Product Description
Providesa comprehensive, analytical account of theprinciples as well as the practical implications of agroforestry.Focuses on understanding how agroforestry systems function while taking into account the conflicts and compromises that arise because of farmers' requirements. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A great book for the seriously interested
I would highly recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in persuing tropical agroforestry. It is full of information, covers social and political ramifications and obstacles to tropical agroforestry, BUT, it is USD114, which is quite high. Having said that, it is a fantastic book and well written, refuting some of the hype of the 1980s, but still very optimistic about agroforestry. For anyone who wants to know the nuts and bolts of these systems, this is your book.
I work in organic cacao production, and know much about TA, however, nearly every page has me learning new things, realizing that the problems we face here are problems shared by others elsewhere, or seeing things in a new light.
The writer is well informed and clearlyu empathetizes with small scale producers. ... Read more

Product Description

Readers benefit because the book is based on these three themes: (1) it builds an understanding of concepts based on information the reader has previously learned; (2) it helps stress the relationship between conceptual understanding and problem-solving approaches; (3) the authors provide numerous examples and problems that use realistic values and situations to give users a strong foundation of engineering practice. The book also includes a PSpice Supplement which contains problems to teach readers how to construct PSpice source files; and this PSpice Version 9.2 can be used to solve many of the exercises and problems found in the book. Topical emphasis is on the basic techniques of circuit analysis–Illustrated via a Digital-to-Analog Resistive Ladder (Chapter 2); the Flash Converter (Chapter 4); Dual Slope Analog-to-Digital Converter (Chapter 5); Effect of parasite inductance on the step response of a series RLC circuit (Chapter 6); a Two-Stage RC Ladder Network (Chapter 8); and a Switching Surge Voltage (Chapter 9). For Electrical and Computer Engineers.

Customer Reviews (7)

Really bad!
This text book is absolutely horrible.I'm a third-year Mech Eng student. I've taken plenty of classes on hard subjects, so I know when a text book just plain sucks.This book does a pathetic job of explaining examples and basic concepts.I've spent hours trying to figure out assumptions that they should have just mentioned in the first place.And the poorly explained examples don't prepare you for the actual chapter problems.Because of the "wordy" writing style of the authors, basic concepts sound more complicated than they actually are; getting through the reading is a slow and tedious process.
The book is utterly sterile.The only colors you'll see inside it are black and a little blue; there isn't even a picture of an actual circuit in this book.It's like it's writen for a machine.

Poor example. The homework problems like hell
The examples which were given in the textbook were way too simple when you compare to the homework problems. Never explain how to do bode plot at all. I am glad I know how to do differential equations before taking the class, otherwise, to use the method that taught by this book, I would be dead. They never explain well on those differential equations and the concept behind.

Don't waste your time
I'm a second year EE engineering student with 20 years of electronics background in repairing, circuit analysis, and troubleshooting.This book is absolutly worthless. The auther jumps to great leaps of understanding with littel or no background to show the student how they got to those conclusions.The examples are non excistant. They use "conventional current" which is really backward to reality.It used to be called "hole theory" back in the day.Go with Boylstead or somone who has a clue about teaching. If your a beginning electronics student, forget this book, you'll be lost by the 1st chapter.There are countless problems too lengthy to go into detail here. If your school is using it, spend the extra money and get somthing to actually learn from, just to pass the course.

Give me a break.
If anyone tells you this is a good book, then they are receiving bribes from Prentice Hall.The only possible explanation I can think of that would explain the use of this book, is if the class is intended to 'weed out' 90 percent of the students.This is by far the most terrible excuse for a textbook I have ever seen.It teaches the most basic concepts of circuits, but yet it practically assumes you already know them, because it doesn't bother to work any examples out.If these authors were teaching nuclear physics, they would give you an intimidating equation, hand you a chunk of uranium, and expect you to build a power plant without hurting yourself.I have found countless typos (I might mention that I own the 6th edition), several problems that even my professor claims are incorrect, and most of all, I cannot follow the logic presented whatsoever.I have taken many classes that were extremely difficult, and for the most part, I have done well.However, this book presents material that is trivial in comparison, but the book goes right over my head.Only after the professor 'decodes' the text can I understand what the authors intended to say.I will also add that I took 4 semesters of calculus through a distance learning class where I had no instructor at all and got As in all of those classes.I am perfectly capable of understanding a well written book.This book is truly so poor, I would be impressed if Einstein himself didn't scratch his eyebrows off after reading it.

