Agriculture In Harmony With Nature

The strategy presented in this paper is intended to provide decision makers in the agriculture and agri-food sector with useful tools and information to help make the sector's environmental performance a factor that enhances its growth prospects rather than limits them. The strategy follows four directions: improving the capacity of decision makers to integrate environmental considerations in daily management on a proactive basis; promotion of stewardship and sustainable use of the environment and agricultural resource base; focusing of research, development, and technology transfer to address environmental challenges and foster sustainability in the sector; and encouragement of marketing and trade that promote environmental quality and sustainability. For each strategic direction, priorities for action are described. Includes glossary and a profile of Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada.

Have you ever wondered how you can maintain your current lifestyle, but not exhaust our planet's resources? In modern times, many of us have environmental knowledge but we lack an understanding of how to apply that knowledge to our everyday lives. Bridging this gap is what has motivated ecological economist Dr Kamaljit Sangha to write this book. Dr Sangha examines how people can make a difference to the environment by proposing little actions at the household scale that can contribute towards saving our planet. This book examines how to:- Minimise the gap between scientific knowledge and public awareness- Reduce the impact of our actions on our natural environment- Maintain our earth's natural resources- Be happier and healthier by recognising our reliance on Mother Nature and re-establishing our connections with nature. Dr Sangha believes there are a few, very easy steps that everyone - whether they reside in the city or the country - can take to save money, their mental and physical health, and ultimately our planet.

A growing body of evidence shows that agricultural landscapes can be managed not only to produce crops but also to support biodiversity and promote ecosystem health. Innovative farmers and scientists, as well as indigenous land managers, are developing diverse types of “ecoagriculture” landscapes to generate cobenefits for production, biodiversity, and local people. Farming with Nature offers a synthesis of the state of knowledge of key topics in ecoagriculture. The book is a unique collaboration among renowned agricultural and ecological scientists, leading field conservationists, and farm and community leaders to synthesize knowledge and experience across sectors. The book examines: the knowledge base for ecoagriculture as well as barriers, gaps, and opportunities for developing improved ecoagriculture systems what we have learned about managing landscapes to achieve multiple objectives at a landscape scale existing incentives for farmers, other land managers, and investors to develop and invest in ecoagriculture systems pathways to develop, implement, manage, and scale up successful ecoagriculture Insights are drawn from around the world, in tropical, Mediterranean, and temperate environments, from farming systems that range from highly commercialized to semi-subsistence. Farming with Nature is an important new work that can serve as a foundation document for planners, farm organizations, researchers, project developers, and policy makers to develop strategies for promoting and sustaining ecoagriculture landscapes. Replete with valuable best practice guidelines, it is a critical resource for both practitioners and researchers in the field.

"This book is broad and leisurely and important. Something like the river itself on which Wendell Berry lives. It is full of wide and flowing thoughts and one thing leads to another in the manner that nature intended―or used to. The language ranges from the grave and beautiful to the sharp and specific, depending on the need to express the vast variety of subjects he presents."—The Nation The title of this book is taken from an account by Thomas F. Hornbein on his travels in the Himalayas. ""It seemed to me,"" Horenbein wrote, ""that here man lived in continuous harmony with the land, as much as briefly a part of it as all its other occupants."" Wendell Berry's second collection of essays, A Continuous Harmony was first published in 1972, and includes the seminal ""Think Little,"" which was printed in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue and reprinted around the globe, and the splendid centerpiece, ""Discipline and Hope,"" an insightful and articulate essay making a case for what he calls ""a new middle."

"Designed to be an invaluable aid to the activists, farmers, policy makers and consumers fighting for a more sustainable food system."--Cover.

This book is about the invisible or subtle nature of food and farming, and also about the nature of existence. Everything that we know (and do not know) about the physical world has a subtle counterpart which has been scarcely considered in modernist farming practice and research. If you think this book isn’t for you, if it appears more important to attend to the pressing physical challenges the world is facing before having the luxury of turning to such subtleties, then think again. For it could be precisely this worldview – the one prioritises the physical-material dimension of reality - that helped get us into this situation in the first place. Perhaps we need a different worldview to get us out? This book makes a foundational contribution to the discipline of Subtle Agroecologies, a nexus of indigenous epistemologies, multidisciplinary advances in wave-based and ethereal studies, and the science of sustainable agriculture. Not a farming system in itself, Subtle Agroecologies superimposes a non-material dimension upon existing, materially-based agroecological farming systems. Bringing together 43 authors from 12 countries and five continents, from the natural and social sciences as well as the arts and humanities, this multi-contributed book introduces the discipline, explaining its relevance and potential contribution to the field of Agroecology. Research into Subtle Agroecologies may be described as the systematic study of the nature of the invisible world as it relates to the practice of agriculture, and to do this through adapting and innovating with research methods, in particular with those of a more embodied nature, with the overall purpose of bringing and maintaining balance and harmony. Such research is an open-minded inquiry, its grounding being the lived experiences of humans working on, and with, the land over several thousand years to the present. By reclaiming and reinterpreting the perennial relationship between humans and nature, the implications would revolutionise agriculture, heralding a new wave of more sustainable farming techniques, changing our whole relationship with nature to one of real collaboration rather than control, and ultimately transforming ourselves.