Farming Books

If you are interested in learning what's behind the headlines concerning genetically modified crops and foods, this is a good choice. The author is a professor of biological sciences at British Columbia's Simon Fraser University, and clearly knows what he is writing about. He traces the history of GM crops and presents the controversies concerning them in a balanced way. That balance is both the book's strength and weakness. Winston gives the pro- and anti-GM arguments equal time, and describes them in an even-handed way. However, the absence of a strongly stated point of view made the book less interesting, at least to me. Actually, Winston does have a point of view, which he reveals towards the end of the book. He thinks that the issues swirling around GM agriculture and foods can and should be resovled with a lot less rhetoric and more reason. Given the depth of feelings on the side of people and groups opposed to GM agriculture and foods, and the amount of money at stake for companies developing and pushing them, the author's hope for reasonable solutions seems admirable, but perhaps naive. Still, if you want a factual, balanced account of the GM issue to date, this book would certainly be useful.

Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From The Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley, 2002).

A pared down and supposedly simplified version of the author's Ph.D. thesis, this book discusses the economic development of Pre-confederation Ontario and Quebec. Taking into account geographic, geopolitical and sociological aspects of the two provinces, the author shows how it was that Ontario gradually emerged to be the more vibrant and important economic center. But trust me, this is not exactly easy reading; this is the type of book that must be studied to be appreciated. Anyone seeking to do so will be greatly rewarded.

This book covers the changing of the guard in American politics, when authority was no longer unquestioned and citizens were learning how to organize and exert their positions. In hindsight, it is amazing that such an ill conceived idea as transporting 800,000 cubic yards of water over 100 miles to irrigate land inherently unsuited to irrigation could have held sway for three decades before being exposed as impractical. The fact that this feat was accomplished by a handful of citizens, against the united desires of the press and business and political leaders, makes it even more interesting reading.

During the period that this drama was being acted out, I served as a Special Assistant to the Governor of South Dakota, and I was impressed by the clear, interesting and straightforward telling of this story. While I would dispute some of the details, to a reader that did not live out this drama, these are of a minor consequence. As the staff member that authorized funding of the study of transporting Missouri River water to Wyoming, I can assure the readers that this study was done solely to determine the impact of providing clean, fresh water to ranches and small communities in western South Dakota and was completely unrelated to the Oahe project. Governor Kneip quickly distanced himself from this study when objections arose from our political base in eastern South Dakota. This study, however, documented the importance of clean water supplies to the public health and the raising of livestock. The rural water systems that were created in the wake of Oahe addressed this need and as the author noted, this was the lasting legacy of the Oahe Project.

There is a natural tendency in books like this to paint the good guys as pure and the establishment as universally bad. In this case as part of the establishment, there were major differences of opinion within the Kneip administration on the feasibility and desirability of the Oahe Project. The decision to "leak" and make public a wide array of documents that were destined to aid the opponents was thoroughly debated and I admire Governor Kneip's tolerance of those that prevailed in providing the public the truth.

The lesson that citizens can overcome incredible odds in fighting proposed developments is a fascinating story that deserved telling.

I purchased this book as a gift for my boyfriend. I don't know much about it but he was pleased with it.

Good coffee table style book on antique farm tractors. Covers all major manufactures and a chapter on orphans. Shows a good range of tractors for each make, but not the full line or history. Great color pictures. Above average for this style of general book on antique tractors.

Consisting of 19 survey papers by various authors, this book attempts to overview research into what the editors have called "Web Intelligence". All of the topics included in the book are interesting, and very important in both academia and industry as the World Wide Web continues to evolve into a more powerful research tool and Ecommerce engine. Due to space constraints, only the first eight articles will be reviewed here.

After an introductory article on what will be emphasized in the book, the next article deals with how to interpret strong regularities in Web data in terms of user decision-making patterns, and then to describe an agent-based approach to the characterization of user behavior. This article stands out from the others in that it endeavors to be quantitative. For example, heavy-tailed probability distributions are used to model regularities in Web data, and the authors construct an artificial Web space that includes information foraging agents living in it. The authors then compare their model with real-world data, obtaining fairly good agreement.

