Product Description
"The Bottom Rung" presents an in-depth investigation of a population that is becoming extinct in American society: the black farmer. Tracing patterns of marriage and childbearing among both whites and blacks during the first decades of this century, Stewart Tolnay pursues questions about how black southern farm families were formed and dissolved, how they educated their children or put them to work in the fields, and how they migrated in search of opportunity. Further, he considers the possible legacy of these experiences for family life in contemporary urban environments.Making revealing and innovative use of public records from the early part of the twentieth century, Tolnay challenges the widely held idea that southern migrants to northern cities carried with them a dysfunctional family culture. He demonstrates the powerful impact of economic conditions on family life and views patterns of marriage and childbearing as responsive to prevailing social, economic, and political conditions.In a provocative extension of this perspective, Tolnay argues that current high levels of single-parenthood among urban African American families likewise reflect rational responses to the socio-economic environment and government policies. By placing post-World War II demographic developments in a wider historical perspective, "The Bottom Rung" sheds new light on recent discussions of the difficulties faced by the modern black urban family. The text is enhanced by Dorothea Lange's and Russell Lee's poignant photographs. ... Read more

Product Description
Smack in the middle of Kansas, Section 27 in McPherson County has been occupied by the Penner family since 1874. Although few of the area’s residents have direct ties to the past, Mil Penner still farms the land that his family has worked for over 125 years. His account of daily life on a Mennonite family farm near Inman, Kansas, retells a universal story of the American heartland sharpened by personal accounts of one family’s enduring relationship to the land.

In this collection of brief, evocative vignettes, Penner traces the influence of pioneer roots on the present generation as he chronicles the transformation of the land from untouched prairie to productive farm. As a boy, young Mil rubbed shoulders with the very pioneers who tamed the prairies and he now draws on those recollections and memories passed on by his father to make the past come alive.

Through Penner’s accounts, readers will discover a miniature universe through descriptions of breaking sod and harvesting, Mennonite customs and religion, education in a one-room school, and the evolution of farm equipment from horse-drawn to engine-powered plows. The story he tells is virtually a history of the settling of the West as seen from a farm, where getting through the hardships of the Dust Bowl and Depression needed faith as much as fortitude.

Told in a straightforward fashion befitting his family traditions, Section 27 tracks Penner’s development of ecological awareness and growing commitment to recapturing a simpler way of life. He has an innate gift for storytelling and a sharp memory for detail, and as one of the last generation to have experienced harvesting with a binder and threshing machine, he shows how the experience of family farming rewards with simple pleasures and joys. Through his expressive prose, even new-mown hay takes on remarkable dimensions.

In this journey of introspection, Penner reflects on how, when his great-grandfather first broke the sod on Section 27, it altered the land profoundly. Today, he takes an old tractor out to a small plot he’s set aside and drops the plow, feeling a deep satisfaction in seeing the black soil roll and the birds swoop in for the insects he’s stirred up. Although he sees the value in new agricultural methods, he can’t help but ponder the direction in which progress is taking us. As our country moves away from its rural roots at an ever-accelerating pace, Section 27 is a signpost that makes us pause and reconsider that fading heritage before it is gone forever. ... Read more

Product Description
Wearing a suit, spending more time behind a desk than he ever intended, life is brought back into perspective by the memories of growing up on a Midwestern family farm. The adventures of a boy and his dog Yogi discovering life on the family's small farm will give your soul reason for feeling the same joys and fears as those experienced by the two explorers as they met life head on in an era when people didn't lock their houses. This Midwestern families farm didn't just raise cows, chickens and pigs, it raised adventure and mischief in the form of a boy and his dog, adventure supplemented by the one room country school, the fields and the river that flowed near the families 180 acres of life. The important role that each family member played on the farm adds to this adventure as the boy recalls the sage wisdom of adults as well as that which can only come from a relationship between brothers and sisters. Annual trips to the state fair, vacations to neighboring states, and fishing trips with dad will generate in you the warmth of a family farm in times far different than those we live in today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

My Review
An enjoyable read particularly for those who also grew up on a farm no matter what part of the country!It'll bring back fond memories of days gone by and put a smile on your face. ... Read more

