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Grow better not bigger
AS LOCAL ORGANIC agriculture continues to flourish, young professional growers like Jean-Martin Fortier are leading the way with their innovative ideas about how to start a farm. Growing on just 1.5 acres, he and his wife have been making a good living from their vegetable operation for over 10 years, feeding more than 200 families through their thriving CSA and seasonal market stand.
Based on low-tech, high-yield methods of production, The Market Gardener is packed with practical information on:
The Market Gardener is a complete, modern, micro-scale farming handbook which shows that making a living wage growing food without large capital outlay or access to an acreage may be closer than you think.
This collection of articles--compiled primarily by Hugh Courtney from the periodical Applied Biodynamics--introduces the basics of making the essential biodynamic preparations. What is discussed in these articles is much more than just ways to make preparations successfully; it also represents, for the most part, Hugh's way of doing so with lots of practical tips for success. The articles are down to earth, literally, with very little theory, and provide the technical knowhow to make the biodynamic preparations described by Rudolf Steiner in his Agriculture Course and further developed ever since by several generations of biodynamic practitioners.
Biodynamics is a reorientation of agriculture to its primary purpose--not commerce, but life. Anthroposophy is not a fanatical movement, nor is it an iconoclastic movement. As Steiner says, we need cow horns to make the biodynamic preparations, but we do not need to be 'bull-headed' about it. -- Stewart LundyBiodynamics for Beginners, edited and introduced by Stewart Lundy and liberally illustrated throughout, is the perfect guidebook for anyone who is serious about becoming a successful, hands-on biodynamic farmer or gardener.
Updated for its 30th anniversary edition; [This book] remains as relevant as ever.--New York Times Book Review
Since its original publication in 1989, The New Organic Grower has been one of the most important farming books available, with pioneer Eliot Coleman leading the charge in the organic movement in the United States. Now fully illustrated and updated, this 30th Anniversary Edition is a must-have for any agricultural library.
Eliot Coleman's books and innovative methods have helped innumerable organic farmers build successful farms in deep accordance with nature. The wisdom in this seminal book holds true even as the modern agricultural canon has grown--in large part due to Coleman's influence as a wise elder with decades of experience. New information has been included in this edition to showcase the new tools and techniques that Eliot has been developing over the last thirty-five years.
Inspired by the European intensive growers, The New Organic Grower, 30th Anniversary Edition, offers a very approachable and productive form of farming that has proven to work well for the earth and its stewards for centuries. Gardeners working on 2.5 acres or less will find this book especially useful, as it offers proof that small-scale market growers and serious home gardeners can live good lives close to the land and make a profit at the same time. The New Organic Grower is ideal for young farmers just getting started, or gardeners seeking to expand into a more productive enterprise.
New material in this edition includes:
I was interested in the environment, farming, science . . . and there was Eliot's book lying on the shelf. I remember grabbing it, and I just FELL IN. . . . I remember reading it like it was the Bible.--Dan Barber, chef
From the bestselling author of The Market Gardener - key principles for biointensive market gardening and powerful stories of successful growers who are farming profitably on a human-scale
Microfarms is a guide to setting up and running profitable small-scale vegetable farms using organic, low-tech, and highly intensive production methods grounded in ecological principles.
This full-color, richly illustrated resource brings to life the core principles of Jean-Martin Fortier's time-tested approach and includes eight detailed case studies showcasing a diverse range of market gardeners who have started successful farms using Jean-Martin's biointensive techniques. Key features of the book include:
Microfarms champions local agriculture on a human-scale, advocating for a food system that honors the environment, nurtures communities, and supports farmers. This book is an essential read for new and aspiring small-scale farmers, market gardeners, homesteaders, proponents of local food systems, and food lovers everywhere.
The breakthrough resource for fruit and vegetable growers at every scale who want to go 'beyond organic' and build higher soil quality and fertility using fewer inputs through a unique ecosystem-balancing approach
Atthowe's book takes ecological farming to the next level. It is packed with useful, field-tested, innovative techniques for farming more gently without sacrificing productivity. . . This is the future of farming. I highly recommend this book.--Ben Hartman, author of The Lean Farm
The Ecological Farm is the go-to guide for ecological growing, with a unique focus on reduced tillage, minimizing farm and garden inputs, and pest control.
Reflecting the wisdom that farmer, consultant, and educator Helen Atthowe and her late husband, Carl Rosato, gained during decades of farming experience, this book guides readers on how to reduce or eliminate the use of outside inputs of fertilizer or pesticides--even those that are commonly used on certified organic orchards and market gardens. In clear language and with color photographs, charts, and graphs throughout, the book emphasizes the importance of managing the details of an entire growing system over the full life of the enterprise.