Please, for the love of all things sacred, complain to everyone you know about this textbook so it can disappear from the shelves of University bookstores.

Review of Introductory Circuits for Electrical and Computer
I'm sorry to say this but this book is absolutely horrible. This is my third year in college and this has to be the worst text book I've ever had. The text is not very informative and the examples are unclear. The book doesn't go into detail on most of the basic material. This is NOT a good book for an introductory level circuit analysis course. ... Read more

Product Description
This book considers women’s access to land and their role in food production in developing counties.Articles in this collection assert that women’s contribution to global agricultural production for food and for profit continues to be largely unacknowledged and undervalued, and that their ability to farm is constrained by lack of control of land, agricultural inputs, credit, and other essential resources. Thirty years after the first studies, women’s role in farming remains underestimated and misunderstood by development planners and policymakers. ... Read more

Product Description
An introduction to the hardware concepts needed to analyze and design digital systems and the principles of computer hardware organization and design. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great book for beginners
If you are new to computer engineering and need a firm grasp of the basic, this book will do the trick. Goes good with class room training or as additional resources to more updated version of the book.

Oldie but a goodie
This is an excellent book for beginners or as a review. Look at the large number of topics covered in the table of contents.Many excellent diagrams.Easy to read. Many basic concepts for computer hardware design are covered. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Public land for public produce
Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture may be ahead of its time.It poses an interesting question to city and town planners - and we, the residents: should local food production rank right up there with planning for local housing, roads and education?

Darrin Nordahl who has taught at the University of California Extension in Berkeley and now works for the Community and Economic Development Department in Davenport, Iowa, considers municipally sponsored agricultural projects a natural extension of the "post organic/buy local" movement. He presents some stunning projects to prove his point. Local governments can become a change agent in the area of local food production.

Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, who reasons that "importing some food is different from importing most of it," houses a 200,000-member apiary on the green roof of City Hall.Sale of its honey supports local cultural events.Kaiser Permanente, the largest health organization in the country, opens Farmers Markets in thirty of its facilities from Georgia to Hawaii.The first, in Oakland, California, was started because a Kaiser doctor is convinced that "nothing is more important to people's health that what they eat everyday."

In Detroit, Michigan, 30 percent of the city's land is vacant.Community groups have converted these underused locations into local opportunities to produce food. Detroit's urban farming recently sparked stories in the New York Times.Seattle adopted a city-wide goal: create a dedicated garden site for each 2,500 households.Providence, Rhode Island intends to double the amount of food grown in and around the city in the next ten years. Des Moines, Iowa, has already moved beyond public food gardens to establish public orchards, grape arbors and a nuttery.

The author argues that "the sheer abundance of land within public control necessitates a hard look at how it can best serve the needs of the shareholders" and points to an "increasing number of public officials across the country who believe growing food is not only an acceptable land use, but necessary for the health and well-being of the community.

The future will hopefully be, as Nordahl suggests, a time when growing food constitutes "the highest and best use for land."The publication of this book certainly forwards that view of the future.
... Read more

Product Description
This book explains the use of an ecological way of farming, with modern practical applications, to make the fullest use of land resources and the best utilization of available capital and labour.In analyzing the vital relationship between soil, plant, animal and man, the author discusses the best care of land itself, its components, grassland management and the most efficient use of crops to maximize yield, food quality and profitability without the extensive use of chemicals and without damaging the ecology.Widdowson also covers the holistic approach to animal farming, the welfare and health of poultry, cattle, sheep and goats, their nutritional needs through the various stages of their lives, and the best way to balance their diets. ... Read more

Product Description
Many applications today require the Fourier-transform (FT) spectrometer to perform close to its limitations, such as taking many quantitative measurements in the visible and in the near infrared wavelength regions. In such cases, the instrument should not be considered as a perfect 'black box.' Knowing where the limitations of performance arise and which components must be improved are crucial to obtaining repeatable and accurate results. One of the objectives of this book is to help the user identify the instrument's bottleneck.

