• The role of economics in agricultural policy analysis
• Economic efficiency and equity in U.S. agriculture
• Government and the economy : private versus collective choice
• Public choice : the economics of the political process
• Implications of public-choice theory for agricultural policy
• The farm problem and economic justice
• The role of government in U.S. agriculture
• Price supports, parity, and cost of production
• History and overview of production controls and marketing quotas
• Production controls, price supports, and current farm programs
• Cooperatives and marketing orders
• Effects of agricultural commodity programs
• Subsidized food programs
• International trade and trade restrictions
• Crop insurance, market stabilization, and risk management
• Subsidized credit in U.S. agriculture
• Conservation and "protection" of natural resources
• Agricultural research and extension activities
• Taxation in agriculture
• The effects of government farm programs
• The farm security and rural investment act of
• 2002 : how it updated existing law.

Agricultural subsidies in grains, cotton, milk, sugar, tobacco, honey, wool, and peanuts are analyzed in this examination of U.S. farm policy. Looking at such programs as food stamps, crop insurance, subsidized credit, trade credit, trade subsidies and import restrictions, conservation, agricultural research, and taxation, this historical perspective argues that these subsidies ultimately redistribute wealth to powerful agricultural interests who use their political clout to advance their economic interests at the expense of the general public. This analysis of government farm programs will appeal to professors and students who study agriculture; people affected by government farm policies; public officials, and businesses affected by agricultural policy such as those in food service, retail, and distribution.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Rolling Stores
• Anything She Could Sell
• The Chicken Business
• Professional Paradoxes
• Women in the Middle
• From Feed Bags to Fashion.

Black and white farm women as consumers, producers, and agents of change; Farm women of the twentieth-century South have been portrayed as oppressed, worn out, and isolated. Lu Ann Jones tells quite a different story in Mama Learned Us to Work. Building upon evocative oral histories, she encourages us to understand these women as consumers, producers, and agents of economic and cultural change. As consumers, farm women bargained with peddlers at their backdoors. A key business for many farm women was the ""butter and egg trade"" - small-scale dairying and raising chickens. Their earnings provided a crucial margin of economic safety for many families during the 1920s and 1930s and offered women some independence from their men folks. These innovative women showed that poultry production paid off and laid the foundation for the agribusiness poultry industry that emerged after World War II. Jones also examines the relationships between farm women and home demonstration agents and the effect of government-sponsored rural reform. She discusses the professional culture that developed among white agents as they reconciled new and old ideas about women's roles and shows that black agents, despite prejudice, linked their clients to valuable government resources and gave new meanings to traditions of self-help, mutual aid, and racial uplift.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Scientific breeding
• Taking scientific agriculture to the public
• Science, politics, and the USDA
• The law of diminishing returns
• Balancing the farm output
• Farm evangelism and dollar efficiency.

• Scientific breeding
• Taking scientific agriculture to the public
• Science, politics, and the USDA
• The law of diminishing returns
• Balancing the farm output
• Conclusion : farm evangelism and dollar efficiency.

William J. Spillman (1863-1931), considered the founder of agricultural economics, was a scientist and popular agricultural educator for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). As the author of more than three hundred articles and four books, Spillman left a lasting mark on American agriculture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with his pioneering solutions for the problems of overproduction and low prices. Spillman grew up in Lawrence County, Missouri, and received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Missouri in Columbia. In this biography, Laurie Winn Carlson looks at Spillman's career as he moved from Missouri to Washington, D.C., where his concepts shaped what became the agricultural New Deal and, eventually, the current farm allotment programs. By placing Spillman's story within the larger context of American agricultural history, Carlson takes readers inside the USDA during the years our nation's agricultural policy took shape. She studies the development of the field of genetics, the conflicts regarding agricultural education and the creation of the Cooperative Extension Service, the overproduction crisis after World War I and Spillman's ideas for allotment, and the commercial fertilizer industry and the Law of Diminishing Returns. She also looks at efforts to restrict research, the censorship of publications directed toward farmers, and personal rivalries within the USDA. This examination of agricultural through Spillman's eyes reveals that industrialized agriculture was not inevitable but a carefully crafted ideology that farmers were pushed to embrace. Although highly contested by farmers as well as employees within the USDA, industry, government, politics, and technology, industrialized agriculture moved people off the land, replacing them with large-scale mechanized production. An iconoclast within the USDA bureaucracy, Spillman was a ""farm evangelist, "" taking his message of diversified farming across the country. He believed that farmers should integrate livestock and rotate crops, rather than continue the monoculture production that was evolving due to the increasing industrialization of farming. Those issues, as well as the Law of Diminishing Returns, sustainability, and popular education, are all matters to which Spillman devoted his career and are more important today than ever.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Ch. 1. Price Determination in Agricultural Commodity Markets: A Primer / Randy Schnepf
• Ch. 2. Global Agricultural Supply and Demand: Factors Contributing to the Recent Increase in Food Commodity Prices / Ronald Trostle
• Ch. 3. Biofuels, International Food Prices, and the Poor / Joachim von Braun
• Ch. 4. Food Price Inflation: Causes and Impacts / Tom Capehart and Joe Richardson
• Ch. 5. High Wheat Prices: What Are the Issues? / Randy Schnepf
• Ch. 6. Testimony of Jared Bernstein, Economic Policy Institute, House Committee on the Budget of the United States House of Representatives, Rising Food Prices: Budget Challenges, July 30, 2008 / Economic Policy Institute
• Ch. 7. Testimony by Steve H. Hanke, Applied Economics, the Johns Hopkins University and the Cato Institute on Rising Food Prices: Budget Challenges before Committee on the Budget, United States House of Representatives, July 30, 2008
• Ch. 8. Testimony of Jack Huttner, Biorefinery Business Development, Genencor, to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Hearing: "The Relationship between Us Renewable Fuels Policy and Food Prices", June 12, 2008
• Ch. 9. Statement of Joseph Glauber, before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, June 12, 2008
• Ch. 10. Statement of Joseph Glauber, before the Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress, May 1,2008.

