Agricultural Books - Page 3

Sharing the Harvest

Elizabeth Henderson

List Price: $24.95 By: Chelsea Green Publishing Company Amazon Marketplace: 18 new & used starting at $6.74

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

To an increasing number of American families the CSA (community supported agriculture) is the answer to the globalization of our food supply. The premise is simple: create a partnership between local farmers and nearby consumers, who become members or subscribers in support of the farm. In exchange for paying in advance—at the beginning of the growing season, when the farm needs financing—CSA members receive the freshest, healthiest produce throughout the season and keep money, jobs, and farms in their own community.
In this thoroughly revised and expanded edition of a Chelsea Green classic, authors Henderson and Van En provide new insight into making CSA not only a viable economic model, but the right choice for food lovers and farmers alike. Thinking and buying local is quickly moving from a novel idea to a mainstream activity. The groundbreaking first edition helped spark a movement and, with this revised edition, Sharing the Harvest is poised to lead the way toward a revitalized agriculture.

At Home in the Vineyard: Cultivating a Winery, an Industry, and a Life

Susan Sokol Blosser

Amazon Price: $18.94 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of California Press Amazon Marketplace: 53 new & used starting at $5.37

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This moving, evocative memoir, woven with lyrical descriptions of the sights and smells of vineyard life, tells the inspirational story of one woman's journey to success in an industry run mostly by men. At Home in the Vineyard, filled with colorful characters and unexpected experiences, brings a local rural community vividly alive as Oregon wine pioneer and industry icon Susan Sokol Blosser recounts how she fell in love with a vineyard, learned how to run it, and ultimately achieved her vision of producing Pinot Noirs to rival those of Burgundy. An intimate family story, At Home in the Vineyard also gives a candid insider's view of Oregon's flourishing wine industry.
Sokol Blosser begins her narrative in the 1970s, when, as a young, idealistic wife, she helped her husband make his wild idea of planting a vineyard in the Dundee Hills become a reality. By the book's final pages, she has become president of Sokol Blosser Winery, widely respected for gaining national visibility and for producing world-class wines, especially the elusive Pinot Noir. Along the way, Sokol Blosser tells how she learned to do everything from driving a tractor and managing a picking crew to selling Oregon wine in Manhattan. She also shares some special accomplishments: how she instituted values of environmental sustainability and social responsibility at the vineyard, integrated family and business life, and successfully brought the second generation on board.

Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

Steve Striffler

Amazon Price: $16.20 List Price: $18.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Yale University Press Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $11.50

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Anthropologist Steve Striffler begins this book in a poultry processing plant, drawing on his own experiences there as a worker. He also reports on the way chickens are raised today and how they are consumed. What he discovers about America’s favorite meat is not just unpleasant but a powerful indictment of our industrial food system. The process of bringing chicken to our dinner tables is unhealthy for all concerned—from farmer to factory worker to consumer.

The book traces the development of the poultry industry since the Second World War, analyzing the impact of such changes as the destruction of the family farm, the processing of chicken into nuggets and patties, and the changing makeup of the industrial labor force. The author describes the lives of immigrant workers and their reception in the small towns where they live. The conclusion is clear: there has to be a better way. Striffler proposes radical but practical change, a plan that promises more humane treatment of chickens, better food for the consumer, and fair payment for food workers and farmers.

I'll Drink to That: Beaujolais and the French Peasant Who Made It the World's Most Popular Wine

Rudolph Chelminski

Amazon Price: $14.17 List Price: $27.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Gotham Amazon Marketplace: 67 new & used starting at $2.13

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Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Spirits

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The remarkable saga of the wine and people of Beaujolais and Georges Duboeuf, the peasant lad who brought both world recognition.

Every third week of November, wine shops around the world announce “Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé” and in a few short weeks, over seven million bottles are sold and drunk. Although often scorned by the wine world’s snob set, the annual delivery of each year’s new Beaujolais wine brings a welcome ray of sunshine to a morose November from New York to Tokyo. The surprising Cinderella tale behind the success of Beaujolais Nouveau captures not just the story of a wine but also the history of a fascinating region. At the heart of this fairy tale is the peasant wine grower named Georges Duboeuf, whose rise as the undisputed king of Beaujolais reads like a combination of suspenseful biography and luscious armchair travel.

