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'Raising Less Corn And More Hell is more than the living, breathing stories of courageous rural Americans....It is a tribute to the hope that we can and will succeed in preserving what is best in rural America.' Senator Tom Harkin, from the Foreword
Food historian Cynthia Clampitt pens the epic story of what happened when Mesoamerican farmers bred a nondescript grass into a staff of life so prolific, so protean, that it represents nothing less than one of humankind's greatest achievements. Blending history with expert reportage, she traces the disparate threads that have woven corn into the fabric of our diet, politics, economy, science, and cuisine. At the same time she explores its future as a source of energy and the foundation of seemingly limitless green technologies. The result is a bourbon-to-biofuels portrait of the astonishing plant that sustains the world.
From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, farmers in the Corn Belt transformed their region into a new, industrial powerhouse of large-scale production, mechanization, specialization, and efficiency. Many farm experts and implement manufacturers had urged farmers in this direction for decades, but it was the persistent labor shortage and cost-price squeeze following WWII that prompted farmers to pave the way to industrializing agriculture. Anderson examines the changes in Iowa, a representative state of the Corn Belt, in order to explore why farmers adopted particular technologies and how, over time, they integrated new tools and techniques. In addition to the impressive field machinery, grain storage facilities, and automated feeding systems were the less visible, but no less potent, chemical technologies--antibiotics and growth hormones administered to livestock, as well as insecticide, herbicide, and fertilizer applied to crops. Much of this new technology created unintended consequences: pesticides encouraged the proliferation of resistant strains of plants and insects while also polluting the environment and threatening wildlife, and the use of feed additives triggered concern about the health effects to consumers. In Industrializing the Corn Belt, J. L. Anderson explains that the cost of equipment and chemicals made unprecedented demands on farm capital, and in order to maximize production, farmers planted more acres with fewer but more profitable crops or specialized in raising large herds of a single livestock species. The industrialization of agriculture gave rural Americans a lifestyle resembling that of their urban and suburban counterparts. Yet the rural population continued to dwindle as farms required less human labor, and many small farmers, unable or unwilling to compete, chose to sell out. Based on farm records, cooperative extension reports, USDA publications, oral interviews, trade literature, and agricultural periodicals, Industrializing the Corn Belt offers a fresh look at an important period of revolutionary change in agriculture through the eyes of those who grew the crops, raised the livestock, implemented new technology, and ultimately made the decisions that transformed the nature of the family farm and the Midwestern landscape.
The untold history of how meat made America: a tale of the oversized egos, self-made millionaires, and ruthless magnates; eccentrics, politicians, and pragmatists who shaped us into the greatest eaters and providers of meat in history.
In the last 20 years, there has been a remarkable emergence of innovations and technological advances that are generating promising changes and opportunities for sustainable agriculture, yet at the same time the agricultural sector worldwide faces numerous daunting challenges. Not only is the agricultural sector expected to produce adequate food, fiber, and feed, and contribute to biofuels to meet the needs of a rising global population, it is expected to do so under increasingly scarce natural resources and climate change. Growing awareness of the unintended impacts associated with some agricultural production practices has led to heightened societal expectations for improved environmental, community, labor, and animal welfare standards in agriculture. Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century assesses the scientific evidence for the strengths and weaknesses of different production, marketing, and policy approaches for improving and reducing the costs and unintended consequences of agricultural production. It discusses the principles underlying farming systems and practices that could improve the sustainability. It also explores how those lessons learned could be applied to agriculture in different regional and international settings, with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. By focusing on a systems approach to improving the sustainability of U.S. agriculture, this book can have a profound impact on the development and implementation of sustainable farming systems. Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century serves as a valuable resource for policy makers, farmers, experts in food production and agribusiness, and federal regulatory agencies.