Contents

- Preface
- Spectroscopy Instrumentation
- Signal-to-Noise Ratio
- Principles of Interferometer Operation
- Interferometer Alignment Errors
- Motion Components and Systems
- Interferogram Data Sampling
- Data Acquisition
- The Detector
- Consideration of Optics and Interferometer Alignment
- Signal-to-Noise Ratio Enhancement Techniques
- Appendix A: Simulation of Static-Tilt Error
- Appendix B: Sampling Circuit Example
- Appendix C: Simulation of Sampling Error
- Index ... Read more

Product Description
This unique resource delivers complete, easy-to-understand coverage of the management of complex technical projects through systems engineering. Written for a wide spectrum of readers, from novices to experienced practitioners, the book holds the solution to delivering projects on time and within budget, avoiding the failures and inefficiencies of past efforts.

It provides you with a framework that encapsulates all areas of systems engineering, clearly showing you where the multitude of systems engineering activities fit within the overall effort. You get a top-down approach that introduces you to the philosophical aspects of this discipline, and offers you a cohesive understanding of a plethora of important terms, standards and practices that have been developed independently. Moreover, the authors present key systems engineering issues in a manner that promotes individual thinking and unique approaches to the varied projects you encounter in the field. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Systems Engineering - A Good Introduction
Good introductory book on Systems Engineering, covering most important subjects (Introduction to Sys. Eng., Conceptual, Preliminary and Detailed Design and Development, and a nice chapter on Engineering Management).

In some figures it presents a process for engineering a system, along with explanation and examples. I enjoyed A LOT this approach.

Presents information on standards (MIL-STD-499B, IEEE-1220, EIA-632) and a brief overview of SEI's Capability Maturity Model for Systems Engineering (CMM-SE).

What I liked is that it is "straight to the point" and an easy to read book.

Downside: it has no exercises at the end of each chapter.

I recommend it for both students and practitioners.

Hope this helps!

Outstanding text on systems engineering
This is the text used by the University of New South Wales to teach Systems Engineering. It is a practical text and a very useful reference book. For anyone involved with systems engineering, project management of technical projects, or government procurement activity of technical goods or services - this is a must read. ... Read more

Product Description
Anyone who travels California's byways sees the many faces of agriculture. A huge entwined business, farming and ranching are the state's dominant land use. Yet few Californians understand what animals and crops are raised or how agriculture reflects our relationship with nature. This fascinating and gorgeously illustrated field guide gathers essential information about agriculture and its environmental context, and answers the perennial question posed by California travelers: "What is that, and why is it growing here?" Paul F. Starrs's lively text explores the full range of the state's agriculture, deftly balancing agribusiness triumphalism with the pride of boutique producers, sketching meanwhile the darker shadows that can envelop California farming. Documented with diverse maps and Peter Goin's insightful photographs, A Field Guide to California Agriculture captures the industry's energy and ingenuity and its wildly diverse iconography, from the mysteries of forbidden crops (like marijuana) to the majesties of scale in food production. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A marriage of brains and beauty that cannot be missed.
It should be noted that I am not necessarily a marriage advocate, but in the case of academic writing I have found that the ability to inculcate said texts with a pleasing aesthetic and inspiring rhetoric seems a lost art, somewhat akin to the romantic and private notion of the marriages of yore. Overwhelmed these days with quickie marriages (and divorces and remarriages) we have lost the sense of a purposeful and intentional union of the best that two (or more, I lay no moral boundaries) parties have to offer, most obviously in the area of the academic press. And so, thank goodness for academics like Paul Starr and Peter Goin who are able to produce a perfect combination of the quantitative and the qualitative in a field guide that will satisfy the most technical of the nature lovers to the most romantic.

