UI 436: Agriculture Ethics

Marvin is a contract hog farmer in Iowa. He owns his land, his barn, his tractor, and his animal crates. He has seen profits drop steadily for the last twenty years and feels trapped. Josh is a dairy farmer on a cooperative in Massachusetts. He doesn't own his cows, his land, his seed, or even all of his equipment. Josh has a healthy income and feels like he's made it. In The Food Sharing Revolution, Michael Carolan tells the stories of traditional producers like Marvin, who are being squeezed by big agribusiness, and entrepreneurs like Josh, who are bucking the corporate food system. The difference is Josh has eschewed the burdens of individual ownership and is tapping into the sharing economy. Josh and many others are sharing tractors, seeds, kitchen space, their homes, and their cultures. They are business owners like Dorothy, who opened her bakery with the help of a no-interest, crowd-sourced loan. They are chefs like Camilla, who introduces diners to her native Colombian cuisine through peer-to-peer meal sharing. Their success is not only good for aspiring producers, but for everyone who wants an alternative to monocrops and processed foods. The key to successful sharing, Carolan shows, is actually sharing. He warns that food, just like taxis or hotels, can be co-opted by moneyed interests. But when collaboration is genuine, the sharing economy can offer both producers and eaters freedom, even sovereignty. The result is a healthier, more sustainable, and more ethical way to eat.

J. Blake Perkins searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks--and discovers how it changed over time. Eschewing generalities, Perkins focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people themselves as they interacted with government in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He uncovers the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different reactions by hill people as time went by. Resistance in the earlier period sprang from upland small farmers' conflicts with capitalist elites who held the local levers of federal power. But as industry and agribusiness displaced family farms after World War II, a conservative cohort of town business elites, local political officials, and Midwestern immigrants arose from the region's new low-wage, union-averse economy. As Perkins argues, this modern anti-government conservatism bore little resemblance to the populist backcountry populism of an earlier age but had much in common with the movement elsewhere.

Swine flu. Bird flu. Massive fish kills. Concentrations of cancer and other diseases. Recalls of contaminated meats, fruits, and vegetables. Recent public health crises raise urgent questions about how our animal-derived food is raised and brought to market. InAnimal Factory, bestselling investigative journalist David Kirby exposes the powerful business and political interests behind large-scale factory farms, and tracks the far-reaching fallout that contaminates our air, land, and water supply--and our food itself. In this thoroughly researched book, Kirby follows three people from small towns across America whose lives are utterly changed by immense neighboring animal farms. These farms confine thousands of pigs, dairy cattle, and poultry in small spaces, often under horrifying conditions, and generate enormous volumes of biological waste as well as other toxins. Weaving science, politics, big business, and everyday life, Kirby accompanies these citizens-turned-activists as they fight to preserve theirhomes and communities. Animal Factory is an important book about our American food system gone terribly wrong--and the people who are fighting to restore sustainable farming practices and safe natural resources.

New cow... Ray makes the move. Jane feels the rush. Ray says the L-word. Jane breaks her lease. Then suddenly, inexplicably, he dumps her. Just. Like. That. ...old cow. Now black is the only color in Jane's closet and Kleenex is clinging to her nose. Why did it happen? How could it have happened? Moo. Jane is going to get an answer. Not from Ray. Not from her best friends, David and Joan. But from an astounding new discovery of her own: The Old-Cow-New-Cow theory. Forced to move into the apartment of a womanizing alpha male named Eddie, Jane is seeing the world of men and women in a brilliant new light. And when she takes her Old-Cow-New-Cow theory public, it will change her career and her whole life. Unless, of course, she's got it all wrong....

It is easy to feel overwhelmed and depressed by all the threats facing modern agriculture-threats to the environment, to the health and safety of our food, to the economic and cultural viability of farmers and rural communities. Hundreds of thousands of farmers leave their farms every year as the juggernaut of "big agriculture" plows across our rural landscape. But there are viable alternatives to big agriculture, as many farmers and others involved in agriculture, including consumers, are discovering. In Farming for Us All Michael Mayerfeld Bell offers crucial insight into the future of a viable sustainable agriculture movement in the United States. Based on interviews and years of close interaction with over 60 Iowa farm families, Bell answers two critical questions concerning sustainable agriculture: why some farmers are becoming sustainable farmers and why, as yet, most are not. The first part of the book describes how the structure of agriculture-that nexus of markets, regulations, subsidies, and technology-has created a situation in which farmers are paid to undermine their own economic and social security, as well as the security of the land. The second part explores why, nevertheless, most Iowa farmers carry on with these destructive practices. Farming is a pressured endeavor, and farmers find themselves relying on recipes of knowledge to get them through the latest crisis, with little opportunity to explore some other way-even if they think what they know how to do isn't likely to work very well for them. You have to go with what you know. And yet some farmers resist the tide of big agriculture. In the third part of the book, Bell examines Iowa's largest sustainable agriculture group, Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), and finds a new model of social relations at work. Members of PFI seek to create an agriculture that engages others-farmers, university researchers, government officials, and consumers alike-in a common conversation about what agriculture might look like, but without insisting that a common conversation requires a common vision. Instead, PFI members come to relish their differences as sources of learning and new ideas. Through dialogue, these PFI members seek to crossbreed knowledge, to create pragmatic knowledge that gets the crops to grow in ways that sustain families, communities, societies, economies, and environments. Herein lies the heart of the cultivation of practical agriculture, an agriculture that roots action in dialogue and dialogue in action, and thereby sustains them both. In an increasingly fractured and untrusting world, this is a cultivation worthy of all our interests. Farming for Us All gives us the opportunity to explore the possibilities for social, environmental, and economic change that practical, dialogic agriculture presents. It therefore represents an important step forward in our search for a viable sustainable agriculture in the United States.

'A plaine and easie waie to remedie a horse': equine medicine in early modern England is Louise Hill Curth's groundbreaking new book on the health and illness of what were historically the most important domesticated, working animals.

From the editors of Urban Farm magazine, Urban Farm Projects expands the boundaries of city and suburban self-sustainability. Over 40 innovative do-it-yourself projects are stylishly presented and compiled in this entertaining and easy-to-follow user's manual. With projects ranging from the simple (candle making and canning) to the more ambitious (raising bees to pollinate your own crops), this crafty book will appeal to the thrifty and eco-conscious alike. Whether working with a pot or a plot, a backyard or a balcony, Urban Farm Projects is the consummate guide to self-sufficiency and a must-have for every urban dweller looking to make the most of his or her limited money, space, time and stuff!

This book examines the changes and trends in farming and farmland in the United States. Innovations in farm organisation, business arrangements, and production practices have allowed farmers to produce more with less. Fewer labour hours and less land are used today than 30 years ago, and practices such as the use of genetically engineered seeds and no-till have dampened increases in machinery, fuel, and pesticide use. Likely aided by the increased use of risk management tools such as contracts and crop insurance, U.S. agricultural productivity has increased by nearly 50 percent since 1982. Future innovations will be necessary to maintain, or boost, current productivity gains in order to meet the growing global demands that will be placed upon U.S. agriculture.

Focusing on organic farming, this book presents peer-reviewed contributions from leading international academics and researchers in the field of organic agriculture, plant ecosystems, sustainable horticulture and related areas of biodiversity science. It includes case studies and reviews on organic agriculture, horticulture and pest management, use of microorganisms, composting, crop rotation, organic milk and meat production, as well as ecological issues. This unique book addresses a wide array of topics from all continents, making it a valuable reference resource for students, researchers and agriculturists who are concerned with biodiversity, agroecology and sustainable development of agricultural resources.