New York Times Bestseller "A moving, beautifully etched picture of America’s lost and profoundly lonely." —Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day and winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature “Brilliant . . . Darnielle is a master at building suspense, and his writing is propulsive and urgent; it’s nearly impossible to stop reading . . . [Universal Harvester is] beyond worthwhile; it’s a major work by an author who is quickly becoming one of the brightest stars in American fiction.” —Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times “Grows in menace as the pages stack up . . . [But] more sensitive than one would expect from a more traditional tale of dread.” —Joe Hill, New York Times Book Review Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut. So begins Universal Harvester, the haunting and masterfully unsettling new novel from John Darnielle, author of the New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Nominee Wolf in White Van Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town in the center of the state—the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: it’s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck. But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets—an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store—she has an odd complaint: “There’s something on it,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, a new release, and says it’s not defective, exactly, but altered: “There’s another movie on this tape.” Jeremy doesn’t want to be curious, but he brings the movies home to take a look. And, indeed, in the middle of each movie, the screen blinks dark for a moment and the movie is replaced by a few minutes of jagged, poorly lit home video. The scenes are odd and sometimes violent, dark, and deeply disquieting. There are no identifiable faces, no dialogue or explanation—the first video has just the faint sound of someone breathing— but there are some recognizable landmarks. These have been shot just outside of town. In Universal Harvester, the once placid Iowa fields and farmhouses now sinister and imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. The novel will take Jeremy and those around him deeper into this landscape than they have ever expected to go. They will become part of a story that unfolds years into the past and years into the future, part of an impossible search for something someone once lost that they would do anything to regain. “This chilling literary thriller follows a video store clerk as he deciphers a macabre mystery through clues scattered among the tapes his customers rent. A page-tuning homage to In Cold Blood and The Ring.” —O: The Oprah Magazine “[Universal Harvester is] so wonderfully strange, almost Lynchian in its juxtaposition of the banal and the creepy, that my urge to know what the hell was going on caused me to go full throttle . . . [But] Darnielle hides so much beautiful commentary in the book’s quieter moments that you would be remiss not to slow down.” —Abram Scharf, MTV News “Universal Harvester is a novel about noticing hidden things, particularly the hurt and desperation that people bear under their exterior of polite reserve . . . Mr. Darnielle possesses the clairvoyant’s gift for looking beneath the surface.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “[Universal Harvester is] constantly unnerving, wrapped in a depressed dread that haunts every passage. But it all pays off with surprising emotionality.” —Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com
This is a study of the development of farming in the prairie states. The book emphasises the individual farmer (the man with dirt on his hands and dung on his boots), and the problems and developments that have forced him to make decisions about his farm business.
Among the first creatures to help humans attain the goal of having enough to eat was the pig, which provided not simply enough, but general abundance. Domesticated early and easily, herds grew at astonishing rates (only rabbits are more prolific). Then, as people spread around the globe, pigs and traditions went with them, with pigs making themselves at home wherever explorers or settlers carried them. Today, pork is the most commonly consumed meat in the world—and no one else in the world produces more pork than the American Midwest. Pigs and pork feature prominently in many cuisines and are restricted by others. In the U.S. during the early1900s, pork began to lose its preeminence to beef, but today, we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in pork, with talented chefs creating delicacies out of every part of the pig. Still, while people enjoy “pigging out,” few know much about hog history, and fewer still know of the creatures’ impact on the world, and specifically the Midwest. From brats in Wisconsin to tenderloin in Iowa, barbecue in Kansas City to porketta in the Iron Range to goetta in Cincinnati, the Midwest is almost defined by pork. Here, tracking the history of pig as pork, Cynthia Clampitt offers a fun, interesting, and tasty look at pigs as culture, calling, and cuisine.
Society of Illustrators 2006 Gold Medal recipient, Elisha Cooper, captures the smell, taste, and feel of the changing seasons on a farm. Society of Illustrators 2006 Gold Medal recipient, Elisha Cooper, captures the smell, taste, and feel of the changing seasons on a farm. There is so much to look at and learn about on a farm - animals, tractors, crops, and barns. And children feeding animals for morning chores With lyrical writing and beautiful illustrations that capture the rhythms of the changing seasons, Elisha Cooper brings the farm to life.