Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community (Civil Society Series) - Tapa dura

"An eye-opening read recommended for collections on agriculture, community development, economics of food production and sociology."--Academia "[Lyson] provides an excellent historical context on how Northeast growers, who traditionally sold their products in local urban markets, have been able to resist somewhat the pressures to "go corporate" and in the current century, preserve their land by embracing the CSAs, farmers' markets, and other forms of civic agriculture."--The Community Farm

While the American agricultural and food systems follow a path of industrialization and globalization, a counter trend has appeared toward localizing some agricultural and food production. Thomas A. Lyson calls this rebirth of locally based agriculture and food production civic agriculture because these activities are tightly linked to a community's social and economic development. Civic agriculture embraces innovative ways to produce and distribute food, and it represents a sustainable alternative to the destructive practices associated with conventional large-scale agriculture. Lyson argues that farming in the United States was modernized using the same techniques that transformed the manufacturing sector from a system of craft production to one of mass production. Viewing agriculture as just another industrial sector led to transformations in both the production and the processing of food. Lyson enumerates the shortcomings of the current agriculture and food systems, and he then introduces the concept of community problem solving and demonstrates that a re-localization of the food production system is underway.