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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

The inspirational story of a former Microsoft executive’s quest to build libraries around the world and share the love of books What’s happened since John Wood left Microsoft to change the world? Just ask six million kids in the poorest regions of Asia and Africa. In 1999, at the age of thirty-five, Wood quit a lucrative career to found the nonprofit Room to Read. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world,” he strived to bring the lessons of the corporate world to the nonprofit sector—and succeeded spectacularly. In his acclaimed first book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, Wood explained his vision and the story of his start-up. Now, he tackles the organization’s next steps and its latest challenges—from managing expansion to raising money in a collapsing economy to publishing books for children who literally have no books in their native language. At its heart, Creating Room to Read shares moving stories of the people Room to Read works to help: impoverished children whose schools and villages have been swept away by war or natural disaster and girls whose educations would otherwise be ignored. People at the highest levels of finance, government, and philanthropy will embrace the opportunity to learn Wood’s inspiring business model and blueprint for doing good. And general readers will love Creating Room to Read for its spellbinding story of one man’s mission to put books within every child’s reach.

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.