Agriculture Science

Why do we consume 35 percent more food when eating with one other person, and 75 percent more when dining with three? How do we explain the fact that people who like strong coffee drink more of it under bright lighting? And why does green ketchup just not work? The answer is gastrophysics, the new area of sensory science pioneered by Oxford professor Charles Spence.

Building Beehives for Dummies is the follow-up book to the best-selling Beekeeping for Dummies. It provides everything you need to learn how to build some of the world's most popular hives and beekeeping accessories. For each design the book includes a detailed materials list (what lumber, hardware, and fasteners you'll need) and step-by-step building instructions.

How did the bananas on your breakfast cereal get to your local grocery store? Easy-to-understand text explains how food gets from farms to stores and describes the role of the community workers who make it all possible.

In 2012, 25-year-old Jackie Moyer—the daughter of a forbidden marriage between a white American father and a Punjabi American mother—was a new organic farmer with 10 acres of land in Gold Hill, California. With a fractured relationship to her heritage, Moyer saw an opportunity for repair when she decided to grow an heirloom wheat variety called Sonora. Sonora wasn’t just an heirloom wheat strain; it was her own cultural heirloom. Jackie uncovers how the history of this hardy wheat mirrors her family's multigenerational story of resilience.

Within a decade, nearly half of all American farmland will change hands as an older generation of farmers steps aside. In their place, a groundswell of new growers will face numerous challenges, including soil degradation, insufficient income, and investors devouring farmland at a staggering pace.

As industry and technology proliferate in modern society, sustainability has jumped to the forefront of contemporary political and environmental discussions. The balance between progress and the Earth's ability to provide for its inhabitants grows increasingly precarious as we attempt to achieve sustainable development.

Oil and Honey is McKibben's account of two necessary and mutually reinforcing sides of the global climate fight - from the center of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small-scale local answers. With empathy and passion he makes the case for a renewed commitment on both levels, telling the story of raising one year’s honey crop and building a social movement that’s still cresting.

Brigit Strawbridge Howard was shocked the day she realized she knew more about the French Revolution than she did about her native trees. And birds. And wildflowers. And bees. The thought stopped her — quite literally — in her tracks. But that day was also the start of a journey, one filled with silver birches and hairy-footed flower bees, skylarks, and rosebay willow herb, and the joy that comes with deepening one’s relationship with place.

Many of us want to increase our self-sufficiency, but few have access to the ideal five gently sloping acres of rich, loamy, well-drained soil. Jenni Blackmore presents a highly entertaining, personal account of how permaculture can be practiced in adverse conditions, allowing anyone to learn to live more sustainably in a less-than-perfect world.

Do you have a small backyard space that is brimming with potential? Have you always wanted to grow your own food and save up money in the process? Are you looking to take a simpler, more self-sufficient path in life? You’re in luck! If you’re looking to create a highly productive, sustainable space that provides homegrown fruits, vegetables, honey, eggs, milk, and meat...then Sustainable Backyard Homesteading for Beginners by D.G. Smith is for you!

A memoir of making these essential relationships work in the face of challenges as natural as weather and as unnatural as corporate politics, her book is a firsthand history of getting in at the "ground level" of organic farming. One of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest, the Diffleys' Gardens of Eagan helped to usher in a new kind of green revolution in the heart of America's farmland, supplying their roadside stand and a growing number of local food co-ops.

Throughout America's history as an industrial nation, sizable countercultural movements have chosen to forgo modern comforts in pursuit of a simpler life. In this illuminating alternative American history, Margot Anne Kelley details the evolution of food-centric utopian movements that were fueled by deep yearnings for unpolluted water and air, racial and gender equality, for peace, for a less consumerist lifestyle, for a sense of authenticity, for simplicity, for a healthy diet, and for a sustaining connection to the natural world.

Camas Davis was at an unhappy crossroads. A longtime magazine writer and editor in the food world, she'd returned to her home state of Oregon with her boyfriend from New York City to take an appealing job at a Portland lifestyle magazine. But neither job nor boyfriend delivered on her dreams, and in the span of a year, Davis was unemployed and on her own. Disillusioned by the years she’d spent mediating the lives of others for a living, she had no idea what to do next. She did know one thing: She no longer wanted to write about the real thing; she wanted to be the real thing.

Marine algae are the supreme eco-engineers of life: they oxygenate the waters, create habitat for countless other organisms, and form the base of a food chain that keeps our planet unique in the universe as we know it. In this audiobook Josie Iselin explores both the artistic and the biological presence of 16 seaweeds and kelps that live in the thin region where the Pacific Ocean converges with the North American continent - a place of incomparable richness.

In The End of Plenty, award-winning environmental journalist Joel K. Bourne Jr. puts our race to feed the world in dramatic perspective. With a skyrocketing world population and tightening global grain supplies spurring riots and revolutions, humanity must produce as much food in the next four decades as it has since the beginning of civilization to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe. Yet climate change could render half our farmland useless by century's end.

Caitlin Shetterly discovered the importance of GMOs the hard way. Shortly after she learned that her son had an alarming sensitivity to GMO corn, she was told that she had the same condition, and her family's daily existence changed forever. An expansion of Shetterly's viral Elle article "The Bad Seed", Modified delves deep into the heart of the matter - from the cornfields of Nebraska to the beekeeping conventions in Brussels - to shine a light on the people, the science, and the corporations behind the food we serve ourselves and our families every day.

Have you been dreaming of a way of living that brings you closer to nature, aligning with your passion for sustainability and wholesome food? Are you overwhelmed by the complexities of starting a small-scale farming business that exists in harmony with Mother Nature? Does the idea of creating an eco-friendly, self-sufficient business resonate with your vision of a fulfilling, purposeful life?

Bokashi is Japanese for "fermented organic matter". While bokashi has enjoyed great popularity in many parts of the world, it is still relatively unknown in North America. From scraps to soil, Bokashi Composting is the complete, step-by-step, do-it-yourself guide to this amazing process.

Barry Estabrook, author of the New York Times bestseller Tomatoland, now explores the dark side of the American pork industry. Drawing on his personal experiences raising pigs as well as his sharp investigative instincts, he covers the range of the human-porcine experience. He embarks on nocturnal feral pig hunts in Texas. He visits farmers who raise animals in vast confinement barns for Smithfield and Tyson, two of the country's biggest pork producers.

Whether you're aware of it or not, you've been born into a system of degeneration that harms the planet and every person and creature alive. In order for transformation to occur, says author Jordan Rubin, "You must make a decision to take steps today to become part of the solution". Planet Heal Thyself will teach you how to start a "revolution of regeneration" in the areas of health and nutrition, sustainable agriculture, and food production as well as economic prosperity and abundance.