I’ll Drink to That transports us to the unique corner of France where medieval history still echoes and where the smallholder peasants who made Beaujolais wines on their farms battled against the contempt of the entrenched Burgundy and Bordeaux establishment. With two bottles of wine in his bike’s saddlebag, young Duboeuf set out to revolutionize the stodgy wine business, becoming the richest and most famous individual wine dealer in France. But this is more than one man’s success story. As The Perfectionist used Bernard Loiseau to tell the layered history of French haute cuisine, here Chelminski uses Duboeuf’s story to paint the portrait of the often endearing, sometimes maddening but always interesting inhabitants of a little-known corner of France, offering at the same time a witty, panoramic view of the history of French winemaking.

The New Farmers' Market: Farm-Fresh Ideas for Producers, Managers & Communities

Vance Corum, Marcie Rosenzweig, Eric Gibson

Amazon Price: $24.25 List Price: $26.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: New World Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 32 new & used starting at $16.85

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Sell your produce! 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Eric Gibson is an agricultural journalist who wrote, along with Bud Kerr, "Sell what you Sow" in 1994. This book, written in conjunction with authors Vance Corum and Marcie Rozenweig, is an improvement on Gibson's previous book with updated information intended for anyone marketing their own produce. Learn how to succeed at farmers' markets. It covers the latest tips and trends from leading-edge sellers and managers from farmers markets across the country. Learn best products to grow and sell, learn display, merchandising, and selling tips, setting prices, managing and promoting the market, setting up an internet web site, dealing with rules and regulations, building community support for buying locally, and market issues and challenges. This book is a valuable resource for city planners, farmers market managers, as well as growers.

With its practical "how-to" approach, the many marketing ideas in this book will inspire you. Gibson gives you all the details needed to start a successful business selling and growing your own produce.

Editorial Review:

As concerned citizens recognize that the vibrancy of urban centers goes hand-in-hand with the vitality of the surrounding rural areas, a farmers' market renaissance is beginning throughout the country. Helping to increase local market success for both farmers and customers, this book serves as a three-part guide to marketing, being a resource for farmers or market gardeners selling their produce at farmers’ markets; for city planners or market managers in starting and building a market; and for community activists and city planners trying to foster appreciation for farmland while reinvigorating economic and social vitality in urban areas. Appendices cover insurance, customer surveys, farmers’ market profitability, and benefits of farmers’ markets.

Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew

Samuel Fromartz

Amazon Price: $11.20 List Price: $14.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harvest Books Amazon Marketplace: 60 new & used starting at $1.49

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Who would have thought that a natural food supermarket could have been a financial refuge from the dot-com bust? But it had. Sales of organic food had shot up about 20 percent per year since 1990, reaching $11 billion by 2003 . . . Whole Foods managed to sidestep that fray by focusing on, well, people like me. Organic food has become a juggernaut in an otherwise sluggish food industry, growing at 20 percent a year as products like organic ketchup and corn chips vie for shelf space with conventional comestibles. But what is organic food? Is it really better for you? Where did it come from, and why are so many of us buying it? Business writer Samuel Fromartz set out to get the story behind this surprising success after he noticed that his own food choices were changing with the times. In Organic, Inc., Fromartz traces organic food back to its anti-industrial origins more than a century ago. Then he follows it forward again, casting a spotlight on the innovators who created an alternative way of producing food that took root and grew beyond their wildest expectations. In the process he captures how the industry came to risk betraying the very ideals that drove its success in a classically complex case of free-market triumph.

Voices from the Heart of the Land: Rural Stories that Inspire Community

Richard L. Cates

Amazon Price: $16.47 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of Wisconsin Press Amazon Marketplace: 19 new & used starting at $12.35

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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> General

Editorial Review:

From 2001 to 2006, Richard L. Cates Jr. interviewed senior members of more than 30 families living in and around Arena township, a small community in southern Wisconsin. He asked them about growing up in rural America and their connection to a way of life that is vanishing in the twenty-first century. The result, Voices from the Heart of the Land, is a collection of reminiscences, observations, and opinions celebrating the stewardship of the land and the values of the stewards. Of course, as Cates points out, these are nothing less than “our core human values—integrity, commitment, responsibility, citizenship, self-determination, decency, kindness, love, and hope.”

Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community (Civil Society Series)

Thomas A. Lyson

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Tufts Amazon Marketplace: 27 new & used starting at $12.21

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Editorial Review:

While the American agricultural and food systems follow a decades-old path of industrialization and globalization, a counter trend has appeared toward localizing some agricultural and food production. Thomas A. Lyson, a scholar-practitioner in the field of community-based food systems, calls this rebirth of locally based agriculture and food production civic agriculture because these activities are tightly linked to a community's social and economic development. Civic agriculture embraces innovative ways to produce, process, and distribute food, and it represents a sustainable alternative to the socially, economically, and environmentally destructive practices associated with conventional large-scale agriculture. Farmers' markets, community gardens, and community-supported agriculture are all forms of civic agriculture.

Lyson describes how, in the course of a hundred years, a small-scale, diversified system of farming became an industrialized system of production and also how this industrialized system has gone global. He argues that farming in the United States was modernized by employing the same techniques and strategies that transformed the manufacturing sector from a system of craft production to one of mass production. Viewing agriculture as just another industrial sector led to transformations in both the production and the processing of food. As small farmers and food processors were forced to expand, merge with larger operations, or go out of business, they became increasingly disconnected from the surrounding communities. Lyson enumerates the shortcomings of the current agriculture and food systems as they relate to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. He then introduces the concept of community problem solving and offers empirical evidence and concrete examples to show that a re-localization of the food production system is underway.

Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (California Studies in Food and Culture, 11)

Theodore C. Bestor

Amazon Price: $17.13 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of California Press Amazon Marketplace: 55 new & used starting at $8.68

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Reference -> Shopping & Commerce

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Located only blocks from Tokyo's glittering Ginza, Tsukiji--the world's largest marketplace for seafood--is a prominent landmark, well known but little understood by most Tokyoites: a supplier for countless fishmongers and sushi chefs, and a popular and fascinating destination for foreign tourists. Early every morning, the worlds of hi-tech and pre-tech trade noisily converge as tens of thousands of tons of seafood from every ocean of the world quickly change hands in Tsukiji's auctions and in the marketplace's hundreds of tiny stalls. In this absorbing firsthand study, Theodore C. Bestor--who has spent a dozen years doing fieldwork at fish markets and fishing ports in Japan, North America, Korea, and Europe--explains the complex social institutions that organize Tsukiji's auctions and the supply lines leading to and from them and illuminates trends of Japan's economic growth, changes in distribution and consumption, and the increasing globalization of the seafood trade. As he brings to life the sights and sounds of the marketplace, he reveals Tsukiji's rich internal culture, its place in Japanese cuisine, and the mercantile traditions that have shaped the marketplace since the early seventeenth century.

The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land

Amazon Price: $11.53 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Shoemaker & Hoard Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $7.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

The agrarian ethic is essential to our survival 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 28 people found this review helpful.

Editor Norman Wirzba's counsel that we cannot live well if we do not attend to the human and non-human "bonds of relationship" is of deep import in an age of mindless surfeit masquerading as self-realization.

The Essential Agrarian Reader 1 out of 5 stars.
5 of 42 people found this review helpful.

Did not like, thought stories were full of Idealistic nonsense. Unrealistic options for the family farmer.

an essential resource for all earth dwellers 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This collection of writings provides a full spectrum of academic approaches to the subject of living on earth - sustainably. It identifies the consequences of choices, those that are, ultimately, unsustainable, and those that could lead to a liveable future.

The fact that my copy was eagerly borrowed by a graduate student economist will serve as an indication of its value and relevance.

Editorial Review:

Agrarian philosophy, a compelling worldview with advocates around the globe, encourages us to develop practices and policies that promote the sustainable health of the land, community, and culture. In this remarkable anthology are 15 essays from Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Wes Jackson, Gene Logsdon, Brian Donahue, Eric Freyfogle, David Orr, and others. The Essential Agrarian Reader calls us to celebrate the gifts of the earth, through honest work and respect for the land.