Genres : Non Fiction

Farmer's daughter Maureen agreed completely with her mother's admonition: Never marry a farmer. Her marriage to a science geek with a good job meant a house on a lake and clean hands-until the farmer hidden inside him started scrabbling to escape. What began as a willingness to put up with his buying a tractor and renting a field becomes an all- encompassing endeavor to learn how to drive, raise, train, and work draft horses, grow and sell their crops, care...

Over the past 50 years, a dangerous set of technologies has crept into beef and dairy farms and ranches. Technologists have succeeded in pushing the pounds of milk that can be extracted from a cow higher and higher and throwing pounds of weight on beef cattle faster. But these advances came with a price. The average age of dairy cow "burnout" has dropped for almost a decade. Infections are rampant. New diseases and health maladies have appeared. Drug use and...

In these times of ecological peril, looming agricultural production problems, and creeping human health disaster it behooves all farmers and eaters to turn attention systems which are time-tested. And “time-tested” means millennia, not mere decades. The several decades since the advent of chemical farming have thrown challenges to ecologies and humans as not experienced in the thousands of years prior. In this multi-authored work readers will connect the dots between the cause of modern disease in toxic farming fields and...

The chemical-based conventional agriculture industry claims that the synthesized concoctions they sell as pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides are safe when used as directed, but does the scientific evidence truly support their assertions? Organic agriculturist and lecturer André Leu delves into a wealth of respected scientific journals to present the peer-reviewed evidence that proves the claims of chemical companies and pesticide regulators are not all they seem. Leu translates technical jargon into layman's terms to break down the five most repeated...

Fertility Farming explores an approach to farming that makes minimal use of plowing, eschews chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and encourages cover cropping and manure application. Newman Turner holds that the foundation of the effectiveness of a fertile soil - and the measure of a fertile soil - is its content of organic matter, ultimately, its humus. Upon a basis of humus, nature builds a complete structure of healthy life - without need for disease control of any kind. In fact,...

What happens when trailblazing urban agro-ecologists Rob and Michelle Avis of Verge Permaculture host superstar “lunatic farmer” Joel Salatin for a three-day, three-workshop weekend…then expand and enhance that recorded wisdom in a three-month online intensive? You get an encyclopedic compendium of small-farming entrepreneurial know-how! And now we’ve gathered up and distilled every mind-bending morsel of Joel’s mob-stocking sagacity from those online events, and captured it all in one encyclopedic extravaganza of integrated agro-education… …to inspire, inform, and incite you to...

This book is the culmination of Acres U.S.A. founder Charles Walters’ lifetime of experience, written in his honest, straight-ahead style, outlining how the small farmer-entrepreneur can find his way to a profitable bottom line. A Farmer's Guide to the Bottom Line provides how-to information on each step from planning to implementation of business practices for the eco-friendly farm and includes examples of people who are making a living, and a profit, by demanding a fair price for their labor. Whether...