Follows the author's family's efforts to live on locally- and home-grown foods, an endeavor through which they learned lighthearted truths about food production and the connection between health and diet.

Hardwick, Vermont, a typical hardscrabble farming community of 3,000 residents, has jump-started its economy and redefined its self-image through a local, self-sustaining food system unlike anything else in America. Even as the recent financial downturn threatens to cripple small businesses and privately owned farms, a stunning number of food-based businesses have grown in the region. The Town That Food Saved is rich with appealing, colorful characters,...

Reveals how the voyages of Columbus reintroduced plants and animals that had been separated millions of years earlier, documenting how the ensuing exchange of flora and fauna between Eurasia and the Americas fostered a European rise, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and made Mexico City the center of the world. [From publisher's description]

The story of former basketball star and current urban farmer and activist, Will Allen, whose vision of gardening from abandoned urban sites led to a grassroots gardening craze.

Bees don't just produce honey. Your food supply depends on them. Apiarist Dave Hackenberg's bees have a busy travel schedule, pollinating around the United States from February to July. So when Dave inspected four hundred of his hives and found that the bees had simply vanished, a dream team of bee scientists got to work.

A portrait of the realities of agricultural life in today's world, based on interviews with more than forty farm families.

In this book, dozens of farm families from America's heartland detail the practices and values that relate to their land, work, and communities. Their stories reveal that those who make their living in agriculture—despite stereotypes of provincialism perpetuated by the media—are savvy to the

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The Georgics (29 BC) is a poem by Roman poet Virgil. Although less prominent than The Aeneid, Virgil's legendary epic of the Trojan hero Aeneas and his discovery of what would later become the city of Rome, The Georgics have endured as a landmark in the history of poetry. The Georgics were inspired by Lucretius's De Rerum Natura and Hesiod's Works and Days, an Ancient Greek poem describing the creation of the cosmos, the history of Earth, and the...

Describes what farms are like, how they differ from one another, and why many middle-sized farms are disappearing.

Imagine a world where every town has their own local food source, grown in the safest way possible, where no drop of water or particle of light is wasted, and where a simple elevator ride can transport you to nature's grocery store, imagine the world of the vertical farm. When Columbia professor Dickson Despommier set out to solve America's food, water, and energy crises, he didn't just think big, he thought up. Despommier's stroke of genius, the...