Agricultural Books

The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants

Samuel Thayer

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Subjects -> Home & Garden -> Gardening & Horticulture -> General
Subjects -> Science -> Biological Sciences -> Plants -> General
Subjects -> Science -> Biological Sciences -> Botany -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

It fills the void! 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This book is unique in that it fills a big void in the other wild edible books out there. This void is filled mainly by the chapters entitled "Harvest and Preparation Methods for Wild Plant Foods" and "Storing Wild Foods". Thayer wrote this book with his experience and not what he has compiled from other books like so many others. It covers only 32 plants but they are very useful plants and it covers them in detail. I agree with other reviewers in that the book may only cover plants that are more common in the eastern U.S. but the author makes recommendations for other books that will cover what his book does not...and I can vouch that his recommendations are worth while. Great pictures, a useful glossary and the verbal content is not only an enjoyable read but overwhelmingly informative. Despite the fact that this book is a softcover, the quality of the pages and binding will seemingly make it a durable guide for field use and the repeated referencing I intend to give it. Regardless of where you live, if you are a serious forager or survival enthusiast your library should not be without this book!

Editorial Review:

A practical guide to all aspects of edible wild plants: finding and identifying them, their seasons of harvest, and their methods of collection and preparation. Each plant is discussed in great detail and accompanied by excellent color photographs. Includes an index, illustrated glossary, bibliography, and harvest calendar. The perfect guide for all experience levels.

The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty

Julia Flynn Siler

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Biography & History -> Company Profiles

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 60 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The Real "Falcon Crest" 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

THis is a great book about the early fine wine industry in California. The TV show "Falcon Crest" pales when compared to the real life story of the Mondavis. This book was a best-seller for a reason. Read it an enjoy.

Family dynamics for all to see 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

An interesting in-depth review of a famous family, from success to downfall. This book navigates the ascendacy of this dynasty to the top of the California wine industry, hindered by the breakdown of personal relations and the final fiasco of the business. Sad, but fascinating.

Editorial Review:

The New York Times bestseller, now in paperback: a scandal-plagued story of the immigrant family that built—and then lost—a global wine empire Set in California’s lush Napa Valley and spanning four generations of a talented and visionary family, The House of Mondavi is a tale of genius, sibling rivalry, and betrayal. From 1906, when Italian immigrant Cesare Mondavi passed through Ellis Island, to the Robert Mondavi Corp.’s twenty-first-century battle over a billion-dollar fortune, award-winning journalist Julia Flynn Siler brings to life both the place and the people in this riveting family drama. A meticulously reported narrative based on more than five hundred hours of interviews, The House of Mondavi is a modern classic.

The End of Food

Paul Roberts

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> Agricultural

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Paul Roberts, the best-selling author of The End of Oil, turns his attention to the modern food economy and finds that the system entrusted to meet our most basic need is failing.
In this carefully researched, vivid narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities behind modern food and shows how our system of making, marketing, and moving what we eat is growing less and less compatible with the billions of consumers that system was built to serve.
At the heart of The End of Food is a grim paradox: the rise of large-scale food production, though it generates more food more cheaply than at any time in history, has reached a point of dangerously diminishing returns. Our high-volume factory systems are creating new risks for food-borne illness, from E. coli to avian flu. Our high-yield crops and livestock generate grain, vegetables, and meat of declining nutritional quality. While nearly one billion people worldwide are overweight or obese, the same number of people—one in every seven of us—can't get enough to eat. In some of the hardest-hit regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, the lack of a single nutrient, vitamin A, has left more than five million children permanently blind.
Meanwhile, the shift to heavily mechanized, chemically intensive farming has so compromised soil and water that it's unclear how long such output can be maintained. And just as we've begun to understand the limits of our abundance, the burgeoning economies of Asia, with their rising middle classes, are adopting Western-style, meat-heavy diets, putting new demands on global food supplies.
Comprehensive in scope and full of fresh insights, The End of Food presents a lucid, stark vision of the future. It is a call for us to make crucial decisions to help us survive the demise of food production as we know it.

Paul Roberts is the author of The End of Oil, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award in 2005. He has written about resource economics and politics for numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Harper's Magazine, and Rolling Stone, and lectures frequently on business and environmental issues.

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, Revised and Expanded Edition (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Marion Nestle

Amazon Price: $11.53 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of California Press Amazon Marketplace: 53 new & used starting at $7.63

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Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Professional Cooking -> Professional

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the U.S., we're bombarded with nutritional advice--the work, we assume, of reliable authorities with our best interests at heart. Far from it, says Marion Nestle, whose Food Politics absorbingly details how the food industry--through lobbying, advertising, and the co-opting of experts--influences our dietary choices to our detriment. Central to her argument is the American "paradox of plenty," the recognition that our food abundance (we've enough calories to meet every citizen's needs twice over) leads profit-fixated food producers to do everything possible to broaden their market portion, thus swaying us to eat more when we should do the opposite. The result is compromised health: epidemic obesity to start, and increased vulnerability to heart and lung disease, cancer, and stroke--reversible if the constantly suppressed "eat less, move more" message that most nutritionists shout could be heard.

