Agricultural Extension Quotes

. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people. Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home. The lawn has become the curse of modern town landscapes as sugar cane is the curse of the lowland coastal tropics, and cattle the curse of the semi-arid and arid rangelands. It is past time to tax lawns (or any wasteful consumption), and to devote that tax to third world relief. I would suggest a tax of $5 per square metre for both public and private lawns, updated annually, until all but useful lawns are eliminated.

As on Easter Island and at Chaco Canyon, Maya peak population numbers were followed swiftly by political and social collapse. Paralleling the eventual extension of agriculture from Easter Island's coastal lowlands to its uplands, and from the Mimbres floodplain to the hills, Copan's inhabitants also expanded from the floodplain to the more fragile hill slopes, leaving them with a larger population to feed when the agricultural boom in the hills went bust. Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster-reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels.

. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people. Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home.

In Scandanavia, 'Iverson finds that the whole spectrum of pollen deposits is altered when (in early Neolithic times) ... the first farmers appear. Cereal pollens increase. Plants of oak woodland lessen and disappear; birch pollen increases rapidly -- it is one of the trees which can come in after an extensive burn. For the pollen record, the effect of early agriculture is as severe as a shift in climate.

. . .biographers tend to regard as character those elements of personality that remain constant, or nearly so, throughout. . .Like practitioners of fractal geometry, biographers seek patterns that persist as one moves from micro- to macro-levels of analysis, and back again. . . . It follows from this that the scale across which we seek similarity need not be chronological. Consider the following incidents in the life of Stalin between 1929 and 1940, arranged not by dates but in terms of ascending horror. Start with the parrot he kept in a cage in his Kremlin apartment. The dictator had the habit of pacing up and down for long periods of time, smoking his pipe, brooding, and occasionally spitting on the floor. One day the parrot tried to mimic Stalin's spitting. He immediately reached into the cage with his pipe and crushed the parrot's head. A very micro-level event, you might well say, so what? But then you learn that Stalin, while on vacation in the Crimea, was once kept awake by a barking dog. It turned out to be a seeing-eye dog that belonged to a blind peasant. The dog wound up being shot, and the peasant wound up in the Gulag. And then you learn that Stalin drove his independently minded second wife, who tried to talk back to him, into committing suicide. And that he arranged for Trotsky, who also talked back, to be assassinated halfway around the world. And that he arranged as well the deaths of as many of Trotsky's associates that he could reach, as well as the deaths of hundred of thousands of other people who never had anything to do with Trotsky. And that when his own people began to talk back by resisting the collectivization of agriculture, he allowed some fourteen million of them to die from the resulting starvation, exile, or imprisonment. Again, there's self-similarity across scale, except that the scale this time is a body count. It's a fractal geometry of terror. Stalin's character extended across time and space, to be sure, but what's most striking about it is its extension across scale: the fact that his behavior seemed much the same in large matters, small matters, and most of those that lay in between.

But nothing encapsulated the subordinate status of wives more obviously than the fact that their domestic labour was unpaid. ‘They are excluded from the realm of exchange and consequently have no value,’ wrote Delphy. Even outside the home, women were more likely than men to work as volunteers. This couldn’t be explained by the nature of the work they were doing. It wasn’t that cleaning, cooking, caring, or doing agricultural work were always unpaid. People could be hired to do these jobs, and these workers would expect to receive wages. It wasn’t the case, either, that wives were getting nothing in return. It’s just that what they were getting in return was so little. The wife’s job was to work, honour, and obey, Delphy concluded. What she got in return was upkeep. This situation was so obviously exploitative that ‘when a farmer couldn’t afford to hire a domestic worker he took a wife’. Delphy’s argument was that, rather than her work being worthless in monetary terms, it was a wife’s relationship to production that gave her labour so little value. It was because she was a wife doing it, in the same way that if a slave were doing it, they wouldn’t be paid either. In the family, and by extension in wider society, the product of her labour was seen to belong to her husband.

Books are an absolute necessity. I always have at least two with me wherever I go, to say nothing of my digital collection, and whenever I can get my hands on a delicious new reading piece, I will finish it at a slackened pace, to savour it with all the esteem it deserves, gratulating in its pleasance, deliciating in every word with ardent affection. I have an extensive library that I could never do without, and there are at least four books decorating every surface in my house. A table is not properly set without a book to furnish it. Half of my great collection is non-fiction, mostly science and history books, ranging from the archaeological to the agricultural, and my fiction section is dedicated to the classics, mostly books published before the world forgot about exquisite prose. I have all the greats in hardcover, but I do not read those: hardcover is for smelling and touching only. For all my favourite authors, I have reading copies, which I might take with me anywhere, to read in cafes or to be used as a swatting tool for unwanted visitors, but books are always fashionable even as ornaments; everyone likes a reader, for a good collection of books betrays a intellectualism that is becoming at anytime. Never succumb to the friable wills of those who reject the majesty of books: there is nothing so repelling as willful illiteracy.

