Farming Across Borders

Farming across Borders uses agricultural history to connect the regional experiences of the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the North American side of the Pacific Rim, now writ large into a broad history of the North American West. Case studies of commodity production and distribution, trans-border agricultural labor, and environmental change unite to reveal new perspectives on a historiography traditionally limited to a regional approach. Sterling Evans has curated nineteen essays to explore the contours of “big” agricultural history. Crops and commodities discussed include wheat, cattle, citrus, pecans, chiles, tomatoes, sugar beets, hops, henequen, and more. Toiling over such crops, of course, were the people of the North American West, and as such, the contributing authors investigate the role of agricultural labor, from braceros and Hutterites to women working in the sorghum fields and countless other groups in between. As Evans concludes, “society as a whole (no matter in what country) often ignores the role of agriculture in the past and the present.” Farming across Borders takes an important step toward cultivating awareness and understanding of the agricultural, economic, and environmental connections that loom over the North American West regardless of lines on a map. In the words of one essay, “we are tied together . . . in a hundred different ways.”

The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes “American” in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from “the line in the sand” that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between “our” food and “their” food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between “us” and “them.” The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging. Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University..

A joint FAO and World Bank study which shows how the farming systems approach can be used to identify priorities for the reduction of hunger and poverty in the main farming systems of the six major developing regions of the world.

This book is about the generations of people who have made the farms we know today. Engaging, enjoyable and informative, the author uses various family experiences to take the reader through three centuries of change in the countryside, including two farming revolutions. Connections are made with people both in and outside of agriculture. Farming issues, past and present, are illustrated by recounting the lives of country people from farm worker to estate owner.Focussing on the Scottish Borders but reflecting lives across the UK, these tales give historically factual accounts of real life people and their ups and downs in dealing with the forces of nature, the varying states of economic depression that swept through the countryside, and the everyday conflicts that arise in family life.Based on painstaking research and many interviews, as well as the author's own personal experience of a lifetime in farming, Farming Stories from the Scottish Borders tells of the struggle against adversity and the human story behind modern farming ways.It will appeal to anyone who has an interest in the history of the countryside and the people who live and work in it and particularly those with a nostalgia for the 'old days'.

Managing biosecurity is everybody’s business. The book’s multi-site, multi-sectoral research contributes to an holistic, evidence-based strategy for managing plant biosecurity in complex contexts. The intent is to provide a starting point for all stakeholders in the biosecurity endeavor – policy personnel at all levels of governance, planners and regional developers, non-government organizations, community groups and individuals – to plan localized strategies that ‘fit’ national needs and constraints and the way people live their lives. In putting forward a ‘strategy’, we draw on many disciplines and cultural perspectives on a problem that is fundamentally a multidisciplinary and global issue. At the same time, the contributing researchers remain aware that such a strategy is always subject to local contextual factors and influences, indigenous and local knowledge and culture, and is regarded as a tool for planning, always subject to change.

Booklist Editors’ Choice “Best Books of 2019” An intimate portrait of the joys and hardships of rural life, as one man searches for community, equality, and tradition in Appalachia Charles D. Thompson, Jr. was born in southwestern Virginia into an extended family of small farmers. Yet as he came of age he witnessed the demise of every farm in his family. Over the course of his own life of farming, rural education, organizing, and activism, the stories of his home place have been his constant inspiration, helping him identify with the losses of others and to fight against injustices. In Going Over Home, Thompson shares revelations and reflections, from cattle auctions with his grandfather to community gardens in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky, racial disparities of white and Black landownership in the South to recent work with migrant farm workers from Latin America. In this heartfelt first-person narrative, Thompson unpacks our country’s agricultural myths and addresses the history of racism and wealth inequality and how they have come to bear on our nation’s rural places and their people.

This series features the scholarly works supported by the Phnom Penh Plan for Development Management, a region-wide capacity building program of the Asian Development Bank that supports knowledge products and services. It seeks to disseminate research results to a wider audience so that policy makers, implementers, and other stakeholders in the Greater Mekong Subregion can better appreciate and understand the breadth and depth of the region's development challenges.