• The disappearance of agricultural land: fact or fiction? / Bruce R. Beattie
• Land trusts: a return to feudalism / Roger Meiners and Bruce Yandle
• Taxation, free markets, and the use of agricultural land / Richard E. Wagner
• The political economy of land conversion on the urban fringe / Samuel R. Staley
• Some issues surrounding land and chemical use in agriculture / B. Delworth Gardner
• Biotechnology, land-use, and the environment: untying the Gordian knot / Henry I. Miller
• To breed, or not to breed? The question of endangered species and agriculture / Ike C. Sugg
• Agriculture and water markets / Terry L. Anderson and Clay J. Landry.

The authors focus on the major environmental constraints that limit U.S. food production without necessarily improving environmental quality. Each chapter documents a specific issue, discusses the regulatory response, and offers ideas for reform.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• From peasants to farmers
• The remaking of rural England
• ch. 1. From England to America
• ch. 2. This newfound land
• ch. 3. New lands, new peoples
• ch. 4. Deprivation, desire, and emigration
• ch. 5. Markets and farm households in early America
• The Farmers' War and its aftermath
• Toward a farmers' nation.

An interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, it tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, and analyzes the growth of markets.

• 1 Front Matter--
• 2 Contents--
• 3 Executive Summary--
• 4
• 1 Soil and Water Quality: New Problems, New Solutions--
• 5
• 2 Opportunities to Improve Soil and Water Quality--
• 6
• 3 A Systems Approach to Soil and Water Quality Management--
• 7
• 4 Policies to Protect Soil and Water Quality--
• 8 Introduction: Soil, Water, and Farming Systems--
• 9
• 5 Monitoring and Managing Soil Quality--
• 10
• 6 Nitrogen in the Soil-Crop System--
• 11
• 7 Phosphorus in the Soil-Crop System--
• 12
• 8 Fate and Transport of Pesticides--
• 13
• 9 Fate and Transport of Sediments--
• 14
• 10 Salts and Trace Elements--
• 15
• 11 Manure and Nutrient Management--
• 16
• 12 A Landscape Approach to Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution--
• 17 Appendix--
• 18 References--
• 19 Glossary--
• 20 About the Authors--
• 21 Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

How can the United States meet demands for agricultural production while solving the broader range of environmental problems attributed to farming practices? National policymakers who try to answer this question confront difficult trade-offs. This book offers four specific strategies that can serve as the basis for a national policy to protect soil and water quality while maintaining U.S. agricultural productivity and competitiveness. Timely and comprehensive, the volume has important implications for the Clean Air Act and the 1995 farm bill. Advocating a systems approach, the committee recommends specific farm practices and new approaches to prevention of soil degradation and water pollution for environmental agencies. The volume details methods of evaluating soil management systems and offers a wealth of information on improved management of nitrogen, phosphorus, manure, pesticides, sediments, salt, and trace elements. Landscape analysis of nonpoint source pollution is also detailed. Drawing together research findings, survey results, and case examples, the volume will be of interest to federal, state, and local policymakers; state and local environmental and agricultural officials and other environmental and agricultural specialists; scientists involved in soil and water issues; researchers; and agricultural producers.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of Tables Orthography Introduction
• 1. The Rio Nunez Region: A Small Corner of West Africa's Rice Coast Region
• 2. The First-Comers and the Roots of Coastal Rice-growing Technology
• 3. The Newcomers and the Seeds of Tidal Rice-Growing Technology
• 4. Coastal Collaboration and Specialization: Flowering of Tidal Rice-Growing Technologies
• 5. The Strangers and the Branches of Coastal Rice-growing Technology, c.1500 to
• 1800
• 6. Feeding the Slave Trade: The Trade in Rice and Captives from West Africa's Rice Coast Conclusion
• Appendix I.1 Fieldwork Interviews
• Appendix I.2 Rice Terminology in Atlantic Languages Spoken in the Coastal Rio Nunez Region Notes Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The American dependence on imported rubber : the lessons of revolution and war, 1911-1922
• Domestic rubber crops in an era of nationalism and internationalism
• Thomas Edison and the challenges of the new rubber crops
• The nadir of rubber crop research, 1928-1941
• Crops in war : rubber plant research on the grand scale
• Sustainable rubber from grain : the Gillette Committee and the battles over synthetic rubber
• Resistance to domestic rubber crops and the decline of the Emergency Rubber Project
• From domestic rubber crops to biotechnology.