However, when pesticides are sprayed over large agricultural areas, they kill a large fraction of the total insect population, ensuring that the hardy survivors breed only with other hardy survivors; the very next generation may display resistance. The more extensive the agricultural use, the more likely bugs are to evolve resistance rapidly, and the less effective the pesticide is likely to be when you need it for disease control.

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

It wasn't easy, however, to get rich in Tibet. The hard ground and extreme cold precluded extensive agriculture- most Tibetans still depend on yak meat and barley flour- and little infrastructure for heavy industries existed outside Lhasa. The high altitude, an average elevation of thirty-five hundred meters, and low oxygen deterred many outsiders. The only thing that Tibet seemed to possess in great quantity was its religion and an exotic past that the Chinese discovered could be packaged and sold to tourists.

The investigator Sam Dash* chronicled the rise of corporate espionage involving bugging and wiretapping during the early twentieth century in his classic book The Eavesdroppers. He found corporate spying in small towns and in the nation’s capital. In Toledo, Ohio, in 1932, for example, investigators came across an extensive wiretap setup in a hotel room next to the headquarters of an agricultural group, the Farmers’ Producers Association. This group had been discussing boosting the price of milk, and the evidence showed that the room had been bugged for days.

John Ruskin did not go to school. Nor did Queen Victoria, nor John Stuart Mill, George Eliot or Harriet Martineau. It would be absurd to suggest that Disraeli, Dickens, Newman or Darwin, to name four very different figures, who attended various schools for short spells in their boyhood, owed very much to their schooling. Had they been born in a later generation, school would have loomed much larger in their psychological stories, if only because they would have spent so much longer there, and found themselves preparing for public examinations. It is hard not to feel that a strong ‘syllabus’, or a school ethos, might have cramped the style of all four and that in their different ways – Disraeli, comparatively rich, anarchically foppish, indiscriminately bookish; Darwin, considered a dunce, but clearly – as he excitedly learned to shoot, to fish and to bird-watch – beginning his revolutionary relationship with the natural world; Newman, imagining himself an angel; Dickens, escaping the ignominy of his circumstances through theatrical and comedic internalized role-play – they were lucky to have been born before the Age of Control. For the well-meaning educational reforms of the 1860s were the ultimate extension of those Benthamite exercises in control which had begun in the 1820s and 1830s. Having exercised their sway over the poor, the criminals, the agricultural and industrial classes, the civil service and – this was next – the military, the controllers had turned to the last free spirits left, the last potential anarchists: the children.

We might be excused our ignorance in this case, because ocean-atmosphere systems are, after all, almost inconceivably complex. Less easy to excuse is our astounding lack of knowledge of much more visible features of our planet’s natural resources and ecology—features that have a direct impact on our well-being. For instance, we know surprisingly little about the state of the planet’s soils. While we have good information for some areas, like the Great Plains of the United States, soil data are sketchy for vast tracts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where billions of people depend directly on agriculture for survival. So we can’t accurately judge how badly we’ve degraded these soils through overuse and poor husbandry, though we do have patchy evidence that the damage is severe and getting worse in many places.18 Similarly, despite extensive satellite photography, our estimates of the rate and extent of tropical deforestation are rudimentary. We know even less about the natural ecology and species diversity inside these forests, where biologists presume most animal and plant species live. As a result, credible figures on the number of Earth’s species range from 5 to 30 million.19 And when it comes to broader questions—questions of how all these components of the planet’s ecology fit together; how they interact to produce Earth’s grand cycles of energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur; and how we’re perturbing these components and cycles—we find a deep and pervasive lack of knowledge, with unknown unknowns everywhere. Our ignorance, for all practical purposes, knows no bounds.

