(Part 2) Best agriculture industry books according to redditors
We found 196 Reddit comments discussing the best agriculture industry books. We ranked the 73 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
1000000000% Agreed!!! I HIGHLY recommend that everyone go read The Dorito Effect -- it's all about how increases in artificial flavor technology, as well as mass farming of vegetables/animals, have contributed to our addiction to processed foods. Fascinating book and it really really makes you think about what you're putting in your body and why. Although it does sort of disagree with your post in that it argues that whole/real foods should not be "bland" -- they're only "bland" because of our society's focus on genetically modifying them to be as pretty/large/productive as possible with no focus on maintaining the true flavor of the food.
Sure. I got a wild hair to grow cut flowers to sell a little over a year ago. So I joined an excellent FB group of professional florists and flower farmers, took a post harvest physiology class, and started reading everything I could about cut flower growing, harvest, and marketing.
I already had a pretty large home garden, about 35' x 35', so I switched over a portion of it to growing cut flower rather than vegetables.
I made a list of cut flowers that grow well in my climate and divided them into categories based on bloom season, purpose, and form. Other For example, zinnias bloom in summer, are a main flower in a bouquet, and have a disk shape. I'd also have something for foliage and maybe a spiky type of flower. With those three things, you can build a decent looking bouquet. Then I selected flowers to grow so I had as many niches filled at any given time through the season.
I picked up the book, Cool Flowers and learned about growing winter hardy flowers for early spring harvest. I seriously can't recommend that book highly enough. It's amazing for anyone who wants to grow flowers, regardless of your purpose.
Then I started using instagram to market myself. I found the attention of an event florist who likes purchasing locally, so I hook her up when she needs anything. I also market on Craigslist and Nextdoor, but those really don't provide much opportunity. Without question, marketing is the most difficult aspect of this. And I say that after getting up before 5am this morning to cut and arrange those bouquets you saw. I also have a very difficult time with pricing. I'm naturally pretty frugal, and it's hard to price these buckets and bouquets so that I make much of a profit. I tend to overprice quite a bit, but I'm working on that.
One other thing I should mention is it's very easy to underestimate how long it takes to cut and process a couple buckets of flowers. It is easily 2 hours of work to cut a couple buckets. Then you have to make time to arrange, etc.
If I were to recommend a few books, they would be:
>That's not the same as farming animals for food supply. A few case examples of sick fuck employees beating animals does not make it s
I already provided information on why cruelty is inherent in the system, but as I already said would be the case... you didn't even look at it. Funny that you were upset that I implied that would be the case.
>because one person (me) not buying meat is not going to change the demand in any meaningful way.
I know you don't care about reality but actual economists disagree with you. In the book Compassions, By the Pound is a book that explains the research of two economists on how abstaining from buying foods on moral grounds effects that production. The basic idea is that when stores check the numbers for what sells and see a drop in sales there will be a large drop in what they buy. These drops only happen 1/1000 times, but the drop is large enough to make it worth it. So what we are looking at is basically a system that for every so many people not buying a product, production will be reduced. So if we divide the reduction in production by the people required for it we can look at an individuals impact. The numbers are different for each product but for every egg you give up, they reduce egg production on average by 0.91 eggs(eggs have the biggest impact for some reason), and for every pound of milk you give up, you reduce milk production by 0.56 pounds. We could look at this your way and say 1 person will only bring us closer to the drop threshold but not over it so it doesn't matter at all, or we can look at this and say that if we are one person short when the store buys stock, that one person is effectively responsible for all of the production that was not reduced, or we can do the reasonable thing and just attribute the impact evenly amongst those involved.
> every American vegan grouped together (There's about 1 million if I am correct) is having very little effect on the industry
You are ignoring all vegetarians, and all people who are reducing their consumption to simply be lower. Let's look at that "very little effect" the industry is having right now. In 1967 there were 10,000 slaughter houses in the U.S, in 2010 there were less than 3,000.
>As far as I am concerned, it's still growing.
As far as your concerned 162 closures per year is growth?
>I'm directly responsible for every piece of shit employee that kicks a pig when my contribution doesn't even make a tenth of a percent.
Just making up numbers seems like a weird debate style but you do you, man.
