For ages, farmers have domesticated plant varieties, while scientists have made nature through hybridization and other processes. This give and take mediated through negotiations, persuasion, the marketplace, and even coercion has resulted in what we call nature and has led to a homogenization of plant crops. Yet homogenization has led to new problems: genetic vulnerability, and the lack of systems to maintain plant germplasm of varieties no longer grown in the fields.This book addresses issues previously viewed as primarily technical concerning the germplasm debate: that is, how, what, and...

Conventional agriculture has attempted to exploit arable land by applying chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation water. These practices become increasingly tenuous as they exhaust our supplies of fossil fuels, deplete aquifers and raise concerns about the safety of food and the overall effect of agriculture on the quality of rural life.The contributors to this volume believe that instead of changing the environment, we can change the adaptation of the plants that we grow in it. Genetic improvement of crop plants for stress conditions and for less favorable environments is a...

James River Chiefdoms explores puzzling discrepancies between the ethnohistoric and archaeological records of the Powhatan and Monacan societies Jamestown colonists met in 1607. The colonists described the coastal Powhatans and the Monacans of the James River interior in terms that evoke the anthropological notion of a chiefdom, but the Chesapeake region's archaeological record lacks elements typically associated with complex polities. In an effort to account for these apparent incongruities, Martin D. Gallivan synthesizes ethnohistoric accounts with the archaeology of thirty-five Native...

Clearly, the debate is no longer over agricultural sustainability as a legitimate goal, but about how to fulfill that goal. Research is a vital factor contributing to the creation of a sustainable agriculture. Entrenched ideas about the way agricultural research is conducted have been challenged by farmers, environmentalists, food-safety advocates, rural activists, and others.William Lockeretz and Molly D. Anderson meet these challenges and chart a reasoned course through the fray. They analyze the potential and the limits of various research approaches associated with alternative...

The Great Plains were once characterized by vast expanses of grass, complex interdependence among species, and dynamic annual changes due to weather, waterways, and fire. It is now generally accepted that less than one percent of the original tallgrass prairie remains. Habitat fragmentation, the loss of natural predator-prey associations, changes in species composition, and various commercial practices continue to threaten grassland biodiversity.Recently scholars and conservationists have discussed opportunities for large-scale restoration projects in the Great Plains, but they have provided...

Urban sprawl has gained much national attention in recent years. Sprawl involves not only land-use issues but also legal, political, and social concerns. It affects our schools, the environment, and race relations. Comprehensive enough for high school students and also appropriate for college undergraduates, Remaking American Communities delves into the challenges of urban sprawl by turning to some of America's top thinkers on the problem, including Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association. Other cutting-edge essays include a foreword about the emergence of sprawl by...

In Uphill against Water, Peter Carrels examines the history of Missouri River water development projects in general and describes the struggle over one of the largest of those projects, South Dakota's Oahe irrigation project, in detail. Opposition to the Oahe project was intense and well organized. After four years of bitter competition, an energetic and resourceful grassroots group, United Family Farmers, wrested control of the Oahe conservancy district board, a government agency that had been an ardent supporter of the irrigation project. That political triumph led to the only victory in...

Over the past decade, organic products have become the fastest growing sector of agriculture, with an annual increase of at least 20 percent. This book explains why organic production and consumption have seen such phenomenal growth in recent years-and, even more important, why they should. A clear-eyed, close-up look at the compelling reasons for organic farming and the methods that make it work, Good Growing begins with a frank account of the problems with conventional industrial agriculture-the pesticide use, pollution, and corporate control that have undermined public health and...

Focusing on the Great Plains states of Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota between 1929 and 1945, Down and Out on the Family Farm examines small family farmers and the Rural Rehabilitation Program designed to help them. Historian Michael Johnston Grant reveals the tension between economic forces that favored large-scale agriculture and political pressure that championed family farms, and the results of that clash. The Great Depression and the drought of the 1930s lay bare the long-term economic instability of the rural Plains. The New Deal introduced the Rural Rehabilitation...

Changing the Way America Farms traces the manner in which alternative farmers have developed and exchanged their own personal, local knowledge as a basis for moving toward an agricultural system that is ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just. Neva Hassanein studies the patterns of local and regional networks in Wisconsin that sprang up to disseminate new and viable agricultural methods. She argues that these networks have in many ways become the foundation of the sustainable agriculture movement. Hassanein focuses on two organizations: the Ocooch Grazers Network, a group...