"Drawing on the details of contemporary accounts from Caithness to East Anglia, this book tells the human and environmental story of the Age of Improvement. It is a book for all those interested in landscape history and the social history of Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."--Jacket.

This volume explores how the archaeologist or historian can understand variations in landscapes. Making use of a wide range of sources and techniques, including archaeological material, documentary sources, and maps, Rippon illustrates how local and regional variations in the 'historic landscape' can be understood.

Income and wealth for farm bus. have changed noticeably this decade. Debt levels have been rising, asset levels have outpaced debt despite a recent fall in land prices, and equity has more than doubled for farm bus. However, recent declines in farm income and falling land prices have raised concerns about the financial position of U.S. farms. Total farm sector debt reached a record $240 billion in 2008, a $26 billion increase over 2007. Debt is expected to decline to $234 billion in 2009. In 1986, nearly 60% of farms used debt financing. By 2007, the number had dropped to 31%. In essence, farm debt has become more concentrated in fewer, larger farm businesses. Lenders and farm operators indicate that real estate accounts for the largest use of farm debt.

“Charles Massy has written a definitive masterpiece that takes its place along with the writings of Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Masanobu Fukuoka, Humberto Maturana, and Michael Pollan. No work has more brilliantly defined regenerative agriculture and the breadth of its restorative impact upon human health, biodiversity, climate, and ecological intelligence." --Paul Hawken In Call of the Reed Warbler, Charles Massy explores regenerative agriculture and the vital connection between our soil and our health. It is the story of how a grassroots revolution—a true underground insurgency—can save the planet, help reduce and reverse climate change, and build healthy people and healthy communities, pivoting significantly on our relationship with growing and consuming food. Using his personal experience as a touchstone—from an unknowing, chemical-using farmer with dead soils to a radical ecologist farmer carefully regenerating a 2000-hectare property to a state of natural health—Massy tells the real story behind industrial agriculture and the global profit-obsessed corporations driving it. With evocative stories, he shows how other innovative and courageous farmers are finding a new way. At stake is not only a revolution in human health and in our communities, but the very survival of the planet. For farmers, backyard gardeners, food buyers, health workers, policy makers, and public leaders alike, Call of the Reed Warbler offers a tangible path forward and a powerful and moving paean of hope. It’s not too late to regenerate the earth. Call of the Reed Warbler shows the way forward for the future of our food supply, our planet, and our health.

The third duke of Buccleuch (17461812) presided over the management of one of Britain's largest landed estates during a period of profound agrarian, social and political change. Tutored by the philosopher Adam Smith, the duke was also a leading patron of the Scottish Enlightenment, lauded by the Edinburgh literati as an exemplar of patriotic nobility and civic virtue, while his alliance with Henry Dundas dominated Scottish politics for almost 40 years. Combining the approaches of intellectual, economic and agrarian history, this book examines the life and career of the third duke, focusing in particular on his relationship with Adam Smith and the improvement of his vast Border estates, assessing the influence of Enlightenment thought on agricultural revolution. In its exploration of the cultural as well as the economic roots of Improvement and in its assessment of a previously unappreciated aspect of Smith's career, this book has appeal for both specialist scholars and general readers interested in the Scottish Enlightenment and the culture of Improvement in 18th-century Scotland.

An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

The life of the poor rural worker appears to have been one of unmitigated toil within an unequal society, a reality seldom endorsed in paintings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The contemporary viewer, who constituted less than three per cent of the population, wished to see visions of the idyllic golden landscapes of Merrie England peopled by happy contented workers, or, alternatively, images of the Big House, a feature and phenomenon now marching over the countryside, fed by a new building frenzy. This particular element would soon evolve into an all-consuming preoccupation for the wealthy throughout the period. Members of the upper echelons of society, with their families all attired in fine silks and satins, look out at their audience from ornately framed canvases as individuals. Yet the rural poor, the rabble at the gates, the unseen workforce, who toiled at the behest of the Master, are virtually unknown. They have left few records. Enclosure came at a price. The Poorhouse beckoned. And still the agricultural labourer did virtually nothing, for most of the eighteenth century, to protest or rebel against the inequalities of his downtrodden existence. Only the dreaded behemoth of the nineteenth century, the threshing machine, would stir him into action. How would it end?

"Drawn from two conferences of the Vernacular Architecture Forum--one held in Charleston in 1994, and the other in Ottawa in 1995"--Back cover.

Carrying the story of the rural landscape into our frantic era, he describes the bow wavewhere city life meets rural agriculture and plots the effect of recreation and its structures on the look of the land.

Between the 17th and 19th centuries, the sport of hunting was transformed: the principal prey changed from deer to fox, and the methods of pursuit were revolutionized. Questioning the traditional explanation of the hunting transition—namely that change in the landscape led to a decline of the deer population—this book explores the terrain of Northamptonshire during that time period and seeks alternative justifications. Arguing that the many changes that hunting underwent in England were directly related to the transformation of the hunting horse, this in-depth account demonstrates how the near-thoroughbred horse became the mount of choice for those who hunted in the shires. This book shows how, quite literally, the thrill of the chase drove the hunting transition.