Nestle, nutrition chair at New York University and editor of the 1988 Surgeon General Report, has served her time in the dietary trenches and is ideally suited to revealing how government nutritional advice is watered down when a message might threaten industry sales. (Her report on byzantine nutritional food-pyramid rewordings to avoid "eat less" recommendations is both predictable and astonishing.) She has other "war stories," too, that involve marketing to children in school (in the form of soft-drink "pouring rights" agreements, hallway advertising, and fast-food coupon giveaways), and diet-supplement dramas in which manufacturers and the government enter regulation frays, with the industry championing "free choice" even as that position counters consumer protection. Is there hope? "If we want to encourage people to eat better diets," says Nestle, "we need to target societal means to counter food industry lobbying and marketing practices as well as the education of individuals." It's a telling conclusion in an engrossing and masterfully panoramic exposé. --Arthur Boehm

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

Dan Koeppel

Amazon Price: $16.29 List Price: $23.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Hudson Street Press Amazon Marketplace: 79 new & used starting at $3.86

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Subjects -> History
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> Economic History
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> Agricultural

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A gripping biological detective story that uncovers the myth, mystery, and endangered fate of the world’s most humble fruit

To most people, a banana is a banana: a simple yellow fruit. Americans eat more bananas than apples and oranges combined. In others parts of the world, bananas are what keep millions of people alive. But for all its ubiquity, the banana is surprisingly mysterious; nobody knows how bananas evolved or exactly where they originated. Rich cultural lore surrounds the fruit: In ancient translations of the Bible, the “apple” consumed by Eve is actually a banana (it makes sense, doesn’t it?). Entire Central American nations have been said to rise and fall over the banana.

But the biggest mystery about the banana today is whether it will survive. A seedless fruit with a unique reproductive system, every banana is a genetic duplicate of the next, and therefore susceptible to the same blights. Today’s yellow banana, the Cavendish, is increasingly threatened by such a blight—and there’s no cure in sight.

Banana combines a pop-science journey around the globe, a fascinating tale of an iconic American business enterprise, and a look into the alternately tragic and hilarious banana subculture (one does exist)—ultimately taking us to the high-tech labs where new bananas are literally being built in test tubes, in a race to save the world’s most beloved fruit.

Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front

Joel Salatin

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Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

This Guy is a Nut! 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Salatin is a nut, but a very interesting nut. Now, this book is titled "Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal" and so I should expect complaining. But, this book was over the top. He justs rants. In his view, no one but him can figure anything out. He will argue for a position in one chapter but against it in another. For instance, he says chicken should be tested based upon the birds health levels, not how the bird is taken care of. But when government inspectors show up at his farm to test his birds for bird flu, he feels he is being persecuted. He makes some interesting points, but he also gets some basic facts wrong (e.g. he says the VFW database was recently hacked into, but it was the Department of Veterans Affairs - the former is a private organization, the later is public). Also, more than complaining about how what he wants to do is illegal, he just complains. It seems that everyone is dumber than he is. He complains that regulations hurt him, but ignore the fact that there are many businees out there that would do even less without the regulations. His theory that the market will work itself out assumes that everyone cares as much as him. Dispite all this though, the book is an entertaining read.

Editorial Review:

Drawing upon 40 years’ experience as an ecological farmer and marketer, Joel Salatin explains with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat. From child labor regulations to food inspection, bureaucrats provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin’s expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex.

Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry

Gail A. Eisnitz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 101 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

With a New Afterword by the Author

Slaughterhouse is the first book of its kind to explore the impact that unprecedented changes in the meatpacking industry over the last twenty-five years—particularly industry consolidation, increased line speeds, and deregulation—have had on workers, animals, and consumers. It is also the first time ever that workers have spoken publicly about what’s really taking place behind the closed doors of America’s slaughterhouses.

In this new paperback edition, author Gail A. Eisnitz brings the story up to date since the book’s original publication. She describes the ongoing efforts by the Humane Farming Association to improve conditions in the meatpacking industry, media exposés that have prompted reforms resulting in multimillion dollar appropriations by Congress to try to enforce federal inspection laws, and a favorable decision by the Supreme Court to block construction of what was slated to be one of the largest hog factory farms in the country. Nonetheless, Eisnitz makes it clear that abuses continue and much work still needs to be done.

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

Wendell Berry

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Discovering a buried treasure 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 15 people found this review helpful.

I grew up in Clarksville, TN, on the border with Guthrie, KY. Up the road not too far is Port Royal, KY, where one of the greatest living Americans still resides. He has lived there as long as I have been alive, and I am now over 30, but I had never heard of Wendell Berry until I had passed my thirtieth year. Were it not for the incomparable radio program "Unwelcome Guests", I may never have heard of him. It is a testament to the failure of our economy, education system, and culture, and it is why no thinking American doubts we are nearing a tragic and historic collapse; we are sliding fast down a snow-packed slope like a child on a greased sled. Our only short-term destiny is to smack into a tree.

