Farming Books

'Advances in Agronomy, Volume 73', left me bewildered. Nowhere in the text did I find reference to the well-researched fact that those who practice agronomy, and who have been convicted of it, are usually recidivists who can never be rehabilitated. So therefore, how has the topic been advanced? Society should be protected from agronomists and their vile deeds. I might sound harsh, but I say that all agronomists should be locked up for life and rendered hormonally inert through the administration of impulse-destroying chemicals.

This book's content is not true to it's title. A small protion of this book is dedicated to history,cultivation, and propagation. The remainder and majority of the book is a list of cultivars. Photographs are few,so even as a cultivar list resource I found this poor. As a grower of boxwood I was disappointed by this book.

This book is by far the best all around worm guide I have ever read. It contains the most comprehensive information available to start raising worms for home use or profit.

Despite the ambitious title of this book, the projects found inside, ranging from planting a terrarium to creating a Japanese rock garden, are a bit lacking. The reader is given only the most vague growing information without any scientific background or general gardening knowledge. The author, in fact, recommends that the reader seek out books on roses for her Rose Garden project! While flowers and herbs are included in the book's projects, vegetables are completely overlooked. However, the illustrations are absolutely beautiful, very Victorian in nature, and are inspirational in their sheer floriferous-ness. Although this is not a "one stop shop" book, the basic project ideas combined with the illustrations, may provide a very beginning young gardener with some incentives to get growing!

The book is a collection of papers from a 1997 workshop. The main objective of the workshop was to integrate research results on pesticides, minerals, global warming, and landscape and nature into practical methods to identify and operationalize environmental indicators within the European Union (EU). Moreover, the editors emphasize in their introduction (preceding the individual contributions that are presented as chapters) that cross-national and long-term comparisons of environmental indicators require consistent methodologies.

Although this is certainly not the first time that the central idea of "...we need one consistent methodology to identify and operationalize indicators..." is expressed, the introduction to the book raises hope that, finally, a book is published that at least attempts to formulate such a methodology.

The book is divided into five parts: a general introduction to environmental indicators in the European Union, a discussion on biodiversity and landscape indicators, a discussion on pollution indicators, different perspectives on the relation between policy and sustainable development, and a discussion and conclusions.

The quality of the paper varies widely. Only few papers are well-written and contain clear practical illustrations. Several papers are too general to be translated into practical methods. Others are too wordy and too muddled to even finish reading them at all. In general, more accurate articles and books on qualitative and quantitative aspects concerning identification, selection, and operationalization indicators have been published.

What especially attracts attention while reading the various papers in this book is that there is no general agreement on how to identify and operationalize environmental indicators. Recalling that the editors hold out the prospect for a "consistent methodology," the discussion of the individual contributions is a disappointment. It is certainly not easy to integrate the wide variety of opinions expressed, but this book provides no new outlook at all on a consistent methodology. Moreover, the discussion refers more to external literature than reviewing contributions in the book itself.

The publisher's claim on the back of the book that "it is essential reading for agricultural and environmental economists and policy makers," therefore, is out of proportion. Although some chapters are well worth reading, "Environmental Indicators and Agricultural Policy" at best is a reasonable reference work on the current status of environmental indicators in the EU.

My advice: borrow, don't buy...

This book wasn't that great, although this book is good enough to give more then one star (2 Stars). This book didn't provide that much imformation, but at least this book was better then the 1 stared (*) "Eyewitness Witches and Magic Makers".

Not alot of information about how to do anything or how they lived. Lots of better books out there

This mis-named book is about nothing other than the application of economic decision-making frameworks to farm management decisions. It says nothing about the context - social, institutional, political, economic, external - of Australian agriculture, nor does it say anything about how to raise animals or grow crops, nor will it help policy analysts in applying social cost-benefit analysis. On the other hand, it is a very comprehensive treatment of its chosen topic, and demonstrates that even techniques of a high level of conceptual sophistication can be applied to practical farm management decisions. The non-treatment of ecological sustainability issues will raise the ire of many - particularly the curtly inappropriate dismissal of agro-forestry. Sustainability issues can be incorporated into the decision-making framework recommended by the authors - indeed, doing so would have aided their message, as long as the discussion of time preference - discounting etc - was also adjusted to recognise the different "discount rates" that should apply to sustainability issues.

I bought this book hoping that it would have information that would be useful to both me (moderate horse experience) and my husband (no horse experience). It turned out to be too basic for me and overwhelming for him. It would be a great book for someone wanting a broad overview of the horse farm business. It was very well written and contained loads of information - just not exactly what I was looking for this time.

This book is a broad survey based for the most part on secondary sources. Good surveys should do two things; they should reflect the depth of the literature on the topic and they should unite what is often an inchoate literature into a unified study. This title accomplishes neither of these goals. Particularly the chapters on prehistoric American Indian agriculture are based on a rather thin reading of the literature. One might think a book w/ this title couldn't dodge major scholarly debates such as the one concerning the magnitude of the influence of Mesoamerica on North American agriculture, but it does. The chapters concerning American Indian agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries are better, though I'd hardly call them definitive. Considering the book is well organized and clearly written, it is ashame the author's skills weren't complemented by more thorough research and deeper reflection.