Alternative Agriculture A History

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. However, that countryside may have looked both more and less familiar than we imagine. Take todays startling yellow fields of rapeseed, seemingly more suited to the landscape of Van Gogh than Constable. They were, in fact, thoroughly familiar to fieldworkers in seventeenth-century England. At the same time, some features that would have gone unremarked in the past now seem like oddities. In the fifteenth century, rabbit warrens were specially guarded to rear rabbits as a luxury food for rich mens tables; whilst houses had moats not only to defend them but to provide a source of fresh fish. In the 1500s we find Catherine of Aragon introducing the concept of a fresh salad to the court of Henry VIII; and in the 1600s, artichoke gardens became a fashion of the gentry in their hope of producing more male heirs. The common tomato, suspected of being poisonous in 1837, was transformed into a household vegetable by the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to cheaper glass-making methods and the resulting increase in glasshouses. In addition to these images of past lives, Joan Thirsk reveals how the forces which drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture a glut of meat and cereal crops, changing dietary habits, the needs of medicine have striking parallels with earlier periods in our history. She warns us that todays decisions should not be made in a historical vacuum: we can find solutions to our current problems in the experience of people in the past.

Joan Thirsk is unquestionably the leading English agricultural historian of her generation. In a writing career extending over half a century, she has made an individual and influential contribution to rural history and our understanding of the economic history of early modern England. As she enters her ninth decade (and her sixth decade of writing and publication), her capacity to lead her collegues into new areas of research is undiminished. This volume arises from a conference held in September 2002 to celebrate Joan's eightieth birthday. It addresses a number of characteristic Thirsk preoccupations - a concern for people and their lives; with landscape, region and peculiarity; and a fascination with alternative agriculture. The contributors are drawn from amongst Joan's former students and friends.

Once patronized primarily by the counterculture and the health food establishment, the organic food industry today is a multi-billion-dollar business driven by ever-growing consumer demand for safe food and greater public awareness of ecological issues. Assumed by many to be a recent phenomenon, that industry owes much to agricultural innovations that go back to the Dust Bowl era. This book explores the roots and branches of alternative agricultural ideas in twentieth-century America, showing how ecological thought has challenged and changed agricultural theory, practice, and policy from the 1930s to the present. It introduces us to the people and institutions who forged alternatives to industrialized agriculture through a deep concern for the enduring fertility of the soil, a passionate commitment to human health, and a strong advocacy of economic justice for farmers. Randal Beeman and James Pritchard show that agricultural issues were central to the rise of the environmental movement in the United States. As family farms failed during the Depression, a new kind of agriculture was championed based on the holistic approach taught by the emerging science of ecology. Ecology influenced the "permanent agriculture" movement that advocated such radical concepts as long-term land use planning, comprehensive soil conservation, and organic farming. Then in the 1970s, "sustainable agriculture" combined many of these ideas with new concerns about misguided technology and an over-consumptive culture to preach a more sensible approach to farming. In chronicling the overlooked history of alternative agriculture, A Green and Permanent Land records the significant contributions of individuals like Rex Tugwell, Hugh Bennett, Louis Bromfield, Edward Faulkner, Russell and Kate Lord, Scott and Helen Nearing, Robert Rodale, Wes Jackson, and groups like Friends of the Land and the Practical Farmers of Iowa. And by demonstrating how agriculture also remains central to the public interest—especially in the face of climatic crises, genetically altered crops, and questionable uses of pesticides—this book puts these issues in historical perspective and offers readers considerable food for thought.

The treatment of long-term agricultural transformation remains a lively topic for historians. Much debate arose when agricultural development patterns were discovered that did without a dominant, production-oriented cereal crop, even when it was accompanied by livestock farming. Joan Thirsk hoped to conclude this debate by putting forward the hypothesis that such "alternative agriculture" was the farmers' way of responding to the difficulties caused by periods of low agricultural prices. This theory stirred up controversy and arguments both for and against.00The contributions to this volume take this hypothesis seriously and attempt to assess its validity. Examining a large number of "alternative agricultures" over the long term, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, they discuss the issues encountered in tracing the links between the spread of alternative crops, such as fruits and vegetables, flowers, and industrial crops, and the general economic environment, across a vast swathe of territory stretching from Flanders to Spain and from France, through Italy and Switzerland, as far as Russia.

Alternative agriculture and man; History, realisation and arrangement of the report; The extent of alternative agriculture; Overview of the specific ideologies on wich the alternative methods of agriculture are based; Cultivation methods; Animal husbrandry; Diseases, pests and weeds; Kilogram yields; The quality of products cultivated by alternative methods; Damage to the environment as a consequences of alternative and conservational agricultural methods; Evaluation; Conclusiones and recommendatios for reasearch; Cultivation methods.

Only once we understand the long history of human efforts to draw sustenance from the land can we grasp the nature of the crisis that faces humankind today, as hundreds of millions of people are faced with famine or flight from the land. From Neolithic times through the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East, in savannahs, river valleys and the terraces created by the Incas in the Andean mountains, an increasing range of agricultural techniques have developed in response to very different conditions. These developments are recounted in this book, with detailed attention to the ways in which plants, animals, soil, climate, and society have interacted. Mazoyer and Roudart’s A History of World Agriculture is a path-breaking and panoramic work, beginning with the emergence of agriculture after thousands of years in which human societies had depended on hunting and gathering, showing how agricultural techniques developed in the different regions of the world, and how this extraordinary wealth of knowledge, tradition and natural variety is endangered today by global capitialism, as it forces the unequal agrarian heritages of the world to conform to the norms of profit. During the twentieth century, mechanization, motorization and specialization have brought to a halt the pattern of cultural and environmental responses that characterized the global history of agriculture until then. Today a small number of corporations have the capacity to impose the farming methods on the planet that they find most profitable. Mazoyer and Roudart propose an alternative global strategy that can safegaurd the economies of the poor countries, reinvigorate the global economy, and create a livable future for mankind.

More and more farmers are adopting a diverse range of alternative practices designed to reduce dependence on synthetic chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics; cut costs; increase profits; and reduce the adverse environmental consequences of agricultural production. Alternative Agriculture describes the increased use of these new practices and other changes in agriculture since World War II, and examines the role of federal policy in encouraging this evolution, as well as factors that are causing farmers to look for profitable, environmentally safe alternatives. Eleven case studies explore how alternative farming methods have been adoptedâ€"and with what economic resultsâ€"on farms of various sizes from California to Pennsylvania.