Based on advances in scientific research in ecological food production, farmers, homesteaders, permaculturists, and gardeners alike will learn methods to:
The Ecological Farm also features a crop-by-crop guide to growing more than 25 of the most popular and profitable vegetables and fruits, including specific management advice for dealing with pests and diseases.
The Ecological Farm makes complex, sometimes messy, ecological concepts and practices understandable to all growers, and makes healthy farming--in which nature is invited to participate--possible.
[This book] will guide all of us as we learn to farm in harmony with an ecosystem and to become obedient to the whole rather than being distracted by the urge to tinker with the parts.
--Wes Jackson, cofounder and president emeritus, The Land Institute
Seasoned and novice growers alike will find a mother lode of information and wisdom packed into this gem of a book!--Nancy Phillips, author of The Herbalist's Way
*Updated with new information about herb dryers and construction, soil fertility, growing cannabis, and more
In the first edition of The Organic Medicinal Herb Farmer, authors Jeff and Melanie Carpenter presented a comprehensive seed-to-bottle guide for aspiring and experienced growers alike, from basic business considerations to planting and propagation to creating value-added products. Now they're back with a revised and updated edition, sharing the lessons they've learned throughout their twenty-five years of operating a medicinal herb farm that prizes quality over quantity.
The Carpenters offer their insights and tips on every aspect of herb farming, including:
The Carpenters make the case that growing organic medicinal herbs is not only viable and profitable, but also an important step for improving the ecological health of farmland, taking pressure off of wild medicinal plant populations, and increasing biodiversity. While local foodways are more often the focus of attention, local medicine ways are equally critical and in need of restoration.
The Organic Medicinal Herb Farmer is a one-of-a-kind resource, complete with detailed profiles of 50 medicinal herbs and over 200 color photographs. Whether you're looking to grow an herb farm from the ground up, incorporate medicinal plants on an existing farm, or add tools to your belt as a seasoned grower, you'll find the information you need in this volume.
[A] beautiful and informative book . . . A dirt-smudged copy should be within easy reach of every home gardener or farmer who grows--or wants to grow--medicinal plants.--Michael McGuffin, President, American Herbal Products Association
Read this book to understand why you should care about regenerative agriculture. Until the public is better-informed and insists on sweeping changes to current agricultural policy . . . we will continue to degrade our planet and destabilize our climate. Leu and Cummins, through inspiring stories and solid science, show just how quickly we could turn that around.--Allan Savory, president, Savory Institute; chairman, Africa Centre for Holistic Management
Is it possible that the solution to the global climate emergency lies in a waste agricultural product?
The best-kept secret in today's world is that solutions to some of our most pressing issues--food insecurity, deforestation, overgrazing, water scarcity, rural poverty, forced migration--lie in adopting, improving, and scaling up organic and regenerative agriculture best practices.
The Regenerative Agriculture Solution starts with the story of how two brothers--Jose and Gilberto Flores--are at the leading edge of this approach, pioneering the use of the previously discarded leaves of the prodigious agave plant to regenerate agricultural soils, reduce erosion, and improve water capture.
When Ronnie Cummins, the cofounder of Organic Consumer Association (OCA) and Regeneration International, met the Flores brothers in 2019 and witnessed their revolutionary agave agroforestry system, he knew they were onto something important.
Cummins had spent decades studying the potential and pitfalls of organic and regenerative agriculture and knew best practices when he saw them. He started to write a book about Flores's brother and other visionary people, such as Dr Vandana Shiva, Allan Savory, and John Liu, who started landscape-scale regeneration projects. The scientific data was even more convincing, suggesting that these projects--and others like it--could revolutionize how we understand the climate catastrophe.
Sadly, Cummins passed away in April 2023, in the midst of working on the book. Not to leave this work unfinished, Ronnie's widow and OCA cofounder, Rose, called on their friend, colleague, and collaborator, Regeneration International's cofounder André Leu, to complete the work and place the Flores brothers' breakthroughs in the broader context of regenerative agriculture solutions to the world's many interlocking ecological crises.
The result isThe Regenerative Agriculture Solution, a book that shows how regenerating our forests, rangelands, and farming ecosystems can cool our planet, restore the climate, and enrich our communities.
