Sustainable Agriculture

It is easy to feel overwhelmed and depressed by all the threats facing modern agriculture--threats to the environment, to the health and safety of our food, to the economic and cultural viability of farmers and rural communities. Hundreds of thousands of farmers leave their farms every year as the juggernaut of "big agriculture" plows across our rural landscape. But there are viable alternatives to big agriculture, as many farmers and others involved in agriculture, including consumers, are discovering. In Farming for Us All, Michael Mayerfeld Bell offers crucial insight into the future of a viable sustainable agriculture movement in the United States. Based on interviews and years of close interaction with more than sixty Iowa farm families, Bell answers two critical questions concerning sustainable agriculture: why some farmers are becoming sustainable farmers and why, as yet, most are not. The first part of the book describes how the structure of agriculture--that nexus of markets, regulations, subsides, and technology--has created a situation in which farmers are paid to undermine their own economic and social security as well as the security of the land. The second part explores why most Iowa farmers carry on with these destructive practices. Farming is a pressured endeavor, and farmers find themselves relying on recipes of knowledge to get them through the latest crisis, with little opportunity to explore some other way--even if they think what they know how to do isn't likely to work very well for them. And yet some farmers resist the tide of big agriculture. In the third part of the book, Bell examines Iowa's largest sustainable agriculture group, Practical Farmers of Iowa(PFI), and he finds a new model of social relations at work.

Changing the Way America Farms traces the manner in which alternative farmers have developed and exchanged their own personal, local knowledge as a basis for moving toward an agricultural system that is ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just. Neva Hassanein studies the patterns of local and regional networks in Wisconsin that sprang up to disseminate new and viable agricultural methods. She argues that these networks have in many ways become the foundation of the sustainable agriculture movement. Hassanein focuses on two organizations: the Ocooch Grazers Network, a group of dairy farmers who practice intensive rotational grazing, and the Wisconsin Women's Sustainable Farming Network. The different lived experiences of particular members in each group shaped the ways local knowledge was generated and exchanged. Hassanein considers the broader implications of this kind of local-level, collective activity centered around the creation and exchange of agricultural knowledge. In rejecting the all-knowing expertise characteristic of scientific reports and extension services, network members instead created heterogeneous systems based on the exchange of information among a community of farming practitioners. These informal networks do not completely reject agricultural science, but they do suggest ways of democratizing knowledge production for sustainable agriculture. Neva Hassanein has a doctorate in environmental studies and is currently a program associate for the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides.

Sustainable agriculture - Sustainable agriculture integrates three main goals: environmental stewardship, farm profitability, and prosperous farming communities. These goals have been defined by a variety of disciplines and may be looked at from the vantage point of the farmer or the consumer.

List of sustainable agriculture topics - It integrates three main goals, environmental health, economic profitability, and social and economic equity. These goals have been defined by a variety of philosophies, policies and practices, from the vision of farmers and consumers.

Conservation agriculture - Conservation agriculture (similar to Sustainable agriculture) is a kind of agriculture that aims to coexist with environments unlike other modern agriculture, which is harmful to the earth's environment.

Small-scale agriculture - Small-scale agriculture is an alternative to factory farming or more broadly, intensive agriculture or unsustainable farming methods that are prevalent in primarily first world countries. Environmental Health Perspectives has noted that " Sustainable agriculture is not merely a package of prescribed methods.

sustainableagriculture

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Agriculture Agroecology Science Sustainable - Agriculture Agroecology Science Sustainable Agroecology - Agroecology is the science of applying ecological concepts and principles to the design, development, and management of sustainable agricultural systems. Central Science Laboratory - The Central Science Laboratory(CSL) is an executive agency of the UK government department the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). It specialises in the sciences underpinning agriculture for sustainable crop production, environmental management and conservation and in food safety and quality. Sustainable agriculture - Sustainable agriculture integrates three main goals: environmental ...

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