In the third article, the authors overview the work on DAML-S, a version of the DARPA Agent Markup Language, and which is one of the attempts to create a "semantic Web". The goal of the semantic Web is in their view is to construct reusable, high-level, generic procedures that can be customized for individual use, and also, and most importantly to be able to reason about the content that is the result of Web queries. The authors describe the 3 different conceptual areas of DAML-S, and the 3 different processes making it up. They also discuss the advantages in using agent-oriented software engineering in Web services. The emphasize strongly that the semantic Web should not be merely a knowledge repository, but should exhibit behavorial intelligence.

The authors of the fourth article discuss the design and use of social agents in Web applications. Using Scheme, they have developed a language they call Q, to develop interaction scenarios between agents and users. I cannot speak to the efficacy of Q in building avatars and other agents since I have never used it, but the authors assert that it can execute hundreds of scenarios simultaneously, and allows for autonomous agents.

Web-based education was one of the first uses of the Web, and in chapter 5 the authors show it can be improved via the use of agent technology. Their emphasis is on guidebots, which are animated agents or avatars that interact with learners via a combination of speech and gestures. They also describe the Advanced Distance Education (ADE) architecture for Web-based instruction, and discuss a medical application. Most interesting is their use of Bayesian networks in their construction of guidebots.

The acquisition of business intelligence is discussed in chapter 6. The very difficult notion of "interestingness" whose definition plagues most research in artificial intelligence, is addressed in the context of relevant business information on the WWW. The authors discuss a system, coded in C++ and based on vector space representations and association rule mining, that will gather information on companies for eventual comparisons to be made between them. Five methods are used to compare a user site to a competitor site, and the time complexity of each is discussed.

Chapter 7 overviews a technique for mining (negative) association patterns in Web usage data, called "indirect association". In this technique, one finds pairs of pages negatively correlated with each other, but that are accessed together via a common set of pages called the "mediator". Indirect association is supposed to give information on the interests of Web users who share common traversal paths, in order for example to target users for marketing. Crucial in the definition of indirect association is a measure for dependence between itemsets, and the authors discuss a few of these measures. Sequential indirect associations are defined, and the authors discuss three types of these: Convergence, which represents the different ways of entering a frequent sequence; Divergence, which illustrates how the interest of Web users being to diverge from the frequent sequence; and Transitivity, which illustrates how users can enter the frequent sequence through a particular page rarely go to another. The psuedocode for the "INDIRECT" algorithm is given, and the authors describe two methods to reduce the number of discovered patterns by combining indirect associations. The authors then describe how they validated their algorithm by testing it on Web server logs from a university site and an online Web store. They conclude from these tests that indirect associations are helpful in the identification of different groups of Web users who share a similar traversal path.

The next chapter deals with some of the issues that are involved in the extraction of information from the Web, with emphasis on automatic extraction methods that use wrapper induction. A wrapper is a procedure that understands information taken from a source and translates it into a form that is then used to extract particular "features". The trick is to design a wrapper that is intelligent enough to work for many different sources made up of different presentation formats. The authors classify wrappers into manual, heuristic wrapper induction, and knowledge-based wrapper induction. After arguing that manual and heuristic wrapper induction are unsuitable for efficient and intelligent information extraction, they then concentrate attention on a knowledge-based wrapper induction, wherein wrappers are built automatically. Their implementation is called XTROS, written in Java, which does wrapper generation by first converting HTML sources into logical lines, then determining the meaning of logical lines, and then finding the most frequent pattern. The wrapper is then formatted in XML, and the information is then extracted by the interpreter of XTROS, which parses the XML wrapper to build extraction rules and then applies these rules to the search results. The authors describe their performance evaluation of XTROS using a precision and recall measure. The authors remark that XTROS is limited in that it only works for labeled documents, and point to the need for constructing a wrapper learning agent for multidomain environments.

This book is written with a great sense of humor and a great sense of reality. Starting with a brief discription of various cattle/sheep working breeds, Mr. Seis goes on to clearly describe how to train a working dog for sheep or cattle. He covers not only the very basics, but also includes information on dog health and housing. A must for anyone training an intelligent dog for ranch work. (the Australian vernacular is interesting also. Know what a dunny is?)

I'm sure this book was fantastic when if first came out back in the 1940's, but there are way better resources today that provide the information you seek without putting you to sleep or boring you with irrelevant topics on outdated technology.

If you don't mind a dry read (I fell asleep ever five pages) and have read all of the other books there might be some gems in here worth checking out. Otherwise, I'd say save your money and buy something more applicable to farming in the new millenium.