"The Unsettling of America" is nearly as old as I am, and it is as alive and timely as the day it was written. Probably even more so, since its remedies are the salves for our national malady, and they need an even more urgent prescription and application today than they did 30 years ago. Berry not only succinctly and brilliantly describes how we lost our small farmers, he astutely ties that loss to the loss of culture, belonging, responsibility, community, and character we all feel and mourn in our modern lives, even if we don't understand or fully comprehend that empty feeling. It is, after all, called agri-CULTURE because the land is tied intimately with culture, and to convert agriculture into agribusiness is to divorce people from nature, from a responsibility towards nature, and from an understanding of her cycles and patterns, without which, we are incomplete; it is to convert all of us from nurturers into usurpers and exploiters, as Berry explains throughout.

So, this is not just a book about the loss of the small farmer. It is a book about our loss of liberty, independence, personal satisfaction, wealth, pride, mystery, and community. The way Berry weds these losses together throughout the book is a completely compelling. Berry's clean, beautiful, crystal clear prose moves deliberately, with a purposeful trajectory, and it effortlessly maintains a palpable weight of authority that can only be derived from real wisdom. He is a voice at once profoundly conservative and astutely liberal, or, in short, a real prophetic voice.

"The Unsettling of America" is indeed wise, and it was indeed prophetic. The dangerous excesses he foresaw 30 years ago have come to pass in ever accelerating fashion. His remedies absolutely essential for the preservation of America, and for that matter, the world. Everyone should read this book and read Wendell Berry in general. Should we carry on our culture after we smack that tree (we might, after all, break our necks), Wendell Berry will be remembered when Polk, Buchanan, Clinton, and Bush are long, long forgotten, or so we should all hope.

Editorial Review:

The mid-20th-century environmental crisis that led to important protective legislation in the 1970s, is, to poet/farmer Wendell Berry's mind, also a crisis of character, agriculture, and culture. Because Americans are divorced from the land, they mistreat it; because they are divorced from each other, they mistreat those around them. Berry, writing in a prophetic mode, argues that if Americans are to heal the environmental wounds their land has suffered, they will also need to create more meaningful work, sustain happier and healthier lives, and return to what conservatives call "family values." The Unsettling of America is a quarter century old now, but most of its arguments remain current.

Pastured Poultry Profits

Joel Salatin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great start 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Joel does a great job overall. I'd just like to see better illustrations, especially concerning pen construction and processing the birds. I highly recommend newbies take a look at Herrick Kimball's [...]. He does a great job illustrating how to process the birds, with great pictures. Also, the homemade plucker, which he designed, is great. It plucks 3 birds in about 10-15 seconds! Now that's good stuff! But I'd highly recommend Joel's book, in spite of the poor illustrations. Maybe he should have a talk with his publisher and put out a new edition. We just did our first 50 Cornish X Rocks, largely based on his methods and it went off without a hitch...well, I accidentally ran over a couple of birds with the pen as I moved it. So, those were a couple of "hitches", but some of the little buggers just didn't want to march to my well-sung Marine Corps marching songs! Imagine that! So, the little non-hackers went off to join Colonel Sanders in a better place. Maybe he can get them to march:)

Editorial Review:

A couple working six months per year for 50 hours per week on 20 acres can net $25,000-$30,000 per year with an investment equivalent to the price of one new medium-sized tractor. Seldom has agriculture held out such a plum. In a day when main-line farm experts predict the continued demise of the family farm, the pastured poultry opportunity shines like a beacon in the night, guiding the way to a brighter future.

"All of us interested in seeing an American rural revival should thank Joel and Teresa Salatin for going to the effort and expense to share their experiences and recommendations for pastured poultry with you." —Allan Nation, Editor, The Stockman Grass Farmer

The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession

Adam Leith Gollner

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Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Cooking by Ingredient -> Fruits
Subjects -> Home & Garden -> Gardening & Horticulture -> Fruit
Subjects -> Science -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Delicious, lethal, hallucinogenic and medicinal, fruits have led nations to war, fueled dictatorships and lured people into new worlds. An expedition through the fascinating world of fruit, The Fruit Hunters is the engrossing story of some of Earth's most desired foods.

In lustrous prose, Adam Leith Gollner draws readers into a Willy Wonka-like world with mangoes that taste like piña coladas, orange cloudberries, peanut butter fruits and the miracle fruit that turns everything sour to sweet, making lemons taste like lemonade. Peopled with a cast of characters as varied and bizarre as the fruit -- smugglers, inventors, explorers and epicures -- this extraordinary book unveils the mysterious universe of fruit, from the jungles of Borneo to the prized orchards of Florida's fruit hunters to American supermarkets.

Gollner examines the fruits we eat and explains why we eat them (the scientific, economic and aesthetic reasons); traces the life of mass-produced fruits (how they are created, grown and marketed) and explores the underworld of fruits that are inaccessible, ignored and even forbidden in the Western world.

An intrepid journalist and keen observer of nature -- both human and botanical -- Adam Leith Gollner has written a vivid tale of horticultural obsession.