The Field Guide to California Agriculture serves the purpose of its title in more ways than I can (or need to) enumerate here, especially as I am not in the general category of 'field guide' aficionados. However, I am a geographer and as such I am innately interested in (possibly more accurately described as fascinated by) the relationship between our landscapes and their inhabitants. This text, through elegant - and even cheeky suggestiveness on occasion - is uniquely informative about the nature of California's agricultural tradition(s) and the state of the State, as it were. As a native (and likely overly proud) Californian, the Guide's historical overview is fascinating, if you can get past the color coded index of which even Edward Tufte might feel pangs of envy. The dynamic nature of California's agricultural legacy and the contemporary issues surrounding the industry in both macro- and micro- terms are presented through brilliant writing and complemented by Peter Goin's stunning photography. And let me not neglect to mention the maps - oh cartography, you make me weak in the knees... The maps in the Guide offer myriad ways to contextualize and apply the information within as well as allow for the curious among us to plan any number of road trips to appreciate the diversity that these authors have managed to bring to life in beautiful form.

As an encyclopedic reference, the book is comprehensive and user-friendly. For anyone who eats, cooks, appreciates or even considers the beauty of food, this book will sate even the most ravenous appetite. I have found myself looking through this book again and again as I sit surrounded by the (beautiful) urban milieu of San Francisco, reminding me of the inherently interconnected nature of the land we occupy and the shape of things to come for us as human consumers, protectors and observers of this amazing geographical space that is California.

Geographical Masterpiece
In their Field Guide to California Agriculture, geographer Paul F. Starrs and photographer Peter Goin have devised a new genre of writing. The book's title hardly does it justice, as the "field guide" that it encompasses is embedded in a comprehensive, erudite, and eloquent disquisition on the history, economics, sociology and - above all - geography of agricultural production in what is arguably the world's top farming location. It is, in a word, a masterpiece - one that should appeal equally to a broad public audience and to academic experts. The authors have an uncanny ability to hone in on topics of interest and significance, conveying their importance with precision and wit. Their book is both immensely informative and unfailingly entertaining.

Thanks in good part to the University of California Press, field guides have been evolving in recent years. Starrs and Goin, however, have taken the genre to a new completely new level, in both a scholarly and literary sense. To be sure, the book fulfills all of the necessary functions of the traditional field guide, aiding readers in crop and animal identification. Distinguishing features are listed for each entry, and an eight-page "agricultural product identification" guide provides a useful overview. If one is wondering, for example, whether an orchard contains walnut trees, guidelines are provided. As the walnut entry on page 216 puts it: "The utterly distinctive graft line where the English walnut slip was grafted onto a native black walnut rootstock ... shows 6 to 24 inches above the ground: an instantaneous sign that this is a walnut..." But as is typical for the book, the key to walnut identification does not conclude so prosaically. Instead, the paragraph ends with an evocative tag: "The cicatrice is signature." One does not generally turn to field guides for stylistic grace, but Starrs' writing is at once eloquent and playful. One gets the impression that he had a great deal of fun writing the book, and his enthusiasm can be infectious.

The Field Guide to California Agriculture covers a staggering array of crops and livestock, from bok choi to oysters to cannabis. Each entry covers economic significance, spatial distribution, historical background, and issues of labor demand and farm management. The photos are plentiful and the maps are sharp. California's share of the national harvest is duly noted for each entry, as is the market value. Obtaining the relevant numbers required considerable sleuthing for some crops. The marijuana entry is one of the most detailed in the book, as befits a crop that may well be worth more than all other California agricultural products combined. It is to Starrs and Goin's credit that they tackle the issue head-on, writing about it with knowledge and verve.

The Field Guide to California Agriculture is divided into four main sections. The largest is an encyclopedia of crops and livestock, forming the field guide proper. The volume begins with a 70-page historical overview, and concludes with a similarly comprehensive essay on agricultural regions. These book-ends could together form a book on their own. The second section is a luscious photographical gallery aptly titled, "The Paradox and Poetics of Agriculture." With enlargements and additions, it too could stand alone. Packaged together with the individual crop entries, they add up to a tour de force. ... Read more

Product Description
When other nations are forced to rethink their agricultural and food security strategies in light of the post-peak oil debate, they only have one living example to draw from: that of Cuba in the 1990s. Based on the first and, up till now, only systematic and empirical study to come out of Cuba on this topic, this book examines how the nation successfully headed off its own food crisis after the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc in the early 1990s. It identifies the policies and practices required for such an achievement under conditions of petroleum-scarcity, and in doing so it challenges the more common, free market development approach as encouraged in other food-insecure countries and regions.

