NCW Libraries

Leads the reader through the design process, linking theory to practice.

"The Permaculture Orchard : Beyond Organic is a feature-length educational film that will teach you how to set up your own permaculture orchard at any scale. We recognize the limitations of the organic model as a substitute to conventional fruit growing, and want to propose a more holistic, regenerative approach based on permaculture principles. Based on 20 years of applied theory and trial and error, biologist and educator Stefan Sobkowiak shares...

Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases. 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,...

"Drawing on advances in soil ecology, George Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionizing our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and chemicals; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein...

Forty years ago, corporate agribusiness launched a campaign to push small grain farmers to modernize or perish, or as Nixon's secretary of agriculture Earl Butz put it, "get big or get out." But 27-year-old David Oien decided to take a stand when he dropped out of grad school to return to his family's 280-acre farm, becoming the first in his conservative Montana county to plant a radically different crop: organic lentils. A cheap, healthy source of...

Debunking the Notion that our current food crisis must he addressed through industrial agriculture and genetic modification, author and activist Vandana Shiva argues that those forces are in fact the ones responsible for the hunger problem in the first place. Who Really Feeds the World? is a powerful manifesto calling for agricultural justice and genuine sustainability, drawing upon Shiva's thirty years of research and accomplishments in the field....

"In this book an ecological anthropologist, who has studied farming systems from small-scale African hoe cultivators to industrial American agribusiness, provides a new analysis of population and agricultural growth. This book argues that we can't make sense of population and food production without recognizing the drivers of three fundamentally different types of agriculture. It identifies and explores these three fundamental forms of agricultural...

The bananas we eat today aren't our parents' bananas: We eat a recognizable, consistent fruit that was standardized in the 1960s from dozens into one basic banana. But because of that, the banana we love is dangerously susceptible to a pathogen that might wipe them out. That's the story of our food today: Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance--once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone the hardiest,...