From the small town of Columbus, Georgia to the big city of Tampa Bay, Florida, Rita Lowman has plowed her own path. Her story takes readers on a journey of strength, tenacity, and drive that has bucked the idea of a simple job and replaced it with a brilliant career. Her roots in a small town gave her the courage and the strength to keep pushing through the herd and taking her place at the head of the Florida banking industry.

Farm boy, Don Aslett, is the owner of several businesses and Chairman of Varsity Contractors Inc., a professional cleaning company that he founded and built from the ground up using the ethics and ambition from the "ranch" approach.

Moving from rural Georgia in 1959 with $35 saved from picking cotton and a high school diploma tucked away in his pocket, Joseph D. Greene embarked on a long journey in pursuit of success. His first stop landed him a job with an insurance company as a door-to-door salesman. After a long string of promotions, he became executive vice president/chief marketing officer and a member of the company's board of directors. He continued his education while enjoying an astounding fast-track career, earning a bachelor's and master's degree. The author's commitment to public service would lead to a series of firsts. He became the first African-American elected to public office in McDuffie County, Georgia when he was elected to the county's board of education. He would become the first African-American to sit on dozens of governing boards. He would eventually become chairman of Georgia's University System Board of Regents, presiding over the state's thirty-four colleges and universities. Today, in addition to teaching at Augusta State University, Greene serves as a director of the Georgia Council on Economic Education, conducts financial-planning workshops, and publishes articles on finance and economics. Joseph Greene's triumph over poverty and adversity will inspire you to look at your own life and ask if you've done everything you can to pursue your own dreams, be the best you can be, and give back to your community.

“Always a better way” was WD Farr’s motto. As a Colorado rancher, banker, cattle feeder, and expert in irrigation, Farr (1910–2007) had a unique talent for building consensus and instigating change in an industry known for its conservatism. With his persistent optimism and gregarious personality, Farr’s influence extended from next-door neighbors and business colleagues to U.S. presidents and foreign dignitaries. In this biography, Daniel Tyler chronicles Farr’s singular life and career. At the same time, he tells a broader story of sweeping changes in agricultural production and irrigated agriculture in Colorado and across the West during the twentieth century. WD was a third-generation descendant of western farming pioneers, who specialized in sheep feeding. While learning all he could from his father and grandfather, WD developed a new vision: to make cattle profitable. He sought out experienced livestock experts to help him devise ways to produce beef year-round. When World War II ended, and the troops came home tired of wartime mutton, the beef industry took off. With his new innovations in place, WD was ready. Tyler also reveals WD’s influence in securing water supplies for farmers and ranchers and in establishing water conservation policies. Early in his career, WD helped sell the Colorado–Big Thompson Project to skeptical, debt-ridden farmers. In 1955, he became a board member for the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, a post he held for forty years. Tyler bases his portrait of WD Farr on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with people who knew him personally or by reputation. In the end, Tyler shows that although not everybody agreed, or will agree, with Farr’s stands on particular issues, this “cowboy in the boardroom” led by his own example. By embracing change and seeking consensus rather than forcing his will on others, his greatest legacy—as revealed in this book—may be the model of leadership he provided.

More than 84 per cent of professional rugby players in South Africa are going to find it difficult to survive financially once they stop playing rugby. How will they find success in their new careers once their rugby jerseys have been washed for the last time? From Locker Room to Boardroom explores how former South African rugby players culled certain traits from their playing days and applied them to their enterprises in order to make a successful transition from the rugby field (the locker room) to the business world (the boardroom). Naas Botha, Gary Teichmann, Joel Stransky, François Pienaar, Kevin de Klerk, Breyton Paulse and Kobus Wiese, to name but a few, share the many challenges they faced and the different strategies they employed on the road to establishing the single factor that, more than any other, lies at the root of their business success. Filled with entertaining anecdotes, sound practical advice and pioneering business models, From Locker Room to Boardroom provides a unique and fascinating approach to achieving success in the commercial world.

In Farm, Joyce Kinkead, Evelyn Funda, and Lynne S. McNeill explore the culture of agriculture through a diverse and multicultural collection of fiction, poetry, essays, art, recipes, and folklore. This reader views farming through a variety of lenses, asking students to consider what farms, farming, and farmers mean, and have meant, to culture in the United States. In the text, readers are guided through the Jeffersonian idealism of the yeoman farmer (“cultivators of the earth are the chosen people of God”) to literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Thoreau’s “The Bean-Field,” Cather’s prairie trilogy, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Carpenter’s Farm City). Contributors provide historical context for the literary texts, such as discussion of sharecropping vs. plantation systems, the rise of agribusiness and chemical farming, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission. Written, visual, and oral texts ask readers to consider the farm in art (Grant Wood), ecology (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), children’s and young adult literature (classic children’s books, YA novels, nonfiction, and poetry), advertising (from early boosterism to Chipotle videos), print culture (farmers’ market and victory garden posters from both world wars), folklore (food culture, vintners, and veterinarian practices), popular culture (Farm Aid concerts), and much more. Each reading is supported by activities, exercises, projects, and visual rhetorical elements that further connect students to agriculture and the essential work of farmers.

Rooikraal Revisited: Farming During Apartheid is an autobiographical and nostalgic study of a life left behind. Dylan Weston lived on a dairy farm, Rooikraal, during the Apartheid regime and this collection documents the people, places, interests, and recollections of life in rural South Africa. The bitterness of Apartheid, its inhumanity, is shown—but the good will of the common folk who shared their lives on these "islands of civilization" known as farms is also appreciated and enjoyed. Some of the stories tell of the political impact on the lives of common people, while others tell of human suffering and superstition. Several of the stories describe adventures with animals—farm animals generally, but also the great serpent the Rinkhals. The stories are all true and the experiences real. This is a period of South African life under white domination which has been swept away, and yet on seeing the destruction not of a political system but a thriving community—Rooikraal—great nostalgia fills the author. The people she knew and loved are gone. There are few traces of their lives and of their sense of community left on Rooikraal. The lesson of life, which she learns, is that one can never return to the land of yore; it lives only in the heart and memory—where in the retelling it seems to gain a sense of reality.

THE PREAMBLE PARTS ONE AND TWO Set in Australia in the 23rd century. The earth is dying, the only food available is grown in massive Aquaponic farms. Moulders is the story of the farm personnel, engineers, scientists, computer programmers, botanists and the mysterious Moulders! The story takes us from Australia to South Africa, India and Sri Lanka.

Ned C. Clausens launched his career in advertising at age twenty from the mailroom of the legendary Madison Avenue agency, J. Walter Thompson. From those humble beginnings, he won a variety of roles at New York ad agencies and trade organizations, landing a front-row seat in an industry that has undergone a series of dynamicand sometimes dramatic changesover the last several decades. In this memoir, he recalls his experiences, which were primarily in the business-to-business sector. Along the way, he shares insights on: discovering your passion in life; starting from the bottom and working your way up; and managing a clients marketing communications. With the exception of serving three years in the U.S. Army during the 1960s, Clausen spent fifty-four years in the advertising industry, rubbing elbows with some of the most fascinating people in the world of business. His story is one of good fortune and having the wits to survive and thrive from the creative revolution of the 1960s, through the agency mega-merger of the 1980s, to the digital revolution of today.