Agro Commodities & Agricultural Produts

You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise Have you ever desired, deep within your soul, to make a comfortable full-time living from a farming enterprise? Too often people dare not even vocalize this desire because it seems absurd. It’s like thinking the unthinkable.After all, the farm population is dwindling. It takes too much capital to start. The pay is too low. The working conditions are dusty, smelly and noisy: not the place to raise a family. This is all true, and more, for most farmers.But for farm entrepreneurs, the opportunities for a farm family business have never been greater. The aging farm population is creating cavernous niches begging to be filled by creative visionaries who will go in dynamic new directions. As the industrial agriculture complex crumbles and our culture clambers for clean food, the countryside beckons anew with profitable farming opportunities.While this book can be helpful to all farmers, it targets the…. Click here to Read More

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, “The Price of Tomatoes,” investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have…. Click here to Read More

Organic Coffee: Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers (Ohio RIS Latin America Series) Despite deepening poverty and environmental degradation throughout rural Latin America, Mayan peasant farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, are creating an environmental and economic success by growing organic coffee. Organic Coffee: Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers provides a unique and vivid insight into how this coffee is grown, harvested, processed, and marketed to consumers in the North. Maria Elena Martinez-Torres explains how Mayan farmers have capitalized on their ethnic networks to make a crucial difference in their approach to agriculture. Taking us inside Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state, scene of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, she examines the anatomy of the on-going organic coffee boom and the efffects of the free-trade movement. The energy behind this phenomenon arises from very poor farmers forming cooperatives, revaluing their ethnic identity, and adding value to their land…. Click here to Read More

Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens, 3rd Edition Here is all the information you need to successfully raise chickens — from choosing breeds and hatching chicks to building coops, keeping the birds healthy, and protecting them from predators. This revised third edition contains a new chapter on training chickens and understanding their intelligence, expanded coverage of hobby farming, and up-to-date information on chicken health issues, including avian influenza and fowl first aid. List Price: $ 19.95 Price: $…. Click here to Read More

The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre! Put your backyard to work! Enjoy fresher, organic, better-tasting food all the time. The solution is as close as your own backyard. Grow the vegetables and fruits your family loves; keep bees; raise chickens, goats, or even a cow. The Backyard Homestead shows you how it’s done. And when the harvest is in, you’ll learn how to cook, preserve, cure, brew, or pickle the fruits of your labor.From a quarter of an acre, you can harvest 1,400 eggs, 50 pounds of wheat, 60 pounds of fruit, 2,000 pounds of vegetables, 280 pounds of pork, 75 pounds of nuts. List Price: $ 18.95 Price: $…. Click here to Read More

Tropical Vegetable Production Sustainable crop production is vital to ensure that supplies of fresh vegetables and their products are readily available. However, food security still remains a huge problem in areas of the world, including the tropics and sub-tropics, where communities rely solely on subsistence farming to meet their day-to-day food demands. It is evident that food production needs to become more sustainable to ensure economic stability and poverty reduction. With this in mind, Tropical Vegetable Production addresses the problems surrounding vegetable production in developing countries. Divided into two parts, this volume discusses first the principles and practice of tropical vegetable production, from site selection, security and management to seeds, crop preparation and pesticides, and second, provides details of those crops which are of particular importance in developing countries. List Price: $ 125.00 Price: $…. Click here to Read More

Brave New Seeds: The Threat of GM Crops to Farmers (Global Issues Series) Consumers have taken the lead in rejecting the biotech industry’s determination to foist GMOs on an unsuspecting and unconsulted public. This book gives a voice for the first time to farmers. They are the people being pressured by giant corporations to grow genetically engineered crops. What are the possible downsides for them, particularly for those hundreds of millions of farmers living in the developing countries? This important book is a lucid explanation of what is happening. List Price: $ 20.95 Price: $…. Click here to Read More

The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre! Put your backyard to work! Enjoy fresher, organic, better-tasting food all the time. The solution is as close as your own backyard. Grow the vegetables and fruits your family loves; keep bees; raise chickens, goats, or even a cow. The Backyard Homestead shows you how it’s done. And when the harvest is in, you’ll learn how to cook, preserve, cure, brew, or pickle the fruits of your labor.From a quarter of an acre, you can harvest 1,400 eggs, 50 pounds of wheat, 60 pounds of fruit, 2,000 pounds of vegetables, 280 pounds of pork, 75 pounds of nuts.Put your backyard to work! Enjoy fresher, organic, better-tasting food all the time. The solution is as close as your own backyard. Grow the vegetables and fruits your family loves; keep bees; raise chickens, goats, or even a cow. The Backyard Homestead shows you how it’s done. And when the harvest is in, you’ll learn how to cook, preserve, cure, brew, or pickle…. Click here to Read More

The Banana: Empires, Trade Wars, and Globalization (At Table) The banana is the world’s most important fresh fruit commodity. Little more than a century old, the global banana industry began in the late 1880s as a result of technological advances such as refrigerated shipping, which facilitated the transportation of this highly perishable good to distant markets. Since its inception the banana industry has been fraught with controversy, exhibiting many of the issues underlying the basic global economic relations that first emerged in the era of European colonialism. Perhaps more than any other agricultural product, the banana reflects the evolution of the world economy. At each stage changes in the global economy manifested themselves in the economic geography of banana production and trade. This remains true today as neoliberal imperatives drive the globalization process and mandate freer trade, influencing the patterns of the transatlantic banana trade. The Banana…. Click here to Read More