While many things have changed in our culture, economy and technology since this book was written in the 1930's, there is still a great amount of basic farming information that can be applied to today's small farmer. If you're a modern homesteader looking to return to a simpler life outside the hustle and bustle of even "smaller-town life", this book will only give you a reasonable insight into the general rhythm of the farming life... but don't look for specific answers to off-grid living or 100% eco-friendly methods.

This book may also offend those modern homesteaders or small farmers who see an intrinsic value in the land and animals rather than just looking at everything as a financial profit or loss. However, from the principles outlined in this book, you will get a good idea of things you need to investigate farther and things you absolutely don't want to do. Even some of the outdated recommendations are good because they serve as an example of what the modern eco-farm should NOT be doing. It's all in the way you look at things and what your definition of "profit" is (I found it helped me get through this book to assume "profit" meant "aligning with my values" and not just money.)

All-in-all, it's still a valuable resource written by someone who is an actual farmer (albeit one of days gone by) and not by an idealist/theorist with more anecdotes and agenda than actual experience. There were lots of pitfalls and drawbacks listed in this book that I hadn't considered before... but rather than being disheartened (or blindly taking his advice to quit) I've started researching ways around them. Good for a starting point and keeping on the bookshelf for reference when you're planning next years crops or have problems with soil or crop yields.

Mr. Logsdon is a real farmer. Really! I say that without the sarcastic pun that he assigns to it. I am so thirsty for a knowledge of farming, and while I like the Extension Agency employees (they are dedicated and anxious to help), it is essential to read the truth about farming -- without the influence of the large agriculture bastards who have taken the nutrition out of our food and reingineered seeds to withstand extremely toxic Roundup sprayed over the fields! We eat that stuff! Anyone who wants live a productive life and touch the earth should Logsdon, Kingsolver, and other experienced small farmers. Thank you, Mr. Logsdon for documenting the experiences of farming and land/water stewardship. You are a gem!

Hey, did you know that giving away all your produce free to your neighbors is bad business? Wow, whoda thunkit? Do you know the definition of organic fetilizer? See p. 159: "of vegetable and animal origin". Hm... no mention of hormones, pesticides or antibiotics. How about info on selecting your 1930's model wheelhoe (p. 191)?

Dover Publications specializes in this type of ripoff. They add a little bit of nothing, postdate the copyright and voila! People pay good money thinking they are getting current information.

Do not buy this book to find the latest and greatest information on farming or living independently. But if you want "Old School" wisdom etc on farming and independent living get this book. Many of the principles in the book are timeless and apply as much today as they did when the book was written.

Did not think I as going to enjoy this book, it is very different to her other novels. However, I kept with it was not disappointed. I would recommend this book if you were already familiar with Willa Cather's work as it is strickingly different to My Antionia and Oh Pioneers! yet continues the underlying themes of both books.

Willa Cather's "One of Ours" is a wonderful book that I enjoyed reading again --- the first time was perhaps 40 years ago --- and in fact I got more from it this time around. I disagree with the criticisms in other reviews leveled against the war scenes. My father served in the trenches in WWI, and he felt this novel was surprisingly authentic. That WAS a different time, and people --- justifyably or not --- WERE more idealistic then.
It is unfortunate that this edition by the Aegypan Press is so poor. It is filled with typos --- they even call the hero "Clause" twice on one page. (His name was Claude.) Also, they could have spent a dime or two and included a short history of this novel; when it was written, the fact that it won a Pulitzer, etc., etc. That might just be of interest to readers less familiar with Cather's work.

WILLA CATHER HAS A UNIQUE WAY OF USING OLD WORLD PROSE IN HER DESCRIPTIONS OF EARLY AMERICAN LIFE. THIS IS A COMPELLING STORY OF LIFE IN THE NEBRASKA FARM COUNTRY AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY. HER CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT IS VERY RICH IN THAT SHE SUBLIMBLY WEAVES THE LIFE OF CLAUDE HER MAIN CHARACTER THROUGH HIS YOUTH. IT IS AN IMPORTANT WORK BECAUSE CATHER REMINDS US OF HOW IMPORTANT COURAGE IS, AND THAT MORAL, SPIRITUAL AND ETHICAL LIFE WAS AND STILL IS IMPORTANT. A FAST READ.

Numerous typo errors. Don't think anyone proof read the text. This is definitely not the copy one should buy. No introductory essay or comments.

