Enables readers to strengthen existing agricultural strategies to sustainably solve contemporary problems like food supply chain gaps and food scarcity Agroecological Approaches for Sustainable Soil Management explains strategies to check the deterioration of soil quality, irrigation water quality, reuse of wastewaters in agriculture after treatment, organic fertigation, and corporate fertigation, to transform current agriculture into sustainable agriculture, and demonstrates cost effective technologies for sustainable development of site-specific ecosystems. Techniques to eradicate malnutrition, such as enhanced biofortification, are also covered. Sample topics covered in Agroecological Approaches for Sustainable Soil Management include: Foremost developments in the restoration and utilization of degraded lands through organic farming, precision agriculture, climate-resilient fodder/forage cultivation, and livestock management Promotion of agro-forestry-based apiculture, silviculture, and sericulture, and corporate fertigation, and reclaiming urban brownfields & industrial areas Development of diverse products, including biofuel, fiber, fodder, timber, and herbal products leading to the generation of social capitals Ecology of intercropping systems, tree-cover dynamics of grazing lands, and cover crops for soil management Agroecological Approaches for Sustainable Soil Management is a comprehensive and authoritative resource on the subject, making it a must-have resource for scientists working in agrobiodiversity, agroecology, bioscience, restoration ecology, soil science, and sustainable science, along with postgraduate students in ecology, environmental sciences, and environmental economics.

Honey Bees: Estimating the Environmental Impact of Chemicals is an updated account of the different strategies for assessing the ecotoxicity of xenobiotics against these social insects, which play a key role in both ecology and agriculture. In addition to the classical acute laboratory test, semi-field cage tests and full field funnel tests, new tests based mainly on behavioral responses are for the first time clearly described. Information on the direct and indirect effects on honey bees of radionuclides, heavy metals, pesticides, semi-volatile organic compounds and genetically modified plants is also presented.

2020 independent Press Award Winner--Green Book Category Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2 is a how-to guide enabling you to "plant the rain" by creating water-harvesting "earthworks" or "rain gardens." Earthworks are simple, inexpensive strategies and landforms that passively harvest multiple sources of free on-site water including rainfall, stormwater runoff, air conditioning condensate, and greywater within "living tanks" of soil and vegetation. The plants then pump the water back out in the form of beauty, food, shelter, wildlife habitat, timber and forage, while controlling erosion, reducing down-stream flooding, dropping utility costs, increasing soil fertility, and improving water and air quality. This revised and expanded full-color second edition builds on the information in Volume 1 by showing you how to turn your yard, school, business, park, and neighborhood into lively, regenerative producers of resources. Conditions at home will improve as you simultaneously enrich the ecosystem and inspire the surrounding community. Learn to select, place, size, construct, and plant your chosen earthworks. All is made easier and more effective by the illustrations of natural patterns of water and sediment flow with which you can collaborate or mimic. Detailed step-by-step instructions with over 550 images show you how to do it, and plentiful stories of success motivate you so you will do it!

This book brings together agricultural ethics scholars from the US, Japan and Taiwan to discuss crucial issues in agricultural ethics and sustainability ethics in comparative context. Agricultural ethics and sustainability ethics are wide-ranging and closely linked to environmental ethics, bioethics, virtue ethics, animal welfare, soil conservation, not to mention rural traditions and lifestyles. Six of the chapters cover historical traditions and values in Europe, the US and East Asia. Four of the chapters cover the role of virtue ethics in the analysis of agrarian and environmental ethics, agricultural biotechnology, food ethics, and alternative agriculture, respectively. Finally, two of the chapters cover field efforts of agricultural ethics involving preserving agricultural heritage and building consensus for sustainable farming, respectively. Although the papers are divided into three groups, their contents are interconnected and mutually informative.

Chapters from The Agrarian History of England and Wales, volumes IV and V part II, now appear for the first time in five paperback volumes, designed primarily for a student readership. Dealing respectively with pieces, wages, profits and rents; estate management and the condition of the farm labourer; agricultural techniques and enclosure; marketing; and rural building, these studies bring together the fruits of co-operative scholarship from authorities on the social and economic history of rural England and Wales in the early modern period. To set each subject in context and to update material where necessary, new introductions have been written by the authors of each volume.

Chapters from The Agrarian History of England and Wales, volumes IV and V part II, now appear for the first time in five paperback volumes, designed primarily for a student readership. Dealing respectively with pieces, wages, profits and rents; estate management and the condition of the farm labourer; agricultural techniques and enclosure; marketing; and rural building, these studies bring together the fruits of co-operative scholarship from authorities on the social and economic history of rural England and Wales in the early modern period. To set each subject in context and to update material where necessary, new introductions have been written by the authors of each volume.

