agriculture definition

2014 Rural Sociological Society Annual Conference : �Equity, Democracy, and the Commons: Counter-Narratives for Rural Transformation.� Location: New Orleans, Roosevelt Waldorf Astoria Hotel Date: July 30th to August 3, 2014 Paper Abstracts due: March 3 Submission: Email abstracts (up to 350-words) to Loka Ashwood (ashwood@wisc.edu) and Kate Mactavish (kate.mactavish@oregonstate.edu)  in lieu of an online submission . Changing community and production dynamics in rural America make it a state-sanctioned site for some of the most hazardous and toxic industries of our time.  From its production treadmill, industrial agriculture has cast onto rural America a plethora of negative externalities:  mounting levels of air and water pollution, farm consolidation, and depopulation.   A range of extraction and other risky industries justify the siting of facilities in rural areas because of easy access to ample natural resources, sparse populations that reduce exposure risk...

That is the title of Professor Olivier De Schutter's op-ed in the  New York Times  today ,  but it reminds me of another catchy (if depressing) phrase feminists coined a few decades ago:   the feminization of poverty . As it turns out, De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the the right to food, brings together issues of gender equality and food security in his op-ed in a way that shows the link of both to, you guessed it, poverty.  As most of us know, women are more likely than men to be living in poverty, wherever they are in the world.  Turns out, according to De Shutter, as women get more and more responsibility for growing food in the developing world--partly as a result of male migration for work--women's poverty and hunger, along with that of their families, is exacerbated, not eliminated. Specifically, De Schutter discusses a report released today  to the United Nations Human Rights Council  in which he calls for a "comprehen...

Among the agriculture and rural development issues I have become aware of during my time in Australia is the growing conflict over coal seam gas (CSG).  Coal seam gas, you ask?  That's what Aussies call the natural gas released by fracking, and Aussies are beginning to debate the practice as hotly as we are in the United States.  But the Australian context for this debate--which has evolved into outright conflict in several locales--is different in various regards to what it is in the U.S., including the legal schemes for regulating the practice and the extent to which farmers and others in rural areas can prevent it. This February 2012 piece by Bond University law professor Tina Hunter summarizes several of the issues, including who has the power to regulate or prevent the practice.  In short--it isn't the individual land owners.  Hunter's headline speaks volumes, "Food security v energy security:  land use conflict and the law. "  She writes: The d...

I published this post last Sunday on Legal Ruralism , but am only now getting it up on Agricultural Law, prompted in part by Susan Schneider's excellent post  on the same topic a few days ago.  Here's my post:  A trough that overflows is the image Robert Semple, Jr., conjures in  his editorial  (by the same name) in [the June 3, 2012 issue of the]  New York Times.   In it, Semple argues that the current version of the next generation farm bill replicates the problems long associated with the farm bill:  it supports fat cat farmers while doing too little to help small-scale farmers.  Semple makes references to "rural" and "small town" in the opening paragraph, but does not return to these concerns expressly later in the piece.  He makes no mention of rural development funds, which have always been a proverbial drop in the farm bill/USDA bucket. [ Some sources I have since read indicate no provision has been made for rural developme...