>Using your puddle analogy, you're basically saying I'm polluting the oceans with trash if I piss in a puddle. Yes they are both bodies of water but they're completely unrelated and in this case the scale matters.
God damn you are dense dude. This is the 4th or 5th time you failed to comprehend the difference between comparing actions and comparing justifications for those actions. You are either intentionally trying to miss the point or it is just over your head. I honestly don't know what to tell you other than to try reading it again after a nap or something.
>Well, first of all, you seem to think that every dollar in this industry goes directly to animal abuse, which isn't true
Factory farms raise 99.9 percent of chickens for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle currently sold in the United States. The majority of every dollar is going to terrible abuses and even in the best case having your throat slit is not a fun experience.
>(Although I guess you consider simply eating an animal as abuse. Let's not start that argument.)
If you don't believe it's abuse then I would ask why veterinarians don't use such cost effect human practices when putting down a dog? Why don't they hang the dog upside down and slit its throat? The answer is because it's inhumane and cruel to do that.
>You can try to convince more people to stop eating meat but you just aren't going to convince enough to do anything more than slow the growth of the industry.
This is blatantly false, meat production is going down in first world countries and vegan alternatives are becoming more and more popular every day. Society is changing around you and you can't see it because you don't want to.
>There are better solutions. You can lobby for more oversight and better regulations to protect animals from abuse and inhumane procedures
Wellfarism doesn't work when current laws are already ignored by enforcement. The only actual response to animal cruelty the government has had is to make filming it illegal. That being said it is fully possible to work for legal change to the current system without also supporting it financially.
>You can invest in scientific advancements like lab grown meat.
Lab grown meat is this generations flying cars. There are already plenty of meat alternatives that you can buy and fund today. If you are not supporting them what possible reason would you have to support lab grown meat? Note that you can also do this why not financially supporting animal agriculture.
>Either way, it's more effective and practical to look for these solutions than to antagonize people that eat meat.
Or you could do all three and not support and outdated industry!
>Beyond that, even if I stole it, the industry wouldn't take the loss, the grocery store would. Even then, a grocery store losing a couple hundred dollars (assuming my meat heist is very large) is negligible even if they didn't have loss prevention insurance. It would make zero difference. What a fucking stupid argument.
Did you even read what I said? My entire point was that stealing makes less of a difference than buying food, so if you don't believe that buying food effects companies than why would you believe that stealing effects companies?
I'm saying that by your logic stealing is a victimless crime and you would have no moral reason not to steal.
EDIT: Better wording.
I think you might be thinking of Sacrificial Lambs, about the 2001 USDA seizure of the Faillaces' sheep (they were brought over from the EU in the late 90s as milking sheep - something that was not really available in the U.S. at the time - meat sheep are different than milk sheep). Linda Faillace wrote a book about the whole debacle: Mad Sheep. (I visited the Faillaces' farm as part of a 1999 American Cheese Society tour.)
Good luck with the gardening! I had a horrible slug problem, no more. If you lived near me, I'd have the ducks visit your yard! Gardening with ducks is adorable--my one duck will stick by me because she knows when I dig, I unearth a treasure of yummies for her!
Do a lot of research if you do go the duck route...mine are 8 and 9 yo and you must bring them inside for safety (I use big bins in my garage) before sundown, otherwise, they'll be predator dinners. We've had a lot of heartache and avian vet bills because so many animals like to eat/attack ducks! This is a good book to start.
/r/ethical_living does have some interesting posts, but I'd also like more resources!
Free bonus: some other possible compassionate choices
Not OP. This book IIRC referred to it as brown, not clear.
Squeezed book on Amazon
> In fact, the elasticity of beef aggregate is generally accepted to be less than .15.
Generally accepted? I googled it just now and different sources give differing stuff from 0.3 to 0.75. This book gives 0.68. This paper has 0.7. Pretty good numbers (although of course even .15 is better than nothing, and a real impact).
For an online resource, I'm partial to www.scientificbeekeeping.com. I would also recommend picking up Storey's Beekeeping Guide. Good luck!
Waste no time whatsoever and skip the lousy youtube tutorials: Go straight to the Bible of vertical farming, which is: https://www.amazon.es/Plant-Factory-Vertical-Efficient-Production/dp/0128017759
It's fucking dense with no nonsense information. It was written by Japanese scientists, so you can be sure the information on it has been triple checked. My sister thought I was crazy for reading it because of how "boring" it looks.