Scientist/gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for organic gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields -- resilience science, climatology, climate change, ecology, anthropology, paleontology, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, health, and medicine. In the last half of The Resilient Gardener, Deppe extends and illustrates these principles with detailed information about growing and using five key crops: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs.

In this book you'll learn how to:

-Garden in an era of unpredictable weather and climate change

-Grow, store, and use more of your own staple crops

-Garden efficiently and comfortably (even if you have a bad back)

-Grow, store, and cook different varieties of potatoes and save your own potato seed

-Grow the right varieties of corn to make your own gourmet-quality fast-cooking polenta, cornbread, parched corn, corn cakes, pancakes and even savory corn gravy

-Make whole-grain, corn-based breads and cakes using the author's original gluten-free recipes involving no other grains, artificial binders, or dairy products

-Grow and use popbeans and other grain legumes

-Grow, store, and use summer, winter, and drying squash

-Keep a home laying flock of ducks or chickens; integrate them with your gardening, and grow most of their feed.

The Resilient Gardener is both a conceptual and a hands-on organic gardening book, and is suitable for vegetable gardeners at all levels of experience. Resilience here is broadly conceived and encompasses a full range of problems, from personal hard times such as injuries, family crises, financial problems, health problems, and special dietary needs (gluten intolerance, food allergies, carbohydrate sensitivity, and a need for weight control) to serious regional and global disasters and climate change. It is a supremely optimistic as well as realistic book about how resilient gardeners and their vegetable gardens can flourish even in challenging times and help their communities to survive and thrive through everything that comes their way -- from tomorrow through the next thousand years. Organic gardening, vegetable gardening, self-sufficiency, subsistence gardening, gluten-free living.

In 1998, the last farm in Des Plaines, Illinois was subdivided. Seven acres along the Niobrara River in north-central Nebraska sold for $5700 per acre, twenty times the price for agricultural use. Waukesha County, Wisconsin, although still largely in agriculture, has been almost entirely zoned for small lot subdivisions. Nationwide, the cumulative effect of thousands of individual land use decisions is an orgiastic devouring of the countryside that consumes at least 1.4 million acres of rural land each year, and fragments a much larger area. The effects on landscape functions include loss of agricultural production, water pollution, increases in local runoff and flooding, loss of habitat and biodiversity, and the loss of natural beauty. In exchange we get malls, retail strips, and an ugly sprawl that degrades people and community. How have we come to this, and more importantly, how might we find a better, sustainable approach to the use of land? Land use decisions are the result of complex interactions among law, economics, landscape characteristics, population growth, social and political forces, ethics, and aesthetics. "Under the Blade: The Conversion of Agricultural Landscapes" examines the loss of farmland and other rural lands from each of these perspectives, and shows how interactions among different factors greatly complicate sustainable land management. Included throughout the seven main chapters of the book are descriptions of some of the tools and strategies that can be used to preserve farmland and guide development. The application of these tools is illustrated by 22 case studies of towns and regions throughout the United States, each with a somewhat different challenge, response, and degree of success (or failure).Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Protestant theologian hanged by the Nazis in 1945, stated that "the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." Our current choices in the use of the land are among the most important factors shaping that future world, and "Under the Blade" demonstrates that the quality of that future is far from certain.

The focus of this book is future global climate change and its implications for agricultural systems which are the main sources of agricultural goods and services provided to society. These systems are either based on crop or livestock production, or on combinations of the two, with characteristics that differ between regions and between levels of management intensity. In turn, they also differ in their sensitivity to projected future changes in climate, and improvements to increase climate-resilience need to be tailored to the specific needs of each system. The book will bring together a series of chapters that provide scientific insights to possible implications of projected climate changes for different important types of crop and livestock systems, and a discussion of options for adaptive and mitigative management.

This textbook, published in 1987, presents a selection of marketing enterprises, drawn from throughout the tropics, which succeeded under the conditions prevailing in developing countries. They include the whole range of marketing systems from indigenous private enterprise, through transnationals as joint ventures, to co-operatives and parastatal organisations. They have also been selected to reflect the handling of the various agricultural products and the successive phases in the marketing operation from assembly by small farmers to the processing and distribution of the final product for consumption. This dynamic and readable approach will be enjoyed by students of marketing and agricultural economics, and by those concerned with improvements to marketing systems. Students of development economics will also find this work an interesting addition to the standard texts.

