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This chapter explores the use of animals for food and the realities of farmed-animal law. It shows how farmed animals receive no effective legal protection in the U.S.A., and details how the law to determine whether or not a farming practice is illegally cruel has been altered to transfer the power from the court to the farmed-animal industry. The chapter provides a concrete sense of the extent of the problem and of what should be done about it.

This chapter tests the traditional appreciation of farming in the past, based on crop rotations of two or three crops followed by a fallow year, against the evidence-based practice of 18th- and 19th-century farmers. Not only was farming more complex than this, but it also changed and therefore evolved according to farmers' assessments of the market and the diffusion of new crops and techniques. Through measurements derived from farmers' records, the magnitude of this evolution is measured and in particular the temporal diffusion of the Norfolk four course systems of new crops based on the nitrogen cycle is assessed. At the same time, there was a revolution taking place in soil improvements through soil conditioning and fertilizing, and these are also measured and assessed.

This chapter examines the mole (foundation) and the hiʻohiʻona (elements) that form the traditions of growing kalo—the former offers key concepts, and the latter considers the details and provides examples of how that manifests in farm practice. Mole is both a foundation and a source—a place of beginnings and underpinnings. The word is inhabited by the kalo, first as taproot and ancestral root and as the name given to the smooth, round bottom of a pōhaku kuʻiʻai (stone pounder), the tool traditionally used to turn kalo into poi. Each of these mole is further broken down into hiʻohiʻona, or its visible, physical elements and characteristics: the topography, plants, rocks, soil, water, and other resources.

This book explores the role of economic and technological factors in determining agricultural farming practices. The importance of neutralizing these factors to bring about changes in the agricultural practices is discussed. The book explores the trend of privatization of applied agricultural research, which, according to the advisors, is not a good trend for smaller, less-secure growers. It also focuses on the negative impact on the environment of industrial agriculture, which, in turn, is a concern for the future of U.S. food production. The role of intellectuals and scholars in providing new ideas for agricultural practices that would help change the legislative and regulatory practices regarding agriculture is also discussed.

Chapter Three proceeds as a walk undertaken with the women in Usuthu Gorge, a ward situated at the precise juncture of South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland. Framed as an extended narrative, the walk, and the walking songs that accompany it, chronicle women’s lives in the borderlands, linking specific sites and localities to memories about childhood, kinship ties, linguistic identities and women’s livelihood practices. Embedded in this conversation is an intimate exposition of what it means to live at the edge of three nation states, where the political topography and institutional patchiness emerges in its sharpest relief, and where the ecologies of constraint and opportunity affect a constant process of adaptation, hybridity and motion.

This chapter examines preserved cereal remains and animal bones dating from the Roman period. It concludes that: in the Roman, middle medieval, and post-medieval periods there were marked regional variations in farming practice across the different pays of the study area; certain districts have consistently had the same distinctive patterns of agriculture, and this tends to be where the geology leads to soils that impose particular constraints upon agriculture; and while some distinctive agricultural practices show continuity from the Roman through to the medieval period, others do not.

This chapter examines regional variation in farming practice across the different pays of South West England. The assessment of some easily accessible documentary sources suggests that there were indeed marked regional variations in agricultural regimes across the study area, with some long-lasting patterns such as the generally mixed farming regimes to the west of the Blackdown Hills, and some more specialized husbandry to the east. Within this big picture of regional variation, there were also very marked local variations between particular pays such as dairying in the Somerset lowlands and sheep and corn husbandry on the chalk downland. Palaeoenvironmental sequences show that the lowland areas of the South West and western Wessex were extensively cleared of trees by the late prehistoric period, although more woodland survived in hilly/upland areas such as the Blackdown Hills. The Roman period saw some intensification both to the east and the west of the Blackdowns, and while there may have seen some reversal of this in the early medieval period particularly in more Romanized areas to the east, there was no extensive woodland regeneration.

This chapter examines preserved cereal remains and animal bones from medieval sites. It shows that in terms of medieval arable cultivation, a line can be drawn through the Blackdown Hills between areas to the west whose albeit unquantified charred cereal assemblages are characterized by diverse cropping regimes including significant amounts of oats, and those to the east that were more specialized being mostly dominated by wheat, but with barley particularly significant on the chalk downland, and rye on the Dorset heathlands.