Growing American Rubber explores America's quest during tense decades of the twentieth century to identify a viable source of domestic rubber. Straddling international revolutions and world wars, this unique and well-researched history chronicles efforts of leaders in business, science, and government to sever American dependence on foreign suppliers. Mark Finlay plots out intersecting networks of actors including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, prominent botanists, interned Japanese Americans, Haitian peasants, and ordinary citizens - all of whom contributed to this search for economic self-sufficiency. Challenging once-familiar boundaries between agriculture and industry and field and laboratory, Finlay also identifies an era in which perceived boundaries between natural and synthetic came under review. Although synthetic rubber emerged from World War II as one solution, the issue of ever-diminishing natural resources and the question of how to meet twenty-first-century consumer, military, and business demands lingers today.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• New and old forestry: a confrontation in the making
• Shaping an ecological forestry program
• The national response to ecological forestry
• Ecological forestry in the states
• The Pennsylvania story: missed opportunities
• The skirmishes become a full-scale war
• In search of the future forest.

Wars in the Woods examines the conflicts that have developed over the preservation of forests in America, and how government agencies and advocacy groups have influenced the management of forests and their resources for more than a century. Samuel Hays provides an astute analysis of manipulations of conservation law that have touched off a battle between what he terms ""ecological forestry"" and ""commodity forestry."" Hays also reveals the pervading influence of the wood products industry, and the training of the U.S. Forest Service to value tree species marketable as wood products, as the primary forces behind forestry policy since the Forest Management Act of 1897. ""Wars in the Woods"" gives a comprehensive account of the many grassroots and scientific organizations that have emerged since then to combat the lumber industry and other special interest groups and work to promote legislation to protect forests, parks, and wildlife habitats. It also offers a review of current forestry practices, citing the recent federal easing of protections as a challenge to the progress made in the last third of the twentieth century. Hays describes an increased focus on ecological forestry in areas such as biodiversity, wildlife habitat, structural diversity, soil conservation, watershed management, native forests, and old growth. He provides a valuable framework for the critical assessment of forest management policies and the future study and protection of forest resources.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments Introduction. "The Dunghill of Men's Passions": The Insect Paradox
• 1. "The Insect Tribes Still Maintain Their Ground": Insects and Early Americans
• 2. "There Is No Royal Road to the Destruction of Bugs": The Rise of the Professionals
• 3. "Let Us Conquer Space": Breaking the Plains and Fighting the Insects
• 4. "A Great Schemer": Charles V. Riley and the Broken Promises of Early Insecticides
• 5. "Let Us Spray": Mosquitoes, War, and Chemicals
• 6. "Vot Iss de Effidence?": Residues, Regulations, and the Politics of Protecting Insecticides
• 7. "Complaints Are Coming In": A Year in the Life of an Insecticide Nation,
• 1938
• 8. "Let's Put Our Heads Together and Start a New Country Up": Silent Springs and Loud Protests Epilogue. "Some Very Learned Men Are the Greatest Fools in the World": In Praise of Localism Notes Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The world of insects is one we only dimly understand. Yet from using arsenic, cobalt, and quicksilver to kill household infiltrators to employing the sophisticated tools of the Orkin Man, Americans have fought to eradicate the "bugs" they have learned to hate. Inspired by the still-revolutionary theories of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, James E. McWilliams argues for a more harmonious and rational approach to our relationship with insects, one that does not harm our environment and, consequently, ourselves along the way. Beginning with the early techniques of colonial farmers and ending with the modern use of chemical insecticides, McWilliams deftly shows how America's war on insects mirrors its continual struggle with nature, economic development, technology, and federal regulation. He reveals a very American paradox: the men and women who settled and developed this country sought to control the environment and achieve certain economic goals; yet their methods of agricultural expansion undermined their efforts and linked them even closer to the inexorable realities of the insect world. As told from the perspective of the often flamboyant actors in the battle against insects, American Pests is a fascinating investigation into the attitudes, policies, and practices that continue to influence our behavior toward insects. Asking us to question, if not abandon, our reckless (and sometimes futile) attempts at insect control, McWilliams convincingly argues that insects, like people, have an inherent right to exist and that in our attempt to rid ourselves of insects, we compromise the balance of nature.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)