Paradoxically, the book debunks the myth that Cuba turned to a widespread organic approach to agriculture, a myth that is perpetuated by the majority of visitors to the country, who only encounter urban gardens. In rural regions, to which the author had authorized access, high-input and integrated agriculture was the intention, although practice was hampered by the fluctuations in availability of agrochemicals and fuel. Cuban institutions and individuals were confronted with a series of challenges to going down the organic route, and these challenges are identified as those that other countries will also have to face as they attempt to develop more sustainable, organic farming systems.

The book counters the rhetoric of international policy on achieving sustainable agriculture and food security for developing countries in the context of dwindling global supplies of fossil fuels, and provides useful learning material for the current fledgling attempts at energy descent plans and the mainstreaming of eco-living in industrialized nations.
... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
* Only reader of its kind in this field, edited by the world’s leading expert on sustainable agriculture
* Maps out the complex subject area of sustainable agriculture; introduces and explains key hard-to-find literature
* Highly accessible--the essential student reference text

Our agricultural and food systems are not meeting everyone’s needs, and despite great progress in increasing productivity over the past century, hundreds of millions of people remain hungry and malnourished. This book describes a different form of agriculture: one founded more on ecological principles and which is also more harmonious with people, their societies, and cultures. The latest in the Earthscan Reader Series, this volume brings together the most influential scholarship in the field, containing both theoretical developments and critical appraisals of evidence addressing what is not sustainable about current or past agricultural and food systems, as well as studies of transitions towards agricultural and rural sustainability at farm, community, regional, national, and international levels, and through food supply chains.
Related titles: Agri-Culture * The Living Land * Regenerating Agriculture (all by Jules Pretty) * The Pesticide Detox (edited by Jules Pretty) ... Read more

Product Description

World Agriculture and the Environment presents a unique assessment of agricultural commodity production and the environmental problems it causes, along with prescriptions for increasing efficiency and reducing damage to natural systems. Drawing on his extensive travel and research in agricultural regions around the world, and employing statistics from a range of authoritative sources including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization,the author examines twenty of the world?s major crops, including beef, coffee, corn, rice, rubber, shrimp, sorghum, tea, and tobacco. For each crop, he offers comparative information including:

? a ?fast facts? overview section that summarizes key data for the crop
? main producing and consuming countries
? main types of production
? market trend information and market chain analyses
? major environmental impacts
? management strategies and best practices
? key contacts and references

Customer Reviews (3)

Qualification
How is someone who works for the World Wildlife Fund qualified to write a book and explain the global agriculture industry?

Quick review
World Agriculture and Environment in my opinion is a very interestig book, in which you can find, besides the basic information of agricultural production, techniques that help to reduce damage to natural systems, and also this book gives important evaluations of modern agriculture and its failure.

Superb reference
This is a superb and unique reference.It provides an incredible amount of detail on crops that enter world trade, and their impact on the environment.
The very best thing about this book is that it is not strident and does not blatantly advocate a particular political agenda.It is written in a scientific, objective tone that makes it far more convincing than the rhetorical works.Only when he comes to tobacco (a crop that ruins the environment AND then ruins the consumers) does he use a few value-laden words!
The reader is struck by what a mess the world is in, and how easily we could fix a lot of that.The book provides enormous detail on soil erosion, chemical use, biodiversity reduction, and the rest of our woes, but it presents equal detail on how to prevent those problems.Only a few crops (notably cotton, salmon, chocolate) would be hard to manage well.
Two social themes stand out:first, the very rapid concentration of commodity trade in the hands of a very few firms; second, the degree to which governments subsidize production-at-any-cost as opposed to production-with-environmental-protection.(Subsidizing includes nonlegal subsidies, such as letting the rich get away with breaking environmental laws and dumping huge costs on poorer neighbors.)One cannot escape the conclusion that changing this subsidy structure would fix most of the damage, worldwide.
Environmentalists should think more about subsidies!
Meanwhile, what can a concerned reader do?The book tells how to seek out shade-grown coffee, responsibly raised beef and paper, and so on.It is much harder, at least in the US, to find decently-produced soybeans or corn or wheat, but you can do it.Cotton is a special problem, and the alternatives to it are mostly worse.The hemp advocates will be vocal!
We are in such a mess, and it would be so easy to do so much....This is not a time to lose hope or give up.By providing the big picture, this book should make every concerned citizen stop and think. The few errors I could spot in the book are trivial ones.
This is an absolute must-read and must-have for anyone who works on problems of production and environment or on problems of world food supply and health. ... Read more

