For 12 consecutive months, author Brian Bender lived a nomadic life on small organic farms across the United States. Leaving behind a teaching career, he hopped from farm to farm through an organization called WOOF: World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Along with his spiritual journey, Bender embarked upon a spiritual quest in meditation centers around the country. The heart of this story lies with the unusual people, animals, and tasks on each farm. Bender entered this year of transformation a high school science teacher and came out educated in the ways of sustainable living and human happiness.

This book is an important contribution to our understanding of food in China through an ethnographic case study of an alternative food movement in Shanghai and the surrounding countryside. Cody examines a group of middle-class urban residents who move to the countryside to establish small-scale and independent organic farms. The book explores the complex relationships movement protagonists have with customers in the city, rural neighbours in the countryside, volunteers on their farms, intellectuals involved in rural reconstruction initiatives as well as the organic items they produce. In doing so, Cody provides valuable insights into the urban/rural dichotomy and questions of morality in China today. This book speaks to several concerns associated with the accelerated modernization China and other Asian nations are experiencing, including food safety and class relations. It will appeal to scholars and practitioners across a range of fields including anthropology, food studies, rural development and China Studies.

This book begins with the questions: What draws people to become organic farmers? and Why do so many leave farming in short order? It argues that social cleavages between organic and conventional farmers make it very difficult for organic farmers to realise their utopian goals. Ideological differences between these two groups make them hostile to each other, even when their daily struggles as farmers might (and may still) unite them in the face of other, powerful interests in the food business.

Consumers are more and more concerned with the health of the food they eat. While great public anxiety about genetically engineered foodstuffs and BSE in cattle has developed in Europe, on the positive side there has been a rapidly rising demand for organic produce. Food retailers, including supermarkets, have responded, and the organic sector has moved from a being marginal production fad to a serious subject of policy concern for politicians and public servants involved in European agricultural policy. In this book, three leading authorities on organic farming have for the first time produced a serious and scientific overview for the lay person of the state of organic farming and policy towards it in Europe. Based on a review of a huge body of scientific research into all aspects of the sector, the authors provide in accessible terms a balanced, up-to-date and policy relevant overview of: · The position of organic farming today - the size of the sector, its markets, where research is conducted, and current policies towards the sector. · Assessment of its possible contributions to the environment, food quality, farmers' incomes, and rural development generally. · Explanation of the key factors that will impinge on the organic farming sector in future and policy towards it as a result of the enlargement of the EU, ongoing negotiations at the World Trade Organisation, and Agenda 2000. · Detailed recommendations for future organic farming policy. Most people recognise that European agricultural policy has to change, involving further fundamental reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. This unique book will be of immense value to all those concerned with the issue, as well as of intense interest to those actually involved in the organic farming sector. Educationalists in agricultural universities and institutes will find the book a useful teaching tool.

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.

An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

Learn how to use natural no-till systems to increase profitability, efficiency, carbon sequestration, and soil health on your small farm. The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution is the comprehensive farmer-developed roadmap showing how no-till lowers barriers to starting a small farm, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, increases efficiency and profitability, and promotes soil health. Farming without tilling has long been a goal of agriculture, yet tilling remains one of the most dominant paradigms; almost everyone does it. But tilling kills beneficial soil life, burns up organic matter, and releases carbon dioxide. If the ground could instead be prepared for planting without tilling, time and energy could be saved, soil organic matter increased, carbon sequestered, and dependence on machinery reduced. This hands-on manual offers: Why roller-crimper no-till methods don't work for most small farms A decision-making framework for the four no-till methods: occultation, solarization, organic mulches grown in place, and applied to beds Ideas for starting a no-till farm or transitioning a working farm A list of tools, supplies, and sources. This is the only manual of its kind, specifically written for natural and small-scale farmers who wish to expand or explore chemical-free, regenerative farming methods.