Agriculture - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Organic Coffee

Sat, 01 Jul 2006

Organic Coffee (2006)
Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers

By Maria Elena Martinez-Torres

Despite deepening poverty and environmental degradation throughout rural Latin America, Mayan peasant farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, are finding environmental and economic success by growing organic coffee. Organic Coffee: Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers provides a unique and vivid insight into how this coffee is grown, harvested, processed, and marketed to consumers in Mexico and in the north.

Maria Elena Martinez-Torres explains how Mayan farmers have built upon their ethnic networks to make a crucial change in their approach to agriculture. Taking us inside Chiapas, Mexico's poorest state and scene of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, she examines the anatomy of the ongoing organic coffee boom and the fair-trade movement. The organic coffee boom arose as very poor farmers formed cooperatives, revalued their ethnic identity, and improved their land through organic farming. The result has been significant economic benefits for their families and ecological benefits for the future sustainability of agriculture in the region.

Organic Coffee refutes the myth that organic farming is less productive than chemical-based agriculture and gives us reasons to be hopeful for indigenous peoples and peasant farmers

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Organic+Coffee.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

All Flesh is Grass

Wed, 18 Aug 2004

All Flesh is Grass (2004)
The Pleasures and Promises of Pasture Farming

By Gene Logsdon

Amidst Mad Cow scares and consumer concerns about how farm animals are bred, fed, and raised, many farmers and homesteaders are rediscovering the traditional practice of pastoral farming. Grasses, clovers, and forbs are the natural diet of cattle, horses, and sheep, and are vital supplements for hogs, chickens, and turkeys. Consumers increasingly seek the health benefits of meat from animals raised in green paddocks instead of in muddy feedlots.

In All Flesh Is Grass: The Pleasures and Promises of Pasture Farming, Gene Logsdon explains that well-managed pastures are nutritious and palatable—virtual salads for livestock. Leafy pastures also hold the soil, foster biodiversity, and create lovely landscapes. Grass farming might be the solution for a stressed agricultural system based on an industrial model and propped up by federal subsidies.

In his clear and conversational style, Logsdon explains historically effective practices and new techniques. His warm, informative profiles of successful grass farmers offer inspiration and ideas. His narrative is enriched by his own experience as a “contrary farmer” on his artisan-scale farm near Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

All Flesh Is Grass will have broad appeal to the sustainable commercial farmer, the home-food producer, and all consumers who care about their food.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/All+Flesh+is+Grass.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Islands of Intensive Agriculture in Eastern Africa

Tue, 30 Mar 2004

Islands of Intensive Agriculture in Eastern Africa (2004)

Edited by Mats Widgren and John E.G. Sutton

Islands of intensive agriculture are areas of local cultivation surrounded by low-density livestock herders or extensive cultivators. Along the line of the East Africa Rift Valley, and in the highlands on either side, communities of considerable historical depth have developed highly specialized agricultural regimes, employing such labor-intensive devices as furrow irrigation, hillside terracing, and stall-feeding of cattle.

This collection continues the advance in the understanding of African agricultural practices through the combination of geographical, ethnographic, and archaeological research, concentrating on actual fields, farming strategies, and cultivation techniques.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Islands+of+Intensive+Agriculture+in+Eastern+Africa.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Leaf of Allah

Mon, 29 Mar 2004

Leaf of Allah (2004)
Khat & Agricultural Transformation in Harerge, Ethiopia, 1875–1991

By Ezekiel Gebissa

Khat is a quasi-legal psychoactive shrub, produced and marketed in the province of Harerge, Ethiopia, and widely consumed throughout Northeast Africa. In the late nineteenth century the main cash crop of Harerge was coffee. Leaf of Allah examines why farming families shifted from cultivating coffee and food crops to growing khat.

Demographic, market, and political factors facilitated the emergence of khat as Harerge's leading agricultural commodity. This development increased the scale of unofficial cross-border trade in consumer goods. This study explores the consequences of the new cash crop for the regional economy as a whole, for farmer-state relations, for the nature and balance of local social relations, as well as for Harerge's physical, socioeconomic, and political landscapes.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Leaf+of+Allah.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Sheep Book

Sat, 01 Jan 2000

The Sheep Book (2000)
A Handbook for the Modern Shepherd, Revised and Updated

By Ron Parker

The Sheep Book carries the reader along through a year in a sheep's life during which sheep and shepherd form a symbiosis. A knowledgeable shepherd manages a flock in such a way as to provide an appropriate environment for all phases of the annual journey from breeding through pregnancy, lambing, growing of lambs, marketing of lamb and wools, and revitalization of the sheep for another cycle.

The Sheep Book guides the reader to working with the instincts of the sheep--treating them as animals with special talents and ways of behaving that can be engaged and directed. The reader is encouraged to learn from the sheep, for they are the best teachers of a successful shepherd.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Sheep+Book.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

A Most Promising Weed

Thu, 01 Oct 1998

A Most Promising Weed (1998)
A History of Tobacco Farming and Labor in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1945

By Steven C. Rubert

A Most Promising Weed examines the work experience, living conditions, and social relations of thousands of African men, women, and children on European-owned tobacco farms in colonial Zimbabwe from 1890 to 1945. Steven C. Rubert provides evidence that Africans were not passive in their responses to the penetration of European capitalism into Zimbabwe but, on the contrary, helped to shape both the work and living conditions they encountered as they entered wage employment.

Beginning with a brief history of tobacco growing in Zimbabwe, this study focuses on the organization of workers' compounds and on the paid and unpaid labor performed by both women and children on those farms.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/A+Most+Promising+Weed.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Migrant Farmer in the History of Cape Colony, 1657–1842

Thu, 01 Dec 1994

The Migrant Farmer in the History of Cape Colony, 1657–1842 (1994)

By P. J. van der Merwe

Petrus Johannes Van der Merwe wrote three of the most significant books on the history of South Africa before he was 35 years old. His trilogy, of which The Migrant Farmer is the first volume, has become a classic that no student of Cape colonial history of the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth century can ignore. Van der Merwe was unique among Afrikaner historians in that he focused not on the single event known as the Great Trek, but on the greater migration, nearly three hundred years long, of peoples of Dutch, French and German descent out from the victualling station at Cape Town after their arrival there in 1652. In the process he pioneered new directions in historical writing decades before they became fashionable among other South African historians.

Van der Merwe was less interested in politics than in the social, cultural, economic and religious lives of his subjects. He asked questions about such daily concerns as work, food, property owning, private and public worship, leisure activities, fashions, the environment and about the farmers’ relations with their neighbors, both white and black.

The Migrant Farmer (Die Trekboer in die Geskiedenis van die Kaapkolonie, 1657-1842) was published in Cape Town in Afrikaans in 1938. Beck’s English translation will allow scholars worldwide the opportunity to use, or challenge, this pioneering study of South Africa.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Migrant+Farmer+in+the+History+of+Cape+Colony%2C+1657%E2%80%931842.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.