Product Description

This guide enables engineers and engineering managers to communicate effectively with financial professionals, while offering a balanced presentation of the basics of engineering economic analysis. Focuses on real management situations. Provides accounting/cost accounting fundamentals to measure results. Introduces the concept of “options analysis”applied to capital investment decisions. Aids in conducting economic analyses with liberal use of spreadsheets. Introduces tax considerations and their consequences. For those interested in learning more about capital investment decision methodologies, particularly engineers and engineering managers.

Customer Reviews (3)

Eh...
We students had no choice but to use this book, as homework problems in class were assigned from the book... but as a textbook, I didn't like it. There are examples, but they frankly suck. The book makes assumptions without explaining them adequately, and the text is rife with small errors and typos.

This isn't a difficult subject, but the text manages to make learning it tedious and often confusing.

Still... a necessity for those enrolled in courses that require this text.

Just a text book
Hard to understand the content of the book. The basic meaning is not difficult. But the way the book descripts the theories/meanings is really hard to understand.
Just a textbook.

Good textbook
We were required to buy this textbook for our Engineering Economics class at UT-Austin. I found this book helpful as an introduction to business. It gave us quite a number of examples and review questionsto help us understand the major concepts. Even though the book may have contained a little too much information, I really liked it since I learnt a lot from it. ... Read more

Product Description
An innovative new book designed to teach algorithmic approaches to solving engineering problems. De-emphasizing syntax, the author focuses on structured approaches to implementing solutions using a subset of the C++ language. Focus is on developing common algorithmic patterns and how to use them to solve complex problems. Engineering applications requiring use of algebra, calculus, and physics are included. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Well Done
Item was shipped the day after the order was placed and arrived very promptly, in better shape than expected. I'm very happy.

Good book for Freshman Enginnering Students
I read this book while helping a first time learner of computer programing--the student does not have any previous programming experience.I found the book is very good in teaching students good practices in approaching programming -- Think before writing a the first line of codes. Although the book uses C++, it does not mention object oriented programming at all; perhaps this is a good thing!In my experience with engineering students (who are not computer engineering), I would lose students if I starts talking about object oriented; perhaps object oriented is something that comes asa natural thought process and did not have to be emphasized.

