught in all the agricultural universities across the globe. In addition, the purpose of this work is to spread the basic concepts of organic farming in order to; guide the production systems towards a sustainable agriculture and ecologically safe, obtain harmless products of higher quality, contribute to food security, generating income through the access to markets and improve working conditions of farmers and their neighborhoods. Note: T&F does not sell or distribute the hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This title is co-published with NIPA.