Product Description
Across the first half of the twentieth century, Wisconsin dairy farmer Alexander Krueger and his descendants turned the cameras lens on their Dodge County farm, its environs, their family, and the networks of kin that framed their lives. Their photographs and family stories comprise a unique record not only of who the Kruegers were but also of how they sought to be remembered.Over the generations, the Kruegers reshaped their customs and language, traditions and aspirations. At times they broke with the past, changing churches and embracing scientific farming, marketing co-ops, and political activism. This unusually rich photographic record, enhanced by documentation from letters, account books, deeds, census records, and oral histories, provides an extraordinary portrait of a Pomeranian immigrant family as it adapted to American ways and to changes in agricultural life. ... Read more

Product Description
A Family Place is an evocative, first-person account of Leila Philip's search to uncover and then to come to terms with her family's rich and complicated past. This is a past populated by manor lords and tenant farmers, romantic-era gentlemen farmers and Civil War heroes, wealthy ne'er-do-wells, renegade aunts, and secret children, all of them inextricably linked to a white-columned mansion named Talavera, located two hours from New York City in the Hudson Valley.

Today, Talavera is managed as a commercial fruit farm called Philip Orchards. Since inheriting the estate after their father's death in 1992, Leila Philip and her four siblings have struggled to find the means to keep the house intact and the land from being consumed by development. This uphill battle has forced Philip to ask: What compels a family to risk everything—financial well-being, its place in the modern world, even each other —to hold on to a piece of land?

In her quest for answers, Philip began researching her family's unbreakable bond with this remarkable place. From 1730, the first year of the family tenure on the land, to the present, A Family Place chronicles a fascinating history that is full of surprises. Like Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Kathleen Norris's Dakota, A Family Place is both deeply personal and broadly resonant as her search becomes entangled in the tensions between memory and recorded fact. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

All the Important Things of Life
Leila Philip is so intimate in her writing that one feels as though you are standing next to her and at times, in her head.

She writes of all the things that matter most in life.Family, Place, the Land, History, the essence and distillation, the sum of life experience.It seems a treasure too highly prized to share with just anyone who picks up her book.

Our family too has a farm in Vermont and we have an ongoing struggle to hang on.We are always fearful that the next generation will have to relinquish this treasure.

There is the wonder at the excitement as it infects each new generation.I saw it settle into the psyche of my three year old grand daughter as she came out of the woods with her father.

"This is a dangerous place.There are wolves."

The disappearance of a purchased item.
This product never arrived, and I completely forgot that I'd ordered it until this request for a review appeared. Dammit.

the rise and fall of u-pick apples
This was a great read for someone interested in the history of the Hudson Valley and the influence of modern development and economics on the landscape.The author grounds the story of her family on this patch of farmland, providing a linkage across the many generations that makes the narrative intersting to those not necessarily interested in typical family history works.She weaves in the influences development pressure and farming economics that broadens the scope of the book into a fascinating insight into the changes we see in the Hudson Valley landscape.The evolution of the apple orchard business alone is interesting and, ultimately, a bit heartbreaking for those of us who like to know we can buy and pick locally grown apples, and hope that we will continue seeing those orchards sprawling over the rolling valley with the Catskills and Taconics framing the background.I don't remember the self-reflection on writing style that other reviewers mention... so clearly they didn't detract from my memory of the book.

This had fantastic potential...
I was disappointed in this book.The Hudson Valley is a magnificent well for story tellers and I was excited to read about the generations who had lived in a single home and worked on its orchard.

This is much more a creative writing guide than a history of a house/family.Philip spends chapters describing the writing process, but not enough about the actual home/family.The writing parts would have made an excellent preface, but the book needed more substantative history.

Too often Philips interupts herself to backtrack to modern times.

This had great potential, but left me looking for another book.

Delightful read
Evocative, elegant account of family history, deftly blending geneology with present day realities.Highly enjoyable read~ ... Read more

Product Description
This book explores America's family farms today. Farmers face many challenges like making daily decisions on when to plow, till, plant, fertilise, and harvest, or management decisions involving their sizeable assets, numerous employees, a multitude of rules and regulations and a market place that changes every day. In addition to these challenges, competition from foreign markets, environmental concerns, low prices and many global factors also make the future uncertain. We are at a critical stage in planning for the future of agriculture; recruiting and training the next generation of farmers and ensuring farms will continue to be viable, healthy operations. Every family owned business has to deal with transitions, but it seems to be reaching crisis proportions in agriculture. ... Read more

