This book contains the Office of Technology Assessment commissioned papers analyzing the Northeast, South, Midwest, the Great Plains and the West of the U.S. The papers indicate that the relationship between the structure of agriculture and characteristics of rural communities vary in the U.S. .

This book contains the Office of Technology Assessment commissioned papers analyzing the Northeast, South, Midwest, the Great Plains and the West of the U.S. The papers indicate that the relationship between the structure of agriculture and characteristics of rural communities vary in the U.S. .

A engaging analysis of food production in the United States emphasizing that sustainable agricultural development is important to community health.

A profound shift is occurring among women working in agriculture - they are increasingly seeing themselves as farmers, not only as the wives or daughters of farmers. In this book, farm women in the northeastern United States describe how they got into farming and became successful entrepreneurs despite the barriers they encountered in agricultural institutions, farming communities, and even their own families. The authors' feminist agrifood systems theory (FAST) values women's ways of knowing and working in agriculture and has the potential to shift how farmers, agricultural professionals, and anyone else interested in farming think about gender and sustainability, as well as to change how feminist scholars and theorists think about agriculture.--COVER.

Subsistence Agriculture in the US fills this gap in the existing literature by examining the lived experiences of people taking part in subsistence food production. This book will be of great interest to scholars of sustainable consumption, environmental sociology and social movements.

This book examines the impact of the rise and fall of new commodities, production technologies, and shifting government policies on individuals and farm families in the rural South and the interrelationship between agricultural change and community change.

This book addresses the evolving crisis in agriculture and sketches the 'community economy' that grounds agricultural enterprise more accurately than the industrial model. In its current practice, agriculture is (in the United States but increasingly in the rest of the world) unsustainable and destructive. The most immediately unsustainable feature of industrial agriculture is its dependence on the products of petroleum—as feedstock for fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, and as fuel for the farm machinery and transport of agricultural products into the cities. The problems of agriculture and in general the food systems to which it is attached range from the vulnerability of monocultures to new and stronger pests to the emerging medical problem of obesity. The need for agricultural reform is widely acknowledged; one part of the new work being done suggests that food production in the cities may solve several of its problems at once. This book is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate students in agriculture and environmental studies.