Man oh man...the description of Claude and Enid's wedding night and "marriage" is timeless!

Solviva is a book everyone should read if they are interested in growing their own food, and to learn other methods to live a sustainable life.

Book covers in general terms information about a passive solar home and greenhouse. Heavy on sustainable living and growing but light on construction details and author only theorizes that one could make $500,000 on an acre but never did it. Despite those short comings it still is a great book with ideas and experiences that will simulate the environmental conscious person.

I finally bought this book after hearing about it years ago. I regret not buying it back then. I love this book.

Solviva is a fresh and brillant exploration of the complexities involved in constructing a solar home. Anna Edey is beautifully human as she describes her real life adversity in bringing such a complex project into fruition.

Edey is an honest and telling author. She articulates her emotion involved in creating the energy necessary to endeavor so seemingly innocent and simplistic a notion as a house that you sustain and that sustains you as you sustain the Earth.

She vividly describes having to consider the marketing and distribution not to mention profit margins of raising organic restaurant quality garden vegetables and greens within the confines of her modest solar home.

With candor she conveys how interesting ones life becomes while taking on rabbits, chickens, and goats as a part of ones daily life, and indeed, in fact, as co habitants in as much as they too survived within the small solar house and that their presence yielded a profit.

Edey humbly describes discovering each vegetable and green with such surprise and satisfaction and that her vegetables were in fact prize winning and well sought after.

Because of the biproducts of such an efficently contained microecosystem Edey is able to support herself and her lifestyle comfortably within a selfsustaining home. Not without the residual income of the modern associate but with the profit yielded from her ingenius business and gardening method.

Ultimately the complexity of the solar structure itself combined with Edey's originality and genius in housing and growing botanicals within the solar home, in addition to the interactivity of the animals at the house, combine to make a kind of EARTHSHIP that does inevitably produce a profit.

I am a gardener with a few years of experience and a lot of book learning on the subject. This is my opinion, after reading the book, and coming to it from that point of view.

If you aren't very well read on gardening or mini-farming, I'd recommend skipping this book until you've read a few others, such as Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening, Jeavons books on biointensive gardening, and a few others. Otherwise you'll buy too deeply into what Edey is trying to sell.

If you are pretty well read on the topic and have gardening/mini-farming experience, then the book is a reasonable weekend read.

Either way, unless you're extremely flush with cash, I wouldn't buy the book, I'd only spend time on it if it's available from the library.

The title is misleading, the "How To Grow $500,000 On One Acre" is catchy, but not realistic. The author says that her "gross income was up to $50,000 a year," (pg 158). "up to" ought to raise an eyebrow. I'm supposing that the reader is supposed to assume that the author grossed $50K, but that's not what it says. It also wasn't indicated how many years this was achieved, though there was an earlier reference to the author working at it for 8 years. There wasn't also a hard indicator regarding how long it took to build up to this, the term "soon" was used, but could mean just about anything.

The author then made some seriously goofball (in my opinion) extrapolations: that if the set up had been run more professionally, the author would have been earning well over $100k; that if a full acre was used, then that would obviously mean earnings would be over $500k. There's nothing to support such claims. In fact, at one point she indicated that "gross income never did reach much beyond the $50,000." Throw in the fact that this is gross income, and suddenly the whole agribusiness angle of "Solviva" doesn't look so great, despite what the author "believes."

There are a lot of other places in the book that don't read that well. For example, many other books address composting more thoroughly and clearly. At one point the author discussing composting toilets, incorrectly refers to humanure and nightsoil as being the same thing, and discusses what she "believes" to be the best way for handling it. Want to read about the best ways of handling human waste, that are based on actual research and experimentation? Read the Humanure Handbook, it explains the whys and wherefores much better and more clearly than Solviva.

There were a lot of things like that, such as her assumption that because she was having an insect pest explosion and suddenly the problem decreased that it must be beneficial predator insects catching up. This was just some assumption that she decided was true, based on her deciding it was so, when in fact there could have been many different reasons.

I will say this about the book: there was a lot of stuff about the authors opinions about the state of the world. If you're interested in Edey's world view, then certainly this is the book for you. If you're looking for a guide for small farming or gardening, I'd say pass. If you're interested in reading about the topic, there are way better books to put your money and time into. But if you've already read all those, and Solviva is available in the local library, maybe it's worth some time.