... Read more

Product Description
This innovative volume is the first collective effort by archaeologists and ethnographers to use concepts and models from human behavioral ecology to explore one of the most consequential transitions in human history: the origins of agriculture. Carefully balancing theory and detailed empirical study, and drawing from a series of ethnographic and archaeological case studies from eleven locations--including North and South America, Mesoamerica, Europe, the Near East, Africa, and the Pacific--the contributors to this volume examine the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding using a broad set of analytical models and concepts. These include diet breadth, central place foraging, ideal free distribution, discounting, risk sensitivity, population ecology, and costly signaling. An introductory chapter both charts the basics of the theory and notes areas of rapid advance in our understanding of how human subsistence systems evolve. Two concluding chapters by senior archaeologists reflect on the potential for human behavioral ecology to explain domestication and the transition from foraging to farming. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Did Early Farmers Forage Optimally?
This book presents eleven case studies that apply optimal foraging theory and other ecological models to early agriculture.It also contains an excellent introduction and two really superior final chapters analyzing the cases.
The studies are solid, sensible, and well done.The advantage of ecological theory seems to be that it makes scholars take serious account of large, comprehensive data sets, and provides tools to analyze these.Conclusions are properly modest, being usually confined to particular regions and time frames.One problem tackled by several writers is the very long delay--typically thousands of years--between the origins of deliberate cultivation and the coming of actual dependence on agriculture for staple food.This is a perfect problem for optimal foraging theory.It can model the ways in which people can intensify their hunting, gathering, and foraging.Typically, people could do this more quickly and easily than they can domesticate a new crop or invent a new cultivation technology.
The problem with this book is that it focuses too narrowly on immediate needs for food.Storage is not much discussed, yet a major difference between agriculture and foraging is that agriculture requires extensive storage--at least of seeds for future planting. We know that agriculture, wherever well documented, has provided luxuries and status goods, feast foods, ceremonial foods, fibres, and even furry pets.Above all, it has always provided valuable goods for trade.Agriculture originated in precisely those areas of the planet that were most central to great trade routes, and that farming spread along those routes.Surely, one reason to farm was to have a handy and defensible supply of foods for trade.
All these matters can be modeled within behavioral ecology, or closely related microeconomic frameworks, so there is no excuse for oversimiplifying.One hopes that future work will develop along such lines, expanding the models given herein.
That said, this is an excellent book that makes many valuable contributions.The wonderful summaries of regional archaeological findings, the challenging models, and the eminent common sense of most articles and above all the two commentaries, make the book well worth reading for anyone interested in early agriculture. ... Read more

Product Description

Food Powders is the first book that addresses key aspects of food powder technology. No other book has focused exclusively on food powders, assembling information on their physical properties, production, and functionality, which has been previously published mainly through research and review articles, reports in trade magazines, and symposia presentations.

Product Description
The process of nation-building in Latin America transformed the relations between the state, the economy, and nature. Between 1760 and 1940, the economies of most countries in the Spanish Caribbean came to depend heavily on the export of plant products, such as coffee, tobacco, and sugar. After the mid-nineteenth century, this model of export-led economic growth also became a central tenet of liberal projects of nation-building. As international competition grew and commodity prices fell over this period, Latin American growers strove to remain competitive by increasing agricultural production. By the turn of the twentieth century, their pursuit of export-led growth had generated severe environmental problems, including soil exhaustion, erosion, and epidemic outbreaks of crop diseases and pests. This book traces the history of the intersections between nature, economy, and nation in the Spanish Caribbean through a history of the agricultural and botanical sciences. Growers and governments in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, and Costa Rica turned to scientists to help them establish practical and ideological control over nature. They hoped to use science to alleviate the pressing environmental and economic stresses, without having to give up their commitment to export-led growth. Starting from an overview of the relationship among science, nature, and development throughout the export boom of 1760 to 1930, Stuart McCook examines such topics as the relationship between scientific plant surveys and nation-building, the development of a "creole science" to address the problems of tropical agriculture, the ecological rationalization of the sugar industry, and the growth of technocratic ideologies of science and progress. He concludes with a look at how the Great Depression of the 1930s changed the paradigms of economic and political development and the role of science and nature in these paradigms. ... Read more

Product Description
The major aim of "Microbes in Sustainable Agriculture" is to provide unique collection of data and a holistic view of the subject while presenting more current ideas in the field where significant advances have been made. Collectively, this book provides recent coverage of the role of microbes in sustainability of agronomic practices and thus is likely to be of tremendous value to the students, scientists, teachers of microbiology, biotechnology, environmental biology, agronomy, plant physiology and plant protection, who are interested in this area. Each chapter in this book has been contributed by a qualified team of teachers/scientists. In this context, the current state of knowledge in a specialised field is reviewed without compromising the basic conceptual frame work presented in this book. A concerted effort has been made by editors/authors to bring in quality presentation. This book thus addresses a lot of common queries and of course some odd ones that bring an interesting approach to problems solving in agricultural practices with optimum application of diverse microbes.This book presents readers with stimulation to forge thought in a non-conventional way to understand complex issues as it addresses many problems previously ignored. This book serves as an important source because of its unique compilation of data and text on the application and importance of microbes in crop productivity to achieve global food security. ... Read more