Farming Books

This is, without reservation, the single-best source of information on swine farming.

No person intending to earn a living with pigs should be without this book.

Want to raise 10 sows on open range? Want to raise a hundred sows in confinement? This book will help you make money in the 21st Century!

Tabitha June
Is a Shoulder Cat
By Nina Osier

Yes, I volunteered to Review this book before I knew what the title was. I heard from someone that Nina had some books that she needed reviewing and since Nina had done some work for me I felt an obligation to help her. Frankly I hate cats they make me deathly ill. I am allergic to even the smallest amount of their fur. My daughter has three cats and I won't go to see her because I know I will wind up in the hospital with Pneumonia, if I do.
Certainly, just reading a book about Cats can't make me sick. If anything it might help me learn to live a healthy life with cats. Well I am here to tell you, after reading the book, I am still afraid to try to live around cats but I have a much better knowledge of cats than I did before reading the book. In fact I thoroughly enjoyed Tabitha June Is a Shoulder Cat. Nina did such a good job of explaining how cats think and act and why they act and think the way they do. With all that said lets get on with the review. The setting of the book was in Maine. I spent one winter in Maine when I was a young boy in the U S Navy and know how cold it can get there in the winter. Nina came from a small family with one older sister and a mother and grandmother that both loved and had cats. It was from the time Nina was a little girl because that is where her story begins. It was only natural that Nina loved cats. Her mother and grandmother taught her how to raise and love cats and why some cats were different that others and they all had different personalities. There were dogs and cats at Nina's home when she was small and cats and other animals at her grandmother's house on an island where they all went to stay with grandmother and granddad during the very cold winter months. They took the dogs and cats with them on those winter jaunts. The dogs and cats would get sick from riding in the car on the way to grannies and would take them a little time to get over the car sickness.
After they were settled at grannies the cats would all go out and hunt on the farm if hunting was what they liked to do. Most all of the cats and dogs died in the story and after Nina moved out on the own she would get down to three cats and she would swear she didn't have room for any more cats. Then she would see a pet of the week advertised in the paper as a cat needing a home and she would have to go look at it and most often wound up coming home with two because she said, they looked so alone in the box or what they were in after she got the one she wanted, that I had to have both of them. The cats were always into some kind of trouble the older cats at home were teaching and she was teaching the young kittens what they should do. I would estimate that Nina keep an average of four to five cats and to use her own words speaking of the last two she brought home, "Life's cycle continues, and this pair is at its start right now. As I watch their delight in simply existing, and share their pleasure in experiencing each moment as it happens, my own joy in living is constantly renewed." That is the kind of person Nina M. Osier really is. She is a writer of Science Fiction and gives her life to others and cats. I am in a writing group with Nina NUW, Not the Usual Way, and I get to follow her comments through the message board and she is always helping others. She has her own way about teaching cats and I think it spills over to helping grown ups. She is always able to help any one needing it.
Reviewed by Jack Prather Published Author.

_Talking the Talk_ discusses how the Western scientific tradition has influenced which discourses count as "valid" professional communication; this has been to the exclusion of discourses that are "unconventional" (i.e., cannot be measured via scientific protocols). Historically, certain features of agrarian discourses, such as the heavy reliance upon anecdotal narrative, have invalidated these discourses as unconventional.

With the recent, dramatic changes in agriculture, however, so too have agrarian discourses changed. _Talking_ chronicles an Iowa State University Extension program as representative of these changes and their impact on Iowa's family farms today.

This book should be compulsory reading for students in development. It tells of all sorts of idiotic projects and idiotic consultants, and of a few good ones. It gives a view of after-office-hours life that is true for some expatriates, those with a liver of steel that is. In both cases, the regretted author does not shy away from the naked truth, but does not just deliver it for the sake of it. His depictions of the night-life and his depiction of development are always full of common sense, a rare commodity. Much to learn there. Why make a study to prove that farmers with dry irrigation canals fare worse than those with functioning canals ? Why make a study to prove that villages with electricity are better off than villages with candles ?

Last, but not least, all respecting expats should try to play golf, Bandung rules. Does your common sense not tell you that golf is just a GAME ?

A great book. Real pity that it has been allowed to go out of print. Reissue or new edition badly needed. Much interest in these old machines. R.

This book is my 3 year old son's favorite book. He bacame fasinated with it before his first birthday and has loved it ever since. It has clear and colorful pictures of not only tractors but also other farm equipment. Each page features a picture and a concise easy to read sentence stating the purpose of the pictured equipment. This book displays a variety of manufacturers' lines of farming equipment.

Knowledgeably written by Maxwell Foran (who has worked and studied Western Canadian history for over thirty years), Trails & Trials: Markets And Land Use In Alberta Beef Cattle Industry 1881-1948 is an involving, detailed, specialized history which explores the Canadian cattle ranching era at the turn of the century, agriculture, changes in the markets, the impact of the Great Depression, World War II, and includes the beginning of the postwar period. Black-and-white photographs, maps, and tables illustrate and illuminate this extensively researched, scholarly study of a microcosm of historic Canadian economics.

