The Farmer's Office

Author: Julia Shanks
Publisher: New Society Publishers
ISBN: 1550926101
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
A practical, how-to guide for farmers who want to achieve and maintain financial sustainability in their businesses When you decided to become a farmer, you also became an entrepreneur and business person. In order to be ecologically and financially sustainable, you must understand the basics of accounting and bookkeeping, and learn how to manage a growing business. Author Julia Shanks distills years of teaching and business consulting with farmers into this comprehensive, accessible guide. She covers all aspects of launching, running and growing a successful farm business through effective bookkeeping and business management, providing tools to make managerial decisions, apply for a loan or other financing, and offering general business and strategy advice for growing a business. Whether you've been farming for many years or just getting started, The Farmer's Office gives you the tools needed to think like an entrepreneur and thoughtfully manage your business for success.

Starting & Running Your Own Small Farm Business

Author: Sarah Beth Aubrey
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 1603429190
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
Running your own small farm is demanding enough, but making it profitable presents a host of further challenges. In this business-savvy guide to farming on a small scale, Sarah Aubrey covers everything from financial plans and advertising budgets to web design and food service wholesalers. Learn how to isolate your target audience and craft artisanal products that will delight and amaze customers. With a solid business strategy in place, you can confidently turn your passion into a productive and profitable venture.

Dispossession

Author: Pete Daniel
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469602024
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594--a drop of 93 percent. In his hard-hitting book, historian Pete Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers' fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He exposes the shameful fact that at the very moment civil rights laws promised to end discrimination, hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their hold on the land as they were denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure. More than a matter of neglect of these farmers and their rights, this "passive nullification" consisted of a blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation, blatant acts of discrimination and cronyism, violence, and intimidation. Dispossession recovers a lost chapter of the black experience in the American South, presenting a counternarrative to the conventional story of the progress achieved by the civil rights movement.

Gaining Ground

Author: Forrest Pritchard
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762794380
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
With humor and pathos, Forrest Pritchard recounts his ambitious and often hilarious endeavors to save his family’s seventh-generation farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Through many a trial and error, he not only saves Smith Meadows from insolvency but turns it into a leading light in the sustainable, grass-fed, organic farm-to-market community. There is nothing young Farmer Pritchard won’t try. Whether he’s selling firewood and straw, raising free-range chickens and hogs, or acquiring a flock of Barbados Blackbelly sheep, his learning curve is steep and always entertaining. Pritchard’s world crackles with colorful local characters—farm hands, butchers, market managers, customers, fellow vendors, pet goats, policemen—bringing the story to warm, communal life. His most important ally, however, is his renegade father, who initially questions his son's career choice and eschews organic foods for the generic kinds that wreak havoc on his health. Soon after his father’s death, the farm becomes a recognized success and Pritchard must make a vital decision: to continue serving the local community or answer the exploding demand for his wares with lucrative Internet sales and shipping deals. More than a charming story of honest food cultivation and farmers’ markets, Gaining Ground tugs on the heartstrings, reconnecting us to the land and the many lives that feed us.

Freedom Farmers

Author: Monica M. White
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469643707
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

Business Advice for Organic Farmers Bundle

Author: Richard Wiswall
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781603584630
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Provides step-by-step instructions on how to make crop production more efficient and offers advice on farm operations, managing employees, and office procedures, along with a DVD featuring a workshop and an interview with the author.

Farmers Unite!

Author: Lindsay H. Metcalf
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
ISBN: 1684379083
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 66

Book Description
In the late 1970s, grain prices had tanked, farm auction notices filled newspapers, and people had forgotten that food didn't grow in grocery stores. So, on February 5, 1979, thousands of tractors from all parts of the US flooded Washington, DC, in protest. Author Lindsay H. Metcalf, a journalist who grew up on a family farm, shares this rarely told story of grassroots perseverance and economic justice. In 1979, US farmers traveled to Washington, DC to protest unfair prices for their products. Farmers wanted fair prices for their products and demanded action from Congress. After police corralled the tractors on the National Mall, the farmers and their tractors stayed through a snowstorm and dug out the city. Americans were now convinced they needed farmers, but the law took longer. Boldly told and highlighted with stunning archival images, this is the story of the struggle and triumph of the American farmer that still resonates today.

The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook

Author: Richard Wiswall
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603582495
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Contrary to popular belief, a good living can be made on an organic farm. What’s required is farming smarter, not harder. In The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook, Richard Wiswall shares advice on how to make your vegetable production more efficient, better manage your employees and finances, and turn a profit. From his twenty-seven years of experience at Cate Farm in Vermont, Wiswall knows firsthand the joys of starting and operating an organic farm—as well as the challenges of making a living from one. Farming offers fundamental satisfaction from producing food, working outdoors, being one’s own boss, and working intimately with nature. But, unfortunately, many farmers avoid learning about the business end of farming; because of this, they often work harder than they need to, or quit farming altogether because of frustrating—and often avoidable—losses. In this comprehensive business kit, Wiswall covers: Step-by-step procedures to make your crop production more efficient Advice on managing employees, farm operations, and office systems Novel marketing strategies What to do with your profits: business spending, investing, and planning for retirement A companion toolkit, available for download upon purchase of the book, offers valuable business tools, including easy-to-use spreadsheets for projecting cash flow, a payroll calculator, comprehensive crop budgets for forty different crops, and tax planners.

Bet the Farm

Author: Frederick Kaufman
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 1118234596
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Book Description
A prominent food journalist follows the trail from Big Pizza to square tomatoes to exploding food prices to Wall Street, trying figure out why we can't all have healthy, delicious, affordable food In 2008, farmers grew enough to feed twice the world's population, yet more people starved than ever before?and most of them were farmers. In Bet the Farm, food writer Kaufman sets out to discover the connection between the global food system and why the food on our tables is getting less healthy and less delicious even as the the world's biggest food companies and food scientists say things are better than ever. To unravel this riddle, he moves down the supply chain like a detective solving a mystery, revealing a force at work that is larger than Monsanto, McDonalds or any of the other commonly cited culprits?and far more shocking. Kaufman's recent cover story for Harper's, "The Food Bubble," provoked controversy throughout the food world, and led to appearances on the NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Fox Business News, Democracy Now, and Bloomberg TV, along with features on National Public Radio and the BBC World Service. Visits the front lines of the food supply system and food politics as Kaufman visits farms, food science research labs, agribusiness giants, the United Nations, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and more Explains how food has been financialized and the powerful consequences of this change, including: the Arab Spring, started over rising food prices; farmers being put out of business; food scientists rushing to make easy-to-transport, homogenized ingredients instead of delicious foods Explains how the push for sustainability in food production is more likely to make everything worse, rather than better?and how the rise of fast food is bad for us, but catastrophic for those who will never even see a McNugget or frozen pizza

Farming for Our Future

Author: PETER H.. ROSENBERG LEHNER (NATHAN A.)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781585762378
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Farming for Our Future examines the policies and legal reforms necessary to accelerate the adoption of practices that can make agriculture in the United States climate-neutral or better. These proven practices will also make our food system more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is substantial--much more so than official figures suggest--and we will not be able to achieve our overall mitigation goals unless agricultural emissions sharply decline. Fortunately, farms and ranches can be a major part of the climate solution, while protecting biodiversity, strengthening rural communities, and improving the lives of the workers who cultivate our crops and rear our animals. The importance of agricultural climate solutions can not be underestimated; it is a critical element both in ensuring our food security and limiting climate change. This book provides essential solutions to address the greatest crises of our time.