Every 5 years the United States Department of Agriculture sends all the farmers a survey called the Agricultural Census. And every five years once all the results are tallied and without fail, an alarm bell goes off. The national average age in farming keeps climbing up and the trend is ever upward. Farmers around the world are getting old. Where have all the young farmers gone? Why youngsters are leaving the family farms and showing no interest in what’s supposed to be the oldest and the ‘noblest’ profession? This is because small-scale agriculture is being deliberately stifled. Pro-corporate policies are making farming non-viable and farmers are left with no other choice but to quit. Farmers are a dying breed and family farming will become history soon.

How women would rule the World under a female new world order

In Maryrose Wood's stunning middle-grade novel, Alice's Farm, a brave young rabbit must work with her natural predators to save her farmland home and secretly help the farm’s earnest but incompetent new owners. When a new family moves into Prune Street Farm, Alice and the other cottontails are cautious. The new owners are from the city; the family and their dog are not at all what the rabbits expect, and soon Alice is making new friends and doing things no rabbit has done before. When she overhears a plan by a developer to run the family off and bulldoze the farm, Alice comes up with a plan, helped by the farmer’s son, and other animals, including a majestic bald eagle. Here is a stunning celebration of life, the bitter and the sweet. Alice is some rabbit—a character readers will love for generations to come.

The farm bill is one of the most important pieces of legislation the American president signs. Negotiated every five to seven years, it has tremendous implications for food production, nutrition assistance, habitat conservation, international trade, and much more. Yet at nearly 1,000 pages, it is difficult to understand for policymakers, let alone citizens. In this primer, Dan Imhoff and Christina Badaracco translate all the “legalese" and political jargon into an accessible, graphics-rich 200 pages. Readers will learn the basic elements of the bill, its origins and history, and perhaps most importantly, the battles that will determine the direction of food policy in the coming years. The authors trace how the legislation has evolved, from its first incarnation during the Great Depression, to today, when America has become the world’s leading agricultural powerhouse. They explain the three main components of the bill—farm subsidies, food stamps or SNAP, and conservation programs—as well as how crucial public policies are changing. With a new farm bill just signed into law, we all need to understand the implications of food policy. What’s the impact of crop insurance? How does SNAP actually work? What would it take to create a healthier, more sustainable food system? These are questions that affect not only farmers, but everyone who eats. If you care about the answers, The Farm Bill is your guide.

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.