Booklist: Agriculture

Preface. Industrial agriculture is destroying topsoil, aquifers, and biodiversity with land use changes, heavy equipment, and pesticides — which only work for 5 years on average (see Dyer’s “Chasing the Red Queen” below), and scientists are running out of new poisons.  Someday farming will be forced to go back to being organic as pesticides stop working, and material inputs such as oil (diesel for tractors/harvesters) and natural gas decline (fertilizer) decline.

A land grab has been underway for many years in nations that can’t feed themselves. China, India, Saudi Arabia, and other nations have leased vast areas of Africa, Patagonia, Brazil, Paraguay, Ukraine, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, and foreign investors own 30 million acres of US farmland. Read all about it here: F Pearce. The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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History of Agriculture

Industrial Agriculture          

Sustainable Agriculture       

The Joys and Hardships of Family Farms 

  • E Agnew. Back from the Land: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s
  • J Stratton. Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier
  • M Kalish. Little Heathens. Hard times & high spirits on an Iowa Farm during the great depression.     
  • B Greenwood. A pioneer sampler. The daily life of a pioneer family in 1840  
  • R Montgomery. A Cow’s Life  The Surprising History of Cattle      
  • D Masumoto. Epitaph for a Peach, Four Seasons on my Family Farm    
  • Gene Logsdon. 1994. The Contrary Farmer  
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