Customer Reviews

New Roots for Agriculture (New Edition) (Farming and Ranching)

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In his classic simple language Jackson describes the costs of our current way of doing agriculture. He focuses on soil loss with emphasizing the fact that our dependence has gone from "soil to oil" for energy and fertilizer.

This book outlines Jackson's idea for a perennial, herbaceous, polyculture agriculture that mimics the natural environment instead of our current annual, herbaceous, monoculture. Jackson also gives a broad view of decentralizing our societies and distributing people across land according to its ability to support them in the proper concentration.

The critiques of current agricultural practices is well done but simple enough for the laymen to understand. Simple computations are used to illustrate the ecological and financial costs of capital/oil intensive agriculture.

The discussion of values and religion in chapter 8, though it has a good direction, is lacking in comparison to Jackson's other topics.