I LIVE IN A part of the country that at one time a good farmer could take some pleasure in looking at. When I first became aware of it, in the 1940s, the better land, at least, was generally well farmed. The farms were mostly small and were highly diversified, producing cattle, sheep, and hogs, tobacco, corn, and the small grains; nearly all the farmers milked a few cows for home use and to market milk or cream. Nearly every farm household maintained a garden, kept a flock of poultry, and fattened its own meat hogs. There was also an extensive “support system” for agriculture: Every community had its blacksmith shop, shops that repaired harness and machinery, and stores that dealt in farm equipment and supplies. Now the country is not well farmed, and driving through it has become a depressing experience. Some good small farmers remain, and their farms stand out in the landscape like jewels. But they are few and far between, and they are getting fewer every year. The buildings and other improvements of the old farming are everywhere in decay or have vanished altogether. The produce of the country is increasingly specialized. The small dairies are gone. Most of the sheep flocks are gone, and so are most of the enterprises of the old household economy. There is less livestock and more cash-grain farming. When cash-grain farming comes in, the fences go, the livestock goes, erosion increases, and the fields become weedy. Like

Kirkus Review: Carroll Engelhardt, By the Sweat of His Brow: The R. M. Probstfield Family at Oakport Farm (FriesenPress January 5, 2023) “Engelhardt recounts a German family’s experience living in Minnesota’s Red River Valley in the late 19th century. In 1832, Randolph Michael Probstfield was born near Koblenz in the Prussian-controlled Rhineland in western Germany, the son of devoutly Catholic parents who encouraged him to enter the priesthood and were bitterly disappointed when he did not (Probstfield observed, “If I had promised to be a priest and kept my word, today I would be . . . a feted-up, high-living hypocrite in the so-called vineyard of the Lord, and not a farmer . . . earning his bread by the sweat of his brow”). Like many other Germans before him in search of a better life, he emigrated to the United States in 1852, traveled extensively, and worked a dizzying array of jobs before he finally settled in Minnesota in 1860, a time when Germans were the state’s dominant immigrant group. In an effort to assimilate, he altered the spelling of his last name, which was originally Probstfeld. For the rest of his life he would maintain a delicate balance between his enthusiastic loyalty to the United States and pride in his German ancestry. Eventually, Probstfield’s indefatigable work ethic paid off, and he bought Oakport Farm in the Red River Valley in the 1868. He would eventually purchase thousands of acres of land and enjoy the prosperity that came with a great agricultural boom at the end of the 19th century, a period depicted with a scrupulous exactitude by the author. Engelhardt delivers much more than a family history—his book is a granular account of frontier life in America, a life of punishing toil that also held the promise of wealth and freedom. Probstfield emerges as a fascinating patriarch of his family (he married Catherine Goodman, with whom he had 13 children); a rugged, secular individualist, he held progressive political and cultural views, including a great attraction to socialism. He was exceedingly active in local political life, a contentious milieu diligently reconstructed by the author. His extraordinary rigor can be a bit overwhelming—there are minutely detailed discussions of Oakport’s small-grain production, Probstfield’s horticultural experiments, and various meat-preservation methods. However, for the reader looking for a finely detailed treatment of this period in American history, this is an edifying study. A magisterially researched work in American History.

Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)   CHAPTER OBJECTIVES After reading this chapter, you should be able to Use one-way ANOVA when the dependent variable is continuous and the independent variable is nominal or ordinal with two or more categories Understand the assumptions of ANOVA and how to test for them Use post-hoc tests Understand some extensions of one-way ANOVA This chapter provides an essential introduction to analysis of variance (ANOVA). ANOVA is a family of statistical techniques, the most basic of which is the one-way ANOVA, which provides an essential expansion of the t-test discussed in Chapter 12. One-way ANOVA allows analysts to test the effect of a continuous variable on an ordinal or nominal variable with two or more categories, rather than only two categories as is the case with the t-test. Thus, one-way ANOVA enables analysts to deal with problems such as whether the variable “region” (north, south, east, west) or “race” (Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Asian, etc.) affects policy outcomes or any other matter that is measured on a continuous scale. One-way ANOVA also allows analysts to quickly determine subsets of categories with similar levels of the dependent variable. This chapter also addresses some extensions of one-way ANOVA and a nonparametric alternative. ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE Whereas the t-test is used for testing differences between two groups on a continuous variable (Chapter 12), one-way ANOVA is used for testing the means of a continuous variable across more than two groups. For example, we may wish to test whether income levels differ among three or more ethnic groups, or whether the counts of fish vary across three or more lakes. Applications of ANOVA often arise in medical and agricultural research, in which treatments are given to different groups of patients, animals, or crops. The F-test statistic compares the variances within each group against those that exist between each group and the overall mean: Key Point ANOVA extends the t-test; it is used when the independent variable is