This important new volume presents a plethora of research on the distribution of heavy metals in soils and rocks of natural habitats, farmlands, and urbanized areas along with the factors influencing their bioavailability. The authors evaluate the content of organic matter, soil acidity, mineral fertilizers, and more. Developed for ecologists and specialists in the field of environmental protection and the conservation of biological diversity, the book presents the problems of reducing the anthropogenic load on the surrounding countryside and focuses on sustainable agricultural development.

This 1974 book was made available as a second edition in 1979. It provides an understanding of the ways in which the various physiological processes are integrated to produce the responses shown by whole plants growing in the variable environment in the field, whilst stressing the quantitative aspects of these relationships. This was the first general text to attempt such a treatment, thereby digesting much material that had been found only in research papers or detailed monographs and complementing the reductionist approach of most standard texts of plant physiology. Most of the subject matter concerns agricultural systems, but many of the concepts and approaches are applicable to more complex natural ecosystems. Emphasis is placed on integrating knowledge from many sources and on trying to assess quantitatively the importance of each component. The result is a comprehensive account making the book a valuable background for all interested in the study of plants in the field.

Evelina van Millingen Pisani was a modern woman in the age of Queen Victoria. She was born in Constantinople in 1831 to an eccentric French mother and an English father, who was a doctor accused of having murdered Lord Byron. Educated in Papal Rome until the age of eighteen, she was whisked back to Constantinople by her father, now working for the sultan. While visiting Venice, this striking beauty of twenty-two met and married the wealthy Count Pisani. Evelina became an exotic star in the firmament of wealthy American and English socialites, artists, and writers, for whom the artistic decadence of Venice was an antidote to the factories, materialism, and homophobic laws they saw at home. In her circle of friends were Isabella Stewart Gardner and an admiring Henry James. When her husband died after twenty-seven years of marriage, the grieving countess unexpectedly found herself saddled with his mortgage debts. Inheriting the vast but rundown Pisani estate in the misty flatlands near Padua, Evelina took full charge. Becoming a hands-on farmer, she restored swampland, built an English garden, and created a model farm for hundreds of tenant farmers. Through it all, she remained a pillar in the admiring Venetian set.

Hill farming is a way of life, and although the hill farmer in the North of England in the 21st century has changed with the times, the traditions remain strong and the dramatic upland landscape is eternal. In Hill Farming in the North of England, photographer John Bentley has had access to the world of the hill farmer in the North of England. Hill farming is round-the-clock work, season to season, still predominantly done on family farm. In this book he shows farmers at work through the seasons of the year, which dictate the hill farming calendar. From providing feed for the livestock – mostly sheep but also cattle - and shearing to haymaking, from lambing in the spring to ‘tupping’ time in the autumn, going to sales, shows and sheepdog trials, with the backdrop of the dramatic landscape in the changing seasons. It is a visual portrait of a remarkable way of life and a part of our farming heritage. Look through these photographs and you will quickly see the unique challenges of hill farming in the stunning but often harsh landscape of the North of England.

Copper Nanostructures: Next-Generation of Agrochemicals for Sustainable Agroecosystems considers the impact of copper-based nanostructures on agri-food sectors. Sections highlight the green synthesis of copper nanoparticles, production mechanisms, eco-safety, and future perspectives, discuss the increasing importance of copper nanomaterials in plant protection applications, describe the use of copper nanostructures in plant science applications, cover antimicrobial applications, explore copper nanostructure applications, and summarize current applications in agroecosystems, such as copper nanoparticles as nanosensors, their negative ecological effects, estimation risks, and more.

As the medicinal plant industry blooms into a billion dollar business, it reaches beyond collection, propagation, harvesting and sale of crude vegetal drugs into product formulation, packaging and dispensing of sophisticated phyto-pharmaceuticals and herbal preparations. The scientific study of these medicines and the systematic uplifting of the industry to preserve the ancient and serve the modern, is now a global challenge. The Medicinal Plant Industry puts together the various facets of this multi-disciplinary industry and its global interest. It discusses the dire need for developing countries to acquire technologies and techniques for programmed cultivation of medicinal plants. It addresses a wide variety of topics including the old philosophies, modern impact of traditional medicines, and methods of assessing the spontaneous flora for industrial utilization. It covers aspects of cultivation and climatic variations, biological assessment and formulation, process technologies, phytochemical research and information sources. The book reviews highly developed traditional medicine in China and India, and covers experiences in Africa and other continents.