Dr. Richard Olree believes that the key to the biological role of all trace minerals has been available to science for decades, but nobody realized it. Will his Standard Genetic Code Chart prove to be the Rosetta Stone of trace nutrients? Through sequencing the amino acids in the process of constructing proteins, Olree has traced all the elements to their participatory function in the life process.
In this cutting-edge book, the connection is made between the physical, chemical and biological aspects of minerals and subatomic particles in the life process, and assignment is made of the specific mineral that governs each entry in the genetic code. This knowledge, based on peer-reviewed medical literature as well as research by forgotten innovators, suggests an end to the tyranny of pharmaceuticals.
Each of the 64 sequences (or codons) in the Standard Genetic Chart is discussed with an overlay of the mineral involved - its absence leading to degenerative disease; its presence ensuring that health is maintained. Dr Olree's genetic mineral chart overlaps the 64 codons that are now a part of settled science.
This innovative book reveals a unique roadmap overlaying the body's deepest genetic need for specific minerals, classical chiropractic conditions, acupuncture meridians, and deficiency and disease indicators.
The Complete Practical Guide to Growing Vegetables Year-Round in Northern Climates for Local Markets
MANY SMALL FARMS shut down during the dark winter months. Yet with the right techniques, equipment, and cultivars, year-round growing can produce the highest quality and tastiest fresh local vegetables, all while banking a profit.
Building on years of research, experimentation, and collaboration, The Winter Market Gardener is a beautifully illustrated practical guide to winter vegetable production for small farmers growing in northern climates. Coverage includes:
Whether you are an experienced farmer or market grower, enthusiastic amateur, or committed consumer, The Winter Market Gardener will excite, inspire, and empower you to embrace the seasons and work with nature to produce and enjoy superior-quality local vegetables all year.
![The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook: A Complete Guide to Managing Finances, Crops, and Staff - And Making a Profit [With CDROM]](https://otimages.com/Bookcover/1424/9781603581424.jpg)
Contrary to popular belief, a good living can be made on an organic farm. What's required is farming smarter, not harder.
In The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook, Richard Wiswall shares advice on how to make your vegetable production more efficient, better manage your employees and finances, and turn a profit. From his twenty-seven years of experience at Cate Farm in Vermont, Wiswall knows firsthand the joys of starting and operating an organic farm--as well as the challenges of making a living from one. Farming offers fundamental satisfaction from producing food, working outdoors, being one's own boss, and working intimately with nature. But, unfortunately, many farmers avoid learning about the business end of farming; because of this, they often work harder than they need to, or quit farming altogether because of frustrating--and often avoidable--losses.
In this comprehensive business kit, Wiswall covers:
A companion toolkit, available for download upon purchase of the book, offers valuable business tools, including easy-to-use spreadsheets for projecting cash flow, a payroll calculator, comprehensive crop budgets for forty different crops, and tax planners.
Foodies and environmentally minded folks often struggle to understand and articulate the fundamental differences between the farming and food systems they endorse and those promoted by Monsanto and friends. With visceral stories and humor from Salatin's half-century as a lunatic farmer, Salatin contrasts the differences on many levels: practical, spiritual, social, economic, ecological, political, and nutritional.
In today's conventional food-production paradigm, any farm that is open-sourced, compost-fertilized, pasture-based, portably-infrastructured, solar-driven, multi-speciated, heavily peopled, and soil-building must be operated by a lunatic. Modern, normal, reasonable farmers erect No Trespassing signs, deplete soil, worship annuals, apply petroleum-based chemicals, produce only one commodity, erect Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, and discourage young people from farming.
Anyone looking for ammunition to defend a more localized, solar-driven, diversified food system will find an entire arsenal in these pages. With wit and humor honed during countless hours working on the farm he loves, and then interacting with conventional naysayers, Salatin brings the land to life, farming to sacredness, and food to ministry.
Divided into four main sections, the first deals with principles to nurture the earth, an idea mainline farming has never really endorsed. The second section describes food and fiber production, including the notion that most farmers don't care about nutrient density or taste because all they want is shipability and volume. The third section, titled Respect for Life, presents an apologetic for food sacredness and farming as a healing ministry. Only lunatics would want less machinery and pathogenicity. Oh, the ecstasy of not using drugs or paying bankers. How sad. The final section deals with promoting community, including the notion that more farmers would be a good thing.
7 selected lectures by Rudolf Steiner
In 1924--in response to questions about the depletion of soils and a general deterioration of crops and livestock--Rudolf Steiner gave eight lectures on the spiritual foundations for a renewal of agriculture. Based on his suggestions and spiritual science, generations of farmers, gardeners, viticulturist, and researchers developed biodynamics as a healing, nurturing, holistic, ecological, organic, and spiritual approach to a sustainable care of the Earth.
