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Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule focuses on America's most-forgotten farmers: black families that cast their lot on their own land and depended on their own labor in a nation that doubted their right to control either. Rural African Americans have long been perceived as dependent tenants, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers. This collection of essays indicates that one in four black farm families overcame numerous obstacles by 1920 to own farm land. It does this without diminishing the serious nature of the opposition that limited their right to property and independent decision making. These essays indicate that black farmers who became farm owners and landowners should not be dismissed as anomalous economic success stories. Instead, they should be evaluated within the context of a larger social historical milieu. White landowners attempted to protect white's privileged status within the American agrarian ideal that linked landownership to morality and full citizenship. Black farm families had to overcome this philosophical barrier and additional obstacles posed by racism and sexism, the crop lien system of labor, debt, and unstable markets. Additional factors such as geographic isolation, limited crop and stock choices, mechanization, personal relationships, and kinship networks all affected black farm families in numerous and inconsistent ways. Beyond Forty Acres encourages readers to re-conceptualize small farms not as failure when compared to large-scale production agriculture but as an alternative approach specific to a time and place.

Two of the world's most pressing needs—biodiversity conservation and agricultural development in the Third World—are addressed in this multidisciplinary investigation in geography. The book challenges current opinion by showing that the world-renowned diversity of crops grown in the Andes may not be as hopelessly endangered as is widely believed. It uses the lengthy history of small-scale farming by Indians in Peru, including contemporary practices and attitudes, to shed light on prospects for the future. During prolonged fieldwork among Peru's Quechua peasants and villagers in the mountains near Cuzco, evidence that much of the region's biodiversity is being skillfully conserved on a de facto basis was found to be convincing, as has been true during centuries of tumultuous agrarian transitions. Diversity occurs unevenly, however, because of the inability of poorer Quechua farmers to plant the same variety as their well-off neighbors and because land use pressures differ in different locations. Social, political, and economic upheavals have accentuated the unevenness, and this book's geographical findings are all the more important as a result. Diversity is indeed at serious risk, but not necessarily for the same reasons that have been cited by others. The originality of this study is in its correlation of ecological conservation, ethnic expression, and economic development.

After the Civil War, a reinvigorated group of small farm owners emerged in North Carolina’s Lower Cape Fear region. Former slaves and landless freemen joined the established antebellum yeomanry in accumulating small farms carved out of the exhausted turpentine-producing forests of the region. This book explores their growth and decline between 1880 and 1980, focusing on how the simultaneous rise of the Jim Crow social order destroyed their ability to defend their interests as unified class. Small farm owners reemerged as a class at a particularly dynamic moment. Agrarian protest movements were sweeping the countryside. Thrust into commercial production and relations of debt, these farmers struggled to reconcile their ideological commitment to self-sufficiency with the merchant-driven demand for cash-crop production. Underway since the end of the nineteenth century, the gradual transformation of agriculture and rural society gained traction after World War II, dramatically reshaping the southern countryside and reducing the number of people who could make a living from farming through technological and scientific innovations. By focusing on small farmers in the South, this book recasts a central story in American history that is usually told from the standpoint of midwestern family farmers, or southern sharecroppers and plantation owners. Moreover, it rescues African American and Native American farm owners from a segregated realm of inquiry, analyzing them as part of the larger class of small farm owners.

Agriculture in the United States today increasingly operates in two separate spheres: Large, corporate-connected commodity production and distribution systems; and small-scale farms that market directly to consumers. As a result, midsize family-operated farms find it increasingly difficult to find and reach markets for their products. They are too big to use the direct marketing techniques of small farms but too small to take advantage of corporate marketing and distribution systems. This crisis of the midsize farm results in a rural America with weakened municipal tax bases, job losses, and population flight. This book discusses strategies for reviving an “agriculture of the middle” and creating a food system that works for midsize farms and ranches. Activists, practitioners, and scholars from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, political science, and economics, consider ways in which midsize farms can regain vitality by scaling up aspects of small farms’ operations to connect with consumers, organizing together to develop markets for their products, developing food supply chains that preserve farmer identity and are based on fair business agreements, and promoting public policies (at international, federal, state, and community levels) which address agriculture-of-the-middle issues. The book makes it clear that the demise of midsize farms and ranches is not a foregone conclusion and that the renewal of an agriculture of the middle will benefit all participants in the food system, from growers to consumers.