Infrastructure, energy or other large-scale public or private projects require acquisition, easement or rental of agriculture, pasture or forest land. Beside the specific country's laws and regulations, investors have to follow various benchmarks applied by funding institutions as international standards. Together, these standards are designed to assure that adverse impacts on people, their rights, livelihoods, culture and environment are avoided or at least minimized, mitigated, offset and/or compensated. For these purposes, these projects are planned in remote rural areas, were there is a lack of land market because of limited transactions. A critical issue in this this process is a fair economic valuation of agriculture, pasture or forest land using non-marked based valuation methods for compensation purposes. This scientific monograph proposes some simple yet solid methods to value agriculture, pasture or forest land which could be applicable by the local or central administration without necessarily requiring on complex methodologies requiring data which are generally not available. More importantly, such methodologies are also difficult to understand by the landowners making the public consultation process non-transparent. The methods applied have been tested with success in several large-scale projects involving acquisition, easement or rental of land parcels in different soil and climatic conditions belonging to thousands of owners. A series of template will help the valuators to integrate all the variables and standardize data presentation. It can serve as a reference to comply with land easement and acquisition strategies and aforementioned international standards, for example, the Performance Requirements of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Performance Standards of the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

The joint challenges of population increase, food security and conservation of agrobiodiversity demand a rethink of plant breeding and agricultural research from a different perspective. While more food is undeniably needed, the key question is rather about how to produce it in a way that sustains biological diversity and mitigates climate change. This book shows how social sciences, and more especially law, can contribute towards reconfiguring current legal frameworks in order to achieving a better balance between the necessary requirements of agricultural innovation and the need for protection of agrobiodiversity. On the assumption that the concept of property can be rethought against the background of the 'right to include', so as to endow others with a common 'right to access' genetic resources, several international instruments and contractual arrangements drawn from the plant-breeding field (including the Convention on Biological Diversity, technology exchange clearing houses and open sources licenses) receive special consideration. In addition, the authors explore the tension between ownership and the free circulation and exchange of germplasm and issues such as genetic resources managed by local and indigenous communities, the ITPGRFA and participatory plant-breeding programmes. As a whole, the book demonstrates the relevance of the 'Commons' for plant breeding and agricultural innovation.

The failures of "free-market" capitalism are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the production and distribution of food. Although modern human societies have attained unprecedented levels of wealth, a significant amount of the world's population continues to suffer from hunger or food insecurity on a daily basis. In Agriculture and Food in Crisis, Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar have assembled an exceptional collection of scholars from around the world to explore this frightening long-term trend in food production. While approaching the issue from many angles, the contributors to this volume share a focus on investigating how agricultural production is shaped by a system that is oriented around the creation of profit above all else, with food as nothing but an afterthought. As the authors make clear, it is technically possible to feed to world's people, but it is not possible to do so as long as capitalism exists. Toward that end, they examine what can be, and is being, done to create a human-centered and ecologically sound system of food production, from sustainable agriculture and organic farming on a large scale to movements for radical land reform and national food sovereignty. This book will serve as an indispensible guide to the years ahead, in which world politics will no doubt come to be increasingly understood as food politics.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Land represents an important resource for the economic life of a majority of people in the world. The way people handle and use land resources impacts their social and economic well-being as well as the sustained quality of land resources. Land use planning is also integral to water resources development and management for agriculture, industry, drinking water, and power generation. This valuable work brings to the forefront the state of practice of land use planning in India, highlighting governmental programs and research with wide-ranging chapters on important topics. Covering various agro-ecosystem, including irrigated, rainfed, coastal, semi-arid, arid (drylands), and hill and mountain (temperate) regions, this volume discusses a variety of issues related to sustainable agriculture and rural development. Chapters address the following questions: *What are the sources, scales, and quality of land resources and land use data for efficient planning * Which are the agroecological systems hot spots that are have been degraded? How can these areas be rejuvenated in terms of quality? * What should be the unit of planning for a holistic approach for the conservation and efficient use of natural resources at different administrative levels and domains? * What are the roles of state land use boards and district planning committees? * How can various programs be integrated and implemented by central and state agencies? * What are the technologies, new policies, and support systems required to address sustainable land use? * What are the legal issues? * What should be the role of communities in planning for poverty alleviation and integrated planning for sustainable agriculture based livelihoods? * What is the role GIS in sustainable agriculture and rural development? With high population growth, endemic poverty, and weak existing institutional capacity for land management, India (and other regions of the world) require strong scientific and strategically important land use policies and methods for sustainable development. This book helps to show the way. This volume is being published in association with the Centre for Agrarian Studies and Disaster Mitigation of the National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (NIRD and PR).