Product Description
Part celebration of a farm community, part case study in successful land-use planning, Farming on the Edge offers what could be a nationwide model for farmland preservation.
During the 1960s Marin County, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, had plans to build suburbs almost from shore to shore. Freeways were about to cut across the farmland and land prices were rising. The struggling dairy industry seemed doomed.
Then in 1970 a group of politicians, farmers, and citizen activists forged an alliance to protect the county's agricultural land from suburban "conversion." An uneasy alliance at first, with ranchers and environmentalists used to waging battle with each other over zoning strictures, it has grown into a friendship based on profound respect and trust.
At a time when the United States is in danger of becoming the world's first suburban country, John Hart's profiles together with Joan Rosen's photographs of Marin ranchers and their families eloquently evoke the tough-mindedness, the sense of stewardship, and the rooted way of life that make the family-farm inheritance vital to preserve. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

this is the best
I am going to reorder this book if it come back into print. I have used mine so much that it is falling apart. The recipes are excellent, easy to understand. I have never had a failure using any of the recipes. This bookgives you the alternative to eating fat filled foods. ... Read more

Product Description
Gerald and Sue Glasco wanted to farm and rear their children in the country. Leaving a farm management job at Columbiana Ranch near Eldred, Illinois, they bought a 75-acre farm in partnership with Gerald's brother Keith and wife Barbara in southern Illinois and rented another. Their big old farm house on the rented land had been standing empty except for mice. Sue cleaned, painted, and helped the children adjust to a new community. Gerald rushed to be ready for the arrival of baby pigs and started to install the house's first plumbing. Then there was a fire. Pregnant with their fourth child, Sue recorded their rural adventures and misadventures in the 1960s. Finally they moved even deeper into the country to the hog farm.Down on the Farm, a good story for the young or old, captures the universal struggle of young couples who set out to achieve their dreams. With ambitions to write and raise a large family, Sue Glasco did both when she married an agriculture major who also loved rural life. Their four children provided much subject matter. Sometimes she wrote with a toddler hanging on her neck. Sometimes she wrote with humor and sometimes with tears. ... Read more

Product Description
2009 revised edition; book includes several drawings and photographs ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Cute and colorful
I had picked this book up on sale and for months it was one of my daughter's favorites. We always act out the animal sounds and it definately helped her learn animal sounds and colors. For some reason she always likes the end of the book with "the farmer and her three happy children." This is a great book for babies, the illustrations are bright and simple. If you like this one try "Beautiful Bugs", it's also a winner. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is a journal article from Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
In the Brazilian Amazon, colonization is modifying the landscape at an exceedingly fast pace. Recently established households practice slash-and-burn agriculture and participate in the overall deforestation of the Amazon. Near the Transamazon highway, these family agricultural practices are the main cause of deforestation. The study presented here is oriented toward a better understanding of the impacts of farming practices on soil chemical composition. This study used a sampling design based on soil samples taken on farm plots, which had been submitted to a wide range of spatial and temporal sequential land-uses, including soils that were only recently denuded. The data shows that soil responses (organic matter (OM) content, fertility and mercury (Hg) retention) to these varied land-uses were relatively similar, suggesting that the most important event determining the responses was deforestation itself. This is well illustrated by the Hg content of soils, which changed immediately after deforestation and then only slightly thereafter. This phenomenon could also be seen in the base cation (calcium (Ca), potassium (K) and magnesium (Mg)) content which rose drastically after deforestation and tended to stay high for a period up to 10 years of cropping and pasture. This lasting cation rise is reflected by ammonium (NH"4) displacement from surface soils. Indeed, inorganic nitrogen (N) is the most important nutrient loss upon deforestation. Nonetheless, when time spent in fallow was greater than 15 years, base cations (Ca, Mg, K), available N and phosphorus (P) contents tended to go back to initial forest soil values and in some cases to exceed them. Soil type was seen to mediate responses to land-use. Clay-sandy soils showed a lower content of available N and carbon (C) than clayey soils at the soil surface, a difference that was accentuated by deforestation. Conversely, the higher initial content of Hg in clayey soils was associated with a more important Hg loss from the soil's surface. By shedding light on the consequences of family practices for OM, nutrient status and Hg depletion, this paper gives a new perspective on soil responses to agricultural practices. These conclusions need to be addressed in a strategy plan to limit family land-use impacts on soils and the surrounding ecosystems. Recommendations for more sustainable land uses are proposed based on what has been learned about soil responses to local agricultural practices. ... Read more