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Cover

Agriculture: A Very Short Introduction

Paul Brassley and Richard Soffe

April 2016

ISBN: 9780198725961

152 pages
Paperback
174x111mm

In Stock

Very Short Introductions

Price: £8.99

From the large corporation using enormous machines in the USA, to the woman with her hoe and her plot of cassava in Mozambique, to a Chinese collective farm worker in the rice fields, agriculture is essential for humanity to eat. This book looks at the many different types of agriculture and considers the challenges facing farmers today.

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Description

From the large corporation using enormous machines in the USA, to the woman with her hoe and her plot of cassava in Mozambique, to a Chinese collective farm worker in the rice fields, agriculture is essential for humanity to eat. This book looks at the many different types of agriculture and considers the challenges facing farmers today.

  • Introduces readers to the vast range of global agriculture, covering both industrial and developing countries
  • Considers both livestock and crop farming, and the multiple issues facing the different forms of farming
  • Explains the principles of local and international agricultural markets, and how they determine what farmers produce
  • Identifies the universally applicable principles of farming
  • Part of the Very Short Introductions series - over seven millions copies sold worldwide

About the Author(s)

Paul Brassley, Honorary University Fellow, University of Exeter, and Richard Soffe, Director of Rural Business School at The Duchy College, and Chairman of Board of Directors of Rural Business Research

Dr Paul Brassley studied agriculture and agricultural economics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and agricultural history at Oxford University. He worked on a variety of farms from Scotland to Devon before teaching agricultural economics and policy at the former Seale-Hayne College in Devon for over thirty years. He has researched various aspects of agricultural history from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, most recently at the University of Exeter. He is co-editor of War, Agriculture and Food: rural Europe from the 1930s to the 1950s (Routledge, 2012), along with Y.Segers and L.Van Molle

Richard Soffe, studied Agriculture and subsequently lectured Farm Management at Seale-Hayne College, University of Plymouth. He was awarded a Masters Degree in Management and Marketing from Cranfield University. He was awarded Fellowship of the Royal Agricultural Societies and is currently the Director of the Rural Business School at Duchy (Cornwall) College. He is the editor of The Agricultural Notebook, 20th edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003) and The Countryside Notebook (Wiley Blackwell, 2005)

Table of Contents

    Introduction
    Soils and crops
    Farm animals
    Feeding the food industry
    Inputs into agriculture
    Modern and traditional farming
    Farming futures
    Further reading
    Index

Reviews

"When YouGov-Cambridge conducted a poll in 2012 they found that 82 per cent of people have a special place in their hearts for agriculture. However the poll also revealed that only 28 per cent of people feel they know much about the sector. So congratulations to the Oxford University Press for supplying a book that explains it all." - Mark Metcalf, Unite Landworker

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