The idea of specific populations predisposed to obesity is encapsulated in a notion now known as the thrifty gene—technically, the thrifty-genotype hypothesis—that is now commonly invoked to explain the existence of the obesity epidemic and why we might all gain weight easily during periods of prosperity but have such difficulty losing it. The idea, initially proposed in 1962 by the University of Michigan geneticist James Neel, is that we are programmed by our genes to survive in the paleolithic hunter-gatherer era that encompassed the two million years of human evolution before the adoption of agriculture—a mode of life still lived by many isolated populations before extensive contact with Western societies. “Such genes would be advantageous under the conditions of unpredictably alternating feast and famine that characterized the traditional human lifestyle,” explained the UCLA anthropologist Jared Diamond in 2003, “but they would lead to obesity and diabetes in the modern world when the same individuals stop exercising, begin foraging for food only in supermarkets and consume three high-calorie meals day in, and day out.” In other words, the human body evolved to be what Kelly Brownell has called an “exquisitely efficient calorie conservation machine.

Alejandro de Humboldt National Park Outside of the major cities, the great majority of Cuba is agricultural or undeveloped. Cuba has a number of national parks where it is possible to see and enjoy some plants and animals that are truly unique to the region. Because it is relatively remote and limited in size, the Cuban Government has recognized the significance and sensitivity of the island’s biodiversity. It is for these reasons many of these parks have been set aside as protected areas and for the enjoyment of the people. One of these parks is the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, named for Alexander von Humboldt a Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer who traveled extensively in Latin America between 1799 and 1804. He explored the island of Cuba in 1800 and 1801. In the 1950’s during its time of the Cuban Embargo, the concept of nature reserves, on the island, was conceived with development on them continuing into the 1980’s, when a final sighting of the Royal Woodpecker, a Cuban subspecies of the ivory-billed woodpecker known as the “Campephilus principalis,” happened in this area. The Royal Woodpecker was already extinct in its former American habitats. This sighting in 1996, prompted these protected areas to form into a national park that was named Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. Unfortunately no further substantiated sightings of this species has bird has occurred and the species is now most likely extinct. The park, located on the eastern end of Cuba, is tropical and mostly considered a rain forest with mountains and some of the largest rivers in the Caribbean. Because it is the most humid place in Cuba it can be challenging to hike. The park has an area of 274.67 square miles and the elevation ranges from sea level to 3,832 feet at top of El Toldo Peak. In 2001 the park was declared a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. Tours are available for those interested in learning more about the flora & fauna, wild life and the natural medicines that are indigenous to these jungles. “The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning Captain Hank Bracker is available from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillion.com and Independent Book Vendors. Read, Like & Share the daily blogs & weekly "From the Bridge" commentaries found on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Captain Hank Bracker’s Webpage.

Von Thünen’s abstract principles had strikingly concrete geographical consequences. A series of concentric agricultural zones would form around the town, each of which would support radically different farming activities. Nearest the town would be a zone producing crops so heavy, bulky, or perishable that no farmer living farther away could afford to ship them to market. Orchards, vegetable gardens, and dairies would dominate this first zone and raise the price of land—its “rent”—so high that less valuable crops would not be profitable there. Farther out, landowners in the second zone would devote themselves to intensive forestry, supplying the town with lumber and fuel. Beyond the forest, farmers would practice ever more extensive forms of agriculture, raising grain crops on lands where rents fell—along with labor and capital investment—the farther out from town one went. This was the zone of wheat farming. Finally, distance from the city would raise transport costs so high that no grain crop could pay for its movement to market. Beyond that point, landowners would use their property for raising cattle and other livestock, thereby creating a zone of even more extensive land use, with still lower inputs of labor and capital. Land rents would steadily fall as one moved out from the urban market until they theoretically reached zero, where no one would buy land for any price, because nothing it might produce could pay the prohibitive cost of getting to market.

Lola died in her sleep last time I did not even feel her leave. Lola was a true daughter of the Earth, who inherited an extensive wealth of agricultural techniques from her parents and ancestors. For most of her life, they lived in desolate rural poverty but they never lacked for food. They had little money, but everything else they needed, they got from the abundance that nature gifted them. She lived through the age of big cities and concrete dreams, so farming folks like them had zero support from the government. Lola had told me so many stories about encounters with mining corporations and housing developers along with their private armies who never seem to tire converting more farmlands and rural areas into cash cows. They never cared that these lands were scared and had served communities for many generations. But when the pandemic had hit and the global economy had crashed, everyone turned to the rural folks they had always ignored and abused. My lola made sure that her all her children had the ancient wisdom of their people but also schooled in the ways of the city folks. My mother was the first from their community to make their stories known.