'Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes situates agriculture as a design practice, using a wide range of international case studies and analytical essays to propose lessons for contemporary landscape architects who are interested in integrating agriculture into their designs. Agricultural processes, technologies, and cycles have long shaped landscape architectural projects, from the ornamented farm of the eighteenth century to contemporary projects that integrate agriculture and ecological restoration. The book describes the history of agriculture within landscape architecture and reveals the diversity of current design practices that use the rhythms and forms of agriculture to create productive farms that are also sites of beauty, community, ecological conservation, remediation, and pleasure. Highly illustrated in full colour, this book provides essential context, resources, and best practice examples of rural and periurban designed sites for professionals and students alike.

This book argues that the performance-based work in the featured case studies contributes to the construction of food democracy where the public takes back decision-making in shaping the food system. It explores how contemporary artists translate scientific research about local and global agricultural issues into life stories that inform and engage their audiences and, in so doing, transform passive food consumers into proactive food citizens. The pairing of performing and farmscapes (complex webs of farmlands and storylines) enables artists to use embodied practices to encourage audiences to imagine a just and sustainable agri-food system and to collaborate on making it a reality. The book arranges the case studies on a trajectory that moves from projects that foreground knowledge acquisition to ones that emphasize social engagement by creating conversations and coalitions between farming and nonfarming communities to a final one that pairs protest art and political activism to achieve legally-binding changes in the agricultural landscape.

This book contains the full readers' theater script as well as commentary on both Farmscape and the Changing Rural Environment by Anna Lappe ... [et al.]

Farms of Cape Cod brings the reader to the farms and farmers cultivating the finest fruit, flowers, produce, oysters, herbs, eggs and honey in this historic region. The farms create beautiful landscapes, provide nutritious food, and connect us to the land. As the desire for local, organically grown food flourishes and the locavore movement grows, it is important to know where our food comes from. Farms of Cape Cod reacquaints us with our cultural heritage and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the wonders of farming. Twenty-eight unique farms are profiled, with harvests ranging from cranberries, lavender, and grapes to livestock, holly, and shellfish. Each farm's address and operating information is provided, as well as information about their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscriptions. This beautifully illustrated book also offers Tips from the Top, the farmers' proven ideas on planting, growing and cooking.

The landmark survey that celebrates all the places where people hang out--and is helping to spawn their revival A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice "Third places," or "great good places," are the many public places where people can gather, put aside the concerns of home and work (their first and second places), and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation. They are the heart of a community's social vitality and the grassroots of a democracy. Author Ray Oldenburg portrays, probes, and promotes th4ese great good places--coffee houses, cafes, bookstores, hair salons, bars, bistros, and many others both past and present--and offers a vision for their revitalization. Eloquent and visionary, this is a compelling argument for these settings of informal public life as essential for the health both of our communities and ourselves. And its message is being heard: Today, entrepreneurs from Seattle to Florida are heeding the call of The Great Good Place--opening coffee houses, bookstores, community centers, bars, and other establishments and proudly acknowledging their indebtedness to this book.

Apples are so ordinary and so ubiquitous that we often take them for granted. Yet it is surprisingly challenging to grow and sell such a common fruit. In fact, producing diverse, tasty apples for the market requires almost as much ingenuity and interdependence as building and maintaining a vibrant democracy. Understanding the geographic, ecological, and economic forces shaping the choices of apple growers, apple pickers, and apple buyers illuminates what’s at stake in the way we organize our food system. Good Apples is for anyone who wants to go beyond the kitchen and backyard into the orchards, packing sheds, and cold storage rooms; into the laboratories and experiment stations; and into the warehouses, stockrooms, and marketing meetings, to better understand how we as citizens and eaters can sustain the farms that provide food for our communities. Susan Futrell has spent years working in sustainable food distribution, including more than a decade with apple growers. She shows us why sustaining family orchards, like family farms, may be essential to the soul of our nation.

Between 1940 and the mid 1980s, farm production expenses in America's Heartland tripled, capital purchases quadrupled, interest payments jumped tenfold, profits fell 10 percent, the number of farmers decreased by two-thirds, and nearly every farming community lost population, businesses, and economic stability. Growth for these desperate communities has come to mean low-paying part-time jobs, expensive tax concessions, waste dumps, and industrial hog farming, all of which come with environmental and psychological price tags. In Broken Heartland, Osha Gray Davidson chronicles the decline of the Heartland and its transformation into a bitterly divided and isolated regional ghetto. Through interviews with more than two hundred farmers, social workers, government officials, and scholars, he puts a human face on the farm crisis of the 1980s. In this expanded edition, Davidson emphasizes the tenacious power of far-right-wing groups; his chapter on these burgeoning rural organizations in the original edition of Broken Heartland was the first in-depth look - six years before the Oklahoma City bombing - at the politics of hate they nurture. He also spotlights NAFTA, hog lots, sustainable agriculture, and the other battles and changes over the past six years in rural America.