Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Industries - Agribusiness

"Anyone who wants a thorough understanding of the history of the region must read this book." R. Douglas Hurt, author of Problems of Plenty: The American
Farmer in the Twentieth Century

This meticulously researched book tells the story of Midwestern agriculture during a period of epochal change in farm technology, farm management, and farm life. The hard work, tight communities, and values that had characterized the family farm were replaced by large corporate enterprises with massive acreages, high-tech methods, and global outlooks. While many decry this change as loss, Nordin...

The Nature of the Farm is a theoretical and empirical study of contracts and organization in agriculture based on the transaction cost framework. Transaction costs are important in agriculture because nature (for example, seasonality, weather, pests) plays such a critical role in determining output and limiting the ability of farmers to specialize. The book develops specific models and tests the implications of those models against data sets from across North American agriculture, as well as against historical case studies such as eighteenth-century European land contracts and the...

Anthropologist Steve Striffler begins this book in a poultry processing plant, drawing on his own experiences there as a worker. He also reports on the way chickens are raised today and how they are consumed. What he discovers about America's favorite meat is not just unpleasant but a powerful indictment of our industrial food system. The process of bringing chicken to our dinner tables is unhealthy for all concerned--from farmer to factory worker to consumer.

The book traces the development of the poultry industry since the Second World War, analyzing the impact of such changes as...

Food security and sustainability are arguably the most important issues facing the agri-food sector at the beginning of a new millennium. In an era of globalization, where nation states appear to have a diminishing role in governing these matters, the existing and emerging power relations underpinning agri-food regulation demand renewed scholarly attention.

Drawing upon the expertise of some of the most prominent writers in rural sociology, geography and anthropology, this book shows how globalization processes open up a new regulatory politics in which non-political forms of...

Of the plant species, woody plants are producing the most abundant biomass resources, playing important roles in the suppression of carbon dioxide increase and supplying huge...

Engagingly written and richly illustrated, Putting Meat on the American Table explains how America became a meat-eating nation--from the colonial period to the present. It examines the relationships between consumer preference and meat processing--looking closely at the production of beef, pork, chicken, and hot dogs.

Roger Horowitz argues that a series of new technologies have transformed American meat. He draws on detailed consumption surveys that shed new light on America's eating preferences--especially differences associated with income, rural versus urban areas, and...

Both horrified and fascinated by a visit with his geography students to the Canada Packers Lethbridge plant, Ian MacLachlan searched for a book that would explain the main features of the Canadian meat packing industry. Finding very little available, he set about writing an account of the industry that is both an economic geography and economic history.

Comprehensive in its treatment of the whole system surrounding the Canadian beef industry, Kill and Chill offers a history of the structural changes in Canada's cattle and beef commodity chain, beginning with calf production and...

In the Shadows of State and Capital" tells the story of how Ecuadorian peasants gained, and then lost, control of the banana industry. Providing an ethnographic history of the emergence of subcontracting within Latin American agriculture and of the central role played by class conflict in this process, Steve Striffler looks at the quintessential form of twentieth-century U.S. imperialism in the region--the banana industry and, in particular, the United Fruit Company (Chiquita). He argues that, even within this...