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Books > Professional & Technical > Agriculture & farming
Economists have described the upcountry Georgia poultry industry as
the quintessential agribusiness. Following a trajectory from
Reconstruction through the Great Depression to the present day,
Monica R. Gisolfi shows how the poultry farming model of
semivertical integration perfected a number of practices that had
first underpinned the cotton-growing crop-lien system, ultimately
transforming the poultry industry in ways that drove tens of
thousands of farmers off the land and rendered those who remained
dependent on large agribusiness firms. Gisolfi argues that the
inequalities inherent in the structure of modern poultry farming
have led to steep human and environmental costs. Agribusiness
firms-many of them descended from the cotton-era South's furnishing
merchants-brought farmers into a system of feed-conversion
contracts that placed all production decisions in the hands of the
poultry corporations but at least half of the capital risks on the
farmers. Along the way, the federal government aided and
abetted-sometimes unwittingly-the consolidation of power by poultry
firms through direct and indirect subsidies and favorable policies.
Drawing on USDA files, oral history, congressional records, and
poultry publications, Gisolfi puts a local face on one of the
twentieth century's silent agribusiness revolutions.
MRI Atlas of the Infant Rat Brain: Brain Segmentation features an
entirely new coronal, sagittal and horizontal set of tissue cut in
regular 9 m intervals with accompanying photographs of MRI data and
color drawings of selected brain regions in the three planes. The
use of the single brain allows for greater consistency between
sections, while color masking offers advances in manual
segmentation techniques with increased refinement in the definition
of brain areas. Readers will benefit from uniform and consistent
manual tissue segmentation of MRI data in an infant rat brain. This
volume provides readers the first infant rat brain MRI atlas and a
valuable resource in research analyses of the developing brain for
structural and functional MRI analyses.
Selected paper presented at the 1st International Conference on
Urban Agriculture and City Sustainability are contained in this
book. The research reviews ways in which urban agriculture can
contribute to achieve sustainable cities and considers ways of
reducing the impact in terms of use of natural resources, waste
production and climate change. The increasing number of people in
cities requires new strategies to supply the necessary food with
limited provision of land and decreasing resources. This will
become more challenging unless innovative solutions for growing and
distributing food in urban environments are considered. The scale
of modern food production has created and exacerbated many
vulnerabilities and the feeding of cities is now infinitely more
complex. As such the food system cannot be considered secure,
ethical or sustainable. In the last few years there has been a
rapid expansion in initiatives and projects exploring innovative
methods and processes for sustainable food production. The majority
of these projects are focused on providing alternative models that
shift the power back from the global food system to communities and
farmers improving social cohesion, health and wellbeing. It is
therefore not surprising that more people are looking towards urban
farming initiatives as a potential solution. These initiatives have
demonstrated that urban agriculture has the potential to transform
our living environment towards ecologically sustainable and healthy
cities. Urban agriculture can also contribute to energy, natural
resources, land and water savings, ecological diversity and urban
management cost reductions. The impact urban agriculture can have
on the shape and form of our cities has never been fully addressed.
The studies included in this volume look at how cities embed these
new approaches and initiatives, as part of new urban developments
and show that a city regeneration strategy is critical.
Fresh from receiving a doctorate from Cornell University in 1933,
but unable to find work, Charles M. Wiltse joined his parents on
the small farm they had recently purchased in southern Ohio. There,
the Wiltses scratched out a living selling eggs, corn, and other
farm goods at prices that were barely enough to keep the farm
intact.
In wry and often affecting prose, Wiltse recorded a year in the
life of this quintessentially American place during the Great
Depression. He describes the family's daily routine, occasional
light moments, and their ongoing frustrations, small and
large--from a neighbor's hog that continually broke into the
cornfields to the ongoing struggle with their finances. Franklin
Roosevelt's New Deal had little to offer small farmers, and despite
repeated requests, the family could not secure loans from local
banks to help them through the hard economic times. Wiltse spoke
the bitter truth when he told his diary, "We are not a lucky
family." In this he represented millions of others caught in the
maw of a national disaster.
The diary is introduced and edited by Michael J. Birkner, Wiltse's
former colleague at the Papers of Daniel Webster Project at
Dartmouth College, and coeditor, with Wiltse, of the final volume
of Webster's correspondence.
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