The only major U.S. railroad to be operated by westerners and the only railroad built from west to east, the Southern Pacific acquired a unique history and character. It also acquired a reputation, especially in California, as a railroad that people loved to hate. This magisterial history tells the full story of the Southern Pacific, shattering myths about the company that have prevailed to this day. It explores the railroad's development and influence—especially as it affected land settlement, agriculture, water policy, and the environment—and offers a new perspective on the tremendous, often surprising, role the company played in shaping the American West. Based on unprecedented and extensive research into the company's historical archives, the book finds that, contrary to conventional understanding, the Southern Pacific Company identified its corporate well-being with population growth and social and economic development in the railroad's hinterland. As it traces the complex and shifting intersections between corporate and public interest, the book documents the railroad's little-known promotion of land distribution, small-scale farming, scientific agriculture, and less-wasteful environmental practices and policies—including water conservation and wilderness and recreational parklands preservation.

The familiar story of the Civil War tells of a predominately agricultural South pitted against a rapidly industrializing North. However, this book argues that the Republican Party’s political ideology was fundamentally agrarian. Believing that small farms owned by families for generations led to a model society, Republicans supported a northern agricultural ideal in opposition to southern plantation agriculture, which destroyed the land’s productivity, required constant western expansion, and produced an elite landed gentry hostile to the Union. The book shows how agrarian republicanism shaped the debate over slavery’s expansion, spurred the creation of the Department of Agriculture and the passage of the Homestead Act, and laid the foundation for the development of the earliest nature parks.

The majority of the poor and hungry people in the world live on small farms and struggle to subsist on too little land with low input – low yield technologies. At the same time, many other smallholders are successfully intensifying and succeeding as farm businesses, often in combination with diversification into off-farm sources of income. This book examines the growing divergence between subsistence and business oriented small farms, and discusses how this divergence has been impacted by population growth, trends in farm size distribution, urbanisation, off-farm income diversification, and the globalisation of agricultural value chains. It finds that a situation has arisen where policy makers need to differentiate more sharply than in the past between different types of small farms, both in terms of their potential contributions towards achieving national economic growth, poverty alleviation and food security goals, and the types of assistance they need. The book distinguishes between smallholders that are business oriented, subsistence oriented, and at various stages of transition to the nonfarm economy, and discusses strategies appropriate for assisting each type. The book draws on a wealth of recent experience at IFAD and elsewhere to help identify best practice approaches.

Our morning cups of coffee connect us to a global industry and, also, to an export crisis in the tropics that is destroying livelihoods, undermining the cohesion of families and communities, and threatening ecosystems. This book explores the crisis facing small-scale coffee farmers of Mexico and Central America, the political economy of the global coffee industry, the coffee producers’ response to this crisis, and the initiatives that claim to promote more sustainable rural development among coffee-producing communities. The contributors review the historical, political, economic, and agroecological processes involved in today’s coffee industry and analyze the severely depressed export market that small-scale growers in Mexico and Central America encounters. The book presents a series of interdisciplinary case studies showing how small-scale farmers manage ecosystems and organize collectively as they seek useful collaboration with international NGOs and coffee companies to create opportunities for themselves in the coffee market. The findings demonstrate the interconnections between the livelihoods of farmers, biodiversity, conservation, and changing coffee markets. Additional chapters examine alternative trade practices, certification, and eco-labeling, and discuss the politics and market growth of organic, shade-grown, and Fair Trade coffees.