Biodynamic methods consider the farm or garden to be a self-contained organism, embedded in the living landscape of the Earth, which is in turn part of a living, dynamic cosmos of vital, spiritual energies. The aim is to increase the health and vitality of the whole, including the farmer or gardener. The biodynamic practitioner follows an alchemical, transformative path of working with the Earth through the nine homeopathic preparations created by Steiner.
What Is Biodynamics? collects seven seminal lectures--four on developing a spiritual perception of nature and three from his Agriculture Course, dealing with the preparations. Hugh Courtney of the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics contributes an informative, passionate, and visionary introduction.
Whether you are concerned with the quality of agriculture and gardening in particular or have a broader interest in the ecological crises facing us today, this book offers a transformative approach that can truly change the way we live together on Earth.
This is a newly edited revision of Albert Howard's important text on organic farming and gardening, and the central role of humus in maintaining soil health and fertility.
THE SOIL AND HEALTH is a detailed analysis of the vital role of humus and compost in soil health - and the importance of soil health to the health of crops and the humans who eat them. The author is keenly aware of the dead end which awaits humanity if we insist on growing our food using artificial fertilisers and poisons.
Albert Howard (1873-1947) was one of the leaders of the British organics movement in the mid-twentieth century. He was the first westerner to document and publish research on traditional techniques of agriculture, including Indian and Chinese farming and management of the soil.
Agriculture is the fundamental industry of the world and must be allowed to occupy the primary position in the economies of all countries. - Albert Howard
CONTENTS1 - Soil Fertility and Agriculture
1.1 The operations of Nature2 - Disease in Present-day Farming and Gardening
2.1 Diseases of the soil3 - The Problem of Manuring
3.1 The origins and scope of the problem
Are you looking for a holistic permaculture handbook that goes beyond the garden?
The Permaculture Student 2 The Workbook spans the full regenerative spectrum of permaculture with advanced permaculture recipes, how to's, formulas, diagrams, frameworks, strategies, methods, assessments, professional examples, & planning for all sites, people, & climates. This workbook extends and pairs with The Permaculture Student 2 The Textbook - a collection of regenerative solutions designed for advanced high school, college, and adult learners.
A regenerative future is possible - using the practices found in this workbook, you can start a regenerative business, take your home off the grid, and begin living a regenerative lifestyle of abundance.
The Soil and Health, a classic of organic farming, is an essential introduction to organic gardening and farming.
The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible. - Albert Howard.
At the turn of the twentieth century, chemical fertilizers seemed to offer limitless potential in agriculture. However, when British agriculturalist Albert Howard travelled to India as Imperial Economic Botanist to the Government of India, he observed Vedic agriculture as practiced by India peasant farmers, and noted the health benefits to plants, animals and humans from what we now call organic agriculture. Albert Howard, Rudolph Steiner and Lady Eve Balfour are considered the first proponents of organic agriculture.
In his own words: The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a dead or inert mass. There could be no greater misconception than to regard the earth as dead: a handful of soil is teeming with life. The living fungi, bacteria, and protozoa, invisibly present in the soil complex, are known as the soil population. This population of millions and millions of minute existences, quite invisible to our eyes of course, pursue their own lives.
The first duty of the agriculturalist must always be to understand that he is a part of Nature and cannot escape from his environment. He must therefore obey Nature's rules, Howard wrote. He believed that the farmer must work with nature instead of with chemical fertilizers and pesticides for long-term sustained yields. Howard's belief in the importance of manures, compost and mycorrhizal fungi is now generally accepted, and is echoed in the organic gardening motto, Feed the soil not the plant.
Sir Albert Howard presents a summary of his life's work in this book. Howard states This law is true for soil, plant, animal, and man: the health of these four is one connected chain.Anyone interested in organic gardening and farming will find this a fascinating book.
Sir Albert Howard (1873 - 1947) was an English botanist. He studied at Cambridge University as a Foundation Scholar and lectured in the West Indies and the United Kingdom. From 1905 to 1924 he was Imperial Economic Botanist in India. He promoted organic methods through the Rodale Institute in the USA and the Soil Association in the UK and is one of the pioneers in the field.
In Crop Rotation and Cover Cropping, you can learn some of the thinking behind--and the actual nuts and bolts of--laying out a rotation for your farm.
This volume, part of the NOFA guides, covers:
Including on-farm examples and detailed appendices.
