Down By The Feed Mill

More than 240 fascinating photos bring to light the importance of feed mills to American townspeople, economies, and heritage. This wealth of contemporary new photos, together with some vintage images from museum collections, give us a visual record of a changing, and passing, American institution. Covering a time frame of more than 150 years, the book's illuminating text explains what feed mills and grain elevators do, how they work, the role they have played in the American agricultural economy, and the relationship of these businesses to their farmercustomers. By focusing on three mills in depth we learn the changing technological and economicconditions that shaped, and sometimes destroyed, mills. These evocative photos capture mills in the southern half of Michigan's lower peninsula, chosen to be representative of the US mills as a whole in terms of their variety, historic evolution, and characteristics.

Tyler Murphy, a psychic and spiritual healer, journeys through a land ravaged by an asteroid impact. He finds death and hate, but offers hope and healing. He eventually finds Wolf Valley where survivors try to salvage what is left of humanity. Life in Wolf Valley was simple, self sufficient and somewhat normal, but that way of life is about to be threatened. The Knights of New America have begun to build their own community around their newly erected Avalon, but the leaders of K. O. N. A. are not content with staying on the mountaintop. They need more land, more resources and more labor if their dream of a new America is to become a reality. Aftermath II: Wolf Valley is a gripping, but easily read novel that is filled with interesting characters who relate with one another surprisingly throughout the story. Fate and destiny separate loved ones and unite strangers. Doubt, guilt, fear, sorrow, hope, love and happiness abound in Aftermath 2 and leaves the reader to wonder what will happen next.

join the author in reliving sylvania’s over 180 years of history from footpaths to expressways and beyond, in volume five of an eight volume set. with 30 years of research she has included every subject imaginable that helped bring sylvania to where they are today, with excellent schools, over-the-top parks and recreation, rich beautiful homes, commercial and industrial businesses and a quaint historical dowtown that looks like it was planned by norman rockwell himself. this book is a treasure trove of information for the thousands who have ancestors that once lived and helped sylvania grow through these years. Located in northwestern ohio, sylvania is a suburb of toledo, ohio and for many years has been known as “the fastest growing suburb in lucas county.” a once rural farm community, between both the city and township they have grown from a combined 2,220 residents in 1910, to 48,487 in 2010. over a short period of time the land has transformed into beautiful subdivisions of grand houses, so that now their subdivision names are all that remain to remind them of their once dense forests and sprawling farmlands. no longer can sylvania be called the “bedroom community” of toledo, because over the last 50 years they have done a lot more than sleep.

After an asteroid impact, society is thrust into chaos where the strong survive, the weak succumb, and the meek get revenge. This is an epic tale in which characters such as a wilderness survival expert, a psychic, a biker, and a Latino with a machine gun-equipped Mini Cooper cross paths in their search for refuge from the fast becoming apocalyptic world. Survivors salvage what is left of their former lives and attempt to cling onto their humanity. A small band gathers in Wolf Valley, a paradise considered by some. But the Knights of New America have stumbled upon this Eden and threaten to commandeer the little haven. Set in the rural countryside of eastern Pennsylvania, Inevitable Retribution has twists you never see coming.

Few Americans know much about contemporary farming, which has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. In The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, the award-winning geographer and landscape historian John Fraser Hart describes the transformation of farming from the mid-twentieth century, when small family farms were still viable, to the present, when a farm must sell at least $250,000 of farm products each year to provide an acceptable level of living for a family. The increased scale of agriculture has outmoded the Jeffersonian ideal of small, self-sufficient farms. In the past farmers kept a variety of livestock and grew several crops, but modern family farms have become highly specialized in producing a single type of livestock or one or two crops. As farms have become larger and more specialized, their number has declined. Hart contends that modern family farms need to become integrated into tightly orchestrated food-supply chains in order to thrive, and these complex new organizations of large-scale production require managerial skills of the highest order. According to Hart, this trend is not only inevitable, but it is beneficial, because it produces the food American consumers want to buy at prices they can afford. Although Hart provides the statistics and clear analysis such a study requires, his book focuses on interviews with farmers: those who have shifted from mixed crop-and-livestock farming to cash-grain farming in the Midwest agricultural heartland; beef, dairy, chicken, egg, turkey, and hog producers around the periphery of the heartland; and specialty crop producers on the East and West Coasts. These invaluable case studies bring the reader into direct personal contact with the entrepreneurs who are changing American agriculture. Hart believes that modern large-scale farmers have been criticized unfairly, and The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, the result of decades of research, is his attempt to tell their side of the story.