An exciting look at how women entrepreneurs are transforming agriculture through high technology. 21st-century agriculture is now on the cutting edge of technological innovation. Drones, AI, sophisticated soil sensors, data analytics, blockchain, and robotics are transforming agriculture into the growing field of agtech. And women entrepreneurs are the driving spirits making this transformation happen. From Farms to Incubators presents inspiring stories of how women entrepreneurs from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds are leading the agtech revolution. Each agribusiness leader profiled in From Farms to Incubators tells her own story of how she used agtech innovation to solve specific business problems and succeed. These business cases demonstrate the influence of female innovation, the new technologies applied to agribusiness problems, and the career opportunities young women can find in agribusiness. From Farms to Incubators also documents the sweeping changes happening in American food production. Growers in the United States and around the world face rising challenges, including climate change, limited water and land supply, uncertainties in immigration policy, a severe labor shortage, and the problem of feeding a rising population estimated at 9 billion in 2050. The entrepreneurs profiled in From Farms to Incubators are the new leaders in tackling these problems through tech innovation. The women profiled speak frankly on the advantages and drawbacks of technological solutions to agriculture and offers lessons in making technology productive in real work. Offering both exhilarating role models for young women seeking high technology careers and a provocative glimpse into the future of food production, From Farms to Incubators documents how women leaders are profitably disrupting the world's oldest industry.

From the 18th century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, the more modest goals of being able to find work, own a home, and raise a family relatively free of discrimination. Not only their search but also its outcome is covered in Seeking El Dorado. Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations—churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations—that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared. Blacks came in search of the same jobs as other Americans, but the search often proved frustrating. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, African American leadership in the state consistently focused on achieving racial justice. The essays in this book speak of triumph and hardship, success, discrimination, and disappointment. Seeking El Dorado is a major contribution to black history and the history of the American West and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers.

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594--a drop of 93 percent. In his hard-hitting book, historian Pete Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers' fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He exposes the shameful fact that at the very moment civil rights laws promised to end discrimination, hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their hold on the land as they were denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure. More than a matter of neglect of these farmers and their rights, this "passive nullification" consisted of a blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation, blatant acts of discrimination and cronyism, violence, and intimidation. Dispossession recovers a lost chapter of the black experience in the American South, presenting a counternarrative to the conventional story of the progress achieved by the civil rights movement.