Seriously, save yourself some time and go straight for that book. You won't regret it.
Start here
This audiobook is Whispersync compatible, and the Kindle version is only $1.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004FEF6HO
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10129668-the-beekeeper-s-lament
Goodreads gives it a 3.9, though many reviewers loved it. I think it depends on your interests in learning about bees, beekeeping, science or nature?
That Darjeeling book, was it [this one] (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00V0G9ED2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)?
When I was looking into getting goats I read these two books to give me an idea of what I would be getting myself into. Storey's Guide to Raising Meat Goats. Storey's guide Raising Dairy Goats. There's just enough information in both books that will help you learn about their care.
Farm Sancuary
Becoming Vegan
I definitely view it as a technique rather than a ceremony per se. If I go to a Chinese tea shop for a tasting, they serve it gongfu cha style, but it's definitely not done as a ceremony. I serve gongfu cha style at home on the dining room table multiple times a day, including with breakfast -- it's just an easy way to make great-tasting tea rather than a ceremony. When I have friends over we sit around the gongfu cha tray and drink tea for hours while we talk -- it's socialization rather than a ceremony.
Which is not to say that there aren't formal Chinese tea ceremonies. The problem is that people assume there is just one, much like sometimes assume there is one Chinese language (how often have you heard "Do you speak Chinese?" rather than "Do you speak Mandarin? Cantonese? Shanghaiese?" etc).
In my collection I have a great book called Chinese Tea Culture that describes many Chinese tea ceremonies, such as regional marriage tea ceremonies and many others. It seems to be out of print, but the author has a similarly titled one called Tea and Chinese Culture that may be a retitling or new edition.
I agree completely. My favorite resources and recommendations are:
Living Traditions YouTube Channel meat rabbit series
Slightly Red Necked YouTube Channel meat rabbit series
Storey's Guide to Raising Meat Rabbits
Butchering Poultry, Rabbit, Lamb, Goat, and Pork: The Comprehensive Photographic Guide to Humane Slaughtering and Butchering
That last one is (to my mind) a vital resource.
These are good links!
Some good starting points for those who are new to this subject:
https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Uncovering-Global-Food-Scandal/dp/0393068366
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_and_I
I learned about the Ice Cream Bean from this book
I don't know of any reputable sources on the web. It's pretty hard to find unbiased discussions on this subject. I recommended this book to someone else who was interested so if you've got some time and are really interested, give it a try.
I recently grabbed a copy of Plant Factory. I haven't read through it yet; it's targeted towards larger scale farms, but the specific plant data (e.g. ideal nutrient levels and light cycles) and general fundamentals seem useful.
Plant Factory: An Indoor Vertical Farming System for Efficient Quality Food Production https://www.amazon.com/dp/0128017759/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_EHkWzbRSWCDPT
Congrats on your new pup-to-be! And thank you for doing so much research, there aren't nearly enough people who do their homework first :-)
My favorite potty training resource:
Why Crate Train
ABCs of Crate Training
Dos and Don'ts of Crate Training
I, too, highly recommend The Other End of the Leash
Books I also really like:
Training Your Superpuppy - it's pretty basic but it covers a little bit of a lot of topics
My Smart Puppy I really like this for a puppy training book- it comes with a DVD as well which I found very helpful
101 Dog Tricks - For some fun training and bonding exercises. There is a puppy version, but I found that my Border Collies have been able to keep up with the 'adult' book just fine. I also really like Kyra's Do More With Your Dog, just a fun book if you're looking for more activities with your dog or just to learn about other canine activities.
The Dog Wars - It's not a training book but more of a dog politics book, but it should be required reading for any Border Collie enthusiast IMO
If you have any interest in working livestock...
A Way of Life
Top Trainers Talk About Starting A Sheepdog
Herding Dogs
Talking Sheepdogs: Training Your Working Border Collie
Stockdog Savvy
Also-
Collie Psychology - I just found this book online while looking for links for the others. I know nothing about it, but reading the description looks like it could be interesting (anyone know anything about it?)
Edit: Really... once again, I'm the only comment here with a downvote?! If you've got a problem with the things I post, say it to me. Raise an issue, start a discussion. Christ.