Farming for Our Future examines the policies and legal reforms necessary to accelerate the adoption of practices that can make agriculture in the United States climate-neutral or better. These proven practices will also make our food system more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is substantial--much more so than official figures suggest--and we will not be able to achieve our overall mitigation goals unless agricultural emissions sharply decline. Fortunately, farms and ranches can be a major part of the climate solution, while protecting biodiversity, strengthening rural communities, and improving the lives of the workers who cultivate our crops and rear our animals. The importance of agricultural climate solutions can not be underestimated; it is a critical element both in ensuring our food security and limiting climate change. This book provides essential solutions to address the greatest crises of our time.

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.

The machine in the garden; The history since then.

The fact that labor supply consists of men, women, and children in families with their own accustomed and often well-loved ways of living is often overlooked in any discussion of "the farm labor problem." this study uses both agricultural economics and cultural anthropology in analyzing employment problems. The analysis covers (1) histories of the development of the citrus, lettuce, and cotton industries with examples of companies using different harvesting operations, (2) the economics of the technologies, (3) the workers, (4) the participants in their distinctive cultural and institutional settings--Mexican-American, anglo-isolate, negro, Indian, and management, and (5) the participants in their common technological setting. Some of the conclusions were--(1) Arizona agriculture, as a variant of southwestern agriculture, is an instrument of exploitation of unsophisticated, culturally unassimilated peoples, and functions also as an assimilative mechanism working in the direction of upward occupational mobility and by doing depletes itself of its own labor supply, (2) displacement of the higher occupational classes tends to be permanent because its members do not fit the lower occupational classes, and (3) when members of the lower occupational classes are replaced by higher class workers, the members of the lower classes tend to remain in the industry and compete for the new higher-status jobs. Some implications for farm employment and manpower were--(1) an unemployed worker should be retrained in a higher occupational class, (2) if a worker is displaced from the highest occupational status in the industry, he should be retrained for another industry, (3) anglo-isolates cannot be rehabilitated by training programs, and (4) the concept of training for occupational adjustment must be broadened to deal effectively with institutional and cultural factors.

“Charles Massy has written a definitive masterpiece that takes its place along with the writings of Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Masanobu Fukuoka, Humberto Maturana, and Michael Pollan. No work has more brilliantly defined regenerative agriculture and the breadth of its restorative impact upon human health, biodiversity, climate, and ecological intelligence." --Paul Hawken In Call of the Reed Warbler, Charles Massy explores regenerative agriculture and the vital connection between our soil and our health. It is the story of how a grassroots revolution—a true underground insurgency—can save the planet, help reduce and reverse climate change, and build healthy people and healthy communities, pivoting significantly on our relationship with growing and consuming food. Using his personal experience as a touchstone—from an unknowing, chemical-using farmer with dead soils to a radical ecologist farmer carefully regenerating a 2000-hectare property to a state of natural health—Massy tells the real story behind industrial agriculture and the global profit-obsessed corporations driving it. With evocative stories, he shows how other innovative and courageous farmers are finding a new way. At stake is not only a revolution in human health and in our communities, but the very survival of the planet. For farmers, backyard gardeners, food buyers, health workers, policy makers, and public leaders alike, Call of the Reed Warbler offers a tangible path forward and a powerful and moving paean of hope. It’s not too late to regenerate the earth. Call of the Reed Warbler shows the way forward for the future of our food supply, our planet, and our health.