The topic is taken within a wide context--from South Africa to Prince Edward Island and Scotland, from Mexico and the United States to Germany. The period of time covered is wide also--from the 1500s to the present. The 11 collected essays treat the movement of "crops and techniques of cultivation, rumors, radical plebeian ideas, workers, sailors, and prisoners" in spreading political and social ideas throughout this wide area over the several centuries. This is seen as a kind of cross-pollenization, or a vein of globalization going on in the countries touched by the Atlantic since the Renaissance. In places, some authors discuss how the cultivation of a new crop such as corn or potatoes or tobacco brought to another country or an overseas market for it played a role in the dissemination and formation of agrarianism. One learns that there are historical and ongoing ways other than diplomacy, wars, books and the media, and immigration that particular ideas and perspectives spread in the world. These ideas spread and are shaped both by acceptance of them and resistance to them. Except for a couple, the essays' authors are college professors of history. The editors are authors of books in the areas of agrarianism and political and social ideas.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in persuing tropical agroforestry. It is full of information, covers social and political ramifications and obstacles to tropical agroforestry, BUT, it is USD114, which is quite high. Having said that, it is a fantastic book and well written, refuting some of the hype of the 1980s, but still very optimistic about agroforestry. For anyone who wants to know the nuts and bolts of these systems, this is your book.
I work in organic cacao production, and know much about TA, however, nearly every page has me learning new things, realizing that the problems we face here are problems shared by others elsewhere, or seeing things in a new light.
The writer is well informed and clearlyu empathetizes with small scale producers.

"Domestic cattle are ubiquitous" the authors begin. They back this up with statistics: cattle produce 90% of the world's milk, 30% of it's meat; globally, there is one bovine for every four humans; cattle represent the largest sector of agriculture throughout most of the world, and the dominant one in many countries. That is particularly true throughout the developing world which contains 70% of the global cattle population, and where demand for livestock products is expected to treble over the coming four decades. These facts set the context for this book. The cattle sector in tropical countries is an enormous and valuable resource, on which hundreds of millions of people are heavily dependent, and which faces historically unprecedented pressures for change. The authors have set out to document these cattle populations, their past and present, and even to map their future. I believe they have succeeded well beyond their declared ambitions. In effect, this book is a compendium of three separate works. The first section, titled Origins and History, is the most authoritative and coherent account of the domestication of cattle of subsequent movements of cattle, with the expansion of human husbandry, and of the place of cattle in evolving societies. A preliminary chapter reviews the archaeological evidence, and subsequent chapters deal with the spread of cattle types and systems in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The previous literature in this area is not very satisfactory. The further back one goes, the fewer the facts and the greater the room for unchallenged speculation. Much of the accepted wisdom has been based on little more than assertions of position by individual scholars. The authors have carefully reviewed all of this earlier work. They have rejected some theories such as that of Epstein and Mason on sequential migration from Western Asia as the source of African cattle. In other areas, they have strengthened our confidence in existing interpretations. They also have the good sense to identify the large areas where judgement must be withheld for the moment. Clearly, this section of the book was written some time ago. This means that there is little discussion of the exciting new layers of information that are coming from studies on molecular evolution in cattle populations, though these are noted in the last section of the book, under new technologies. This new work has already greatly clarified such questions as the origins and interactions of the Zebu and Taurus strains in Africa, and will undoubtedly lead to a much more complete picture of the origins and spread of cattle. In future editions of Payne and Hodges, it should have a substantial place. That being said, this review of the subject is better than anything that precedes it. Over 50% of the world's 800 or so identified cattle breeds are to be found in the tropics. The second section of Tropical Cattle is a detailed catalogue which covers 211 of the most notable of these. It begins with a discussion on breed classification, and moves on to breeds of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This section can be compared with Mason's " World Dictionary of Breeds Livestock" (1996) and Maule's "Cattle of the Tropics" (1990). It also updates Payne's own "Cattle Production in the Tropics" Volume 1 (1970). It is less lavish (no colour) than the recently published "Cattle Breeds - an encyclopaedia" by Marleen Felius. It is as comprehensive as such a catalogue needs to be. The place of such inventories of breeds will eventually be taken by the electronic database being assembled under the FAO led Global Animal Genetic Resources Program. Freed from the limitations of the printed medium, this will have the capacity for layers of information at whatever level of detail will be required by different users. The third section of the book, entitled "Breeding Policies", looks to the place of cattle in tropical farming systems and in particular to their genetic management and improvement. The coverage of the literature in this field is excellent, and the discussion thorough. It is informed by the experience of both authors over many decades of observing and advising on improvement of cattle in tropical countries. Their convictions are clear and unequivocal: programmed models of genetic improvement from developed economies have little chance of success, because appropriate breeding and production objectives are much more diffuse, and because the infrastructure they need (AI, recording systems) often does not exist. Likewise, breed transplants from the developed world more often than not fail. The case the authors make is persuasive and convincing. They go on to review the spectrum of cattle breeding strategies available. These range from cautious improvement of adapted local breeds, through a series of cross-breeding options to, in exceptional circumstances, breed replacement. Each case is different, and above all, requires careful study of the needs and motivation of cattle owners. They, and not governments or international agencies, ultimately control cattle breeding policy. This is a book of serious scholarship and yet with a very practical intent. For a long time into the future it will undoubtedly be the best source for those interested in the origins, background and breed variation in cattle throughout the tropical world. It will also, I believe, be the essential starting point for those professionally involved in the improvement of cattle and cattle production systems in developing countries. The wisdom and the lessons of the past have been