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Core Historical Literature of Agriculture
Cornell University Library.
The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) is a core electronic collection of agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century.
Full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science,forestry, human nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science. Scholars have selected the titles in this collection for their historical importance.
Their evaluations and 4,500 core titles are detailed in the seven volume series The Literature of the Agricultural Sciences, Wallace C. Olsen, series editor.
Current online holdings: Pages: 850,264 Books: 1,849 (1,910 Volumes) Journals: 6 (288 Volumes)
(March 2007)
It’s valuable to have the texts available on pre-petroleum agriculture. -BA
Shocking Sugar (audio)
Deconstructing Dinner, Global Public Media
Sugar is close to becoming a cultural institution here in North America and is found in a countless number of foods that we consume daily. The media looks to sugar on a rather frequent basis to satisfy the “declining population health” segments of the nightly news. While these segments could arguably not be frequent enough, there is a whole side to sugar rarely touched on.
Like with many crops, fruits and vegetables, sugar production comes with hidden costs. Sugarcane represents the primary crop from which refined sugar originates, and its current methods of cultivation and production are taking a toll on the environment and on the human beings who are part of the process.
Join us as we look past the health concerns of our sugar-driven food system, and look to solutions and alternatives to a commodity that seems to present very little choice for the general public.
(16 March 2007)
Related from the Guardian: Sugar rush.
Farming in the city
Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute
While attending a conference on the outskirts of Stockholm in the fall of 1974, I walked past a community garden near a high-rise apartment building. It was an idyllic Indian summer afternoon, with many people tending gardens a short walk from their residences. More than 30 years later I can still recall the setting because of the aura of contentment surrounding those working in their gardens. They were absorbed in producing not only vegetables, but in some cases flowers as well. I remember thinking, “This is the mark of a civilized society.”
In June 2005, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that urban and peri-urban farms-those within or immediately adjacent to a city-supply food to some 700 million urban residents worldwide. These are mostly small plots-vacant lots, yards, even rooftops.
Within and near the city of Dar es Salaam, capital of Tanzania, there are some 650 hectares of land producing vegetables. This land supplies not only the city’s fresh produce but a livelihood for 4,000 farmers who intensively farm their small plots year-round. On the far side of the continent, an FAO project has urban residents in Dakar, Senegal, producing up to 30 kilograms of tomatoes per square meter each year with continuous cropping in rooftop gardens.
…In some countries, such as the United States, there is a huge unrealized potential for urban gardening. A survey indicated that Chicago has 70,000 vacant lots, and Philadelphia, 31,000. Nationwide, vacant lots in cities would total in the hundreds of thousands. The Urban Agriculture report summarizes why urban agriculture is so desirable. It has “a regenerative effect…when vacant lots are transformed from eyesores-weedy, trash-ridden dangerous gathering places-into bountiful, beautiful, and safe gardens that feed people’s bodies and souls.”
Given the near inevitable rise in future oil prices, the economic benefits of expanding urban agriculture, even in affluent societies, will become much more obvious. Aside from supplying more fresh produce, it will help millions discover the social benefits and the psychological well-being that urban gardening can bring.
(16 March 2007)
Suggested by Carl Flatow of NPR’s Science Friday in a blog post.
Six protesters die in Indian land clashes
Riot police battle farmers over new economic zones
Randeep Ramesh, The Guardian
India’s attempt to imitate the Chinese economic boom by handing farmland to big business turned violent yesterday as police and villagers fought pitched battles in the paddy fields of West Bengal, leaving at least six dead and dozens injured.
The fighting began when 500 armed police tried to enter villages in the Nandigram area, 80 miles south of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), to be met by farmers and activists armed with sickles and machetes behind barricades of upturned vehicles and palm-logs. It was the first time police had tried to gain access since January, when clashes left six people dead. ..
The state’s Communist government has ordered some 22,000 acres (9,000 hectares) to be turned over to a special economic zone for an Indonesian-owned petrochemical complex.
Such zones would, like those in China, offer industry tax- and duty-free areas free from government red tape. ..
(15 Mar 2007)
