If you raise livestock or crops, you’ll need a fence. Good fences are critical to success. They protect your animals (and plants) and keep them at home, and they can also minimize the damage done by pests and predators. In Farm Fences and Gates, you’ll learn how to build and repair the fences you need—and make the difference between a world of trouble and peace of mind. Wood posts or steel, wire mesh, barbed wire, chain link, or rail, this book will help you figure out what kind of fence is appropriate and how to plan its construction. Useful diagrams and charts help you estimate how much material you’ll need and how to go about installing and maintaining a solid, dependable fence. Writer and farm consultant Rick Kubik offers clear and expert advice on what works best in certain areas and for particular purposes. His instructions for planning and constructing each variety of fencing take the guesswork out of a job of critical importance to most landowners (and their neighbors). Farm Fences and Gates is the first and most essential tool for anyone thinking of building a fence. This complete guidebook will save time and money for beginners and seasoned builders alike by explaining how to do the job right the first time around.

Field Guide to Appropriate Technology is an all-in-one "hands-on guide" for nontechnical and technical people working in less developed communities. It has been developed and designed with a prestigious team of authors, each of whom has worked extensively in developing societies throughout the world. This field guide includes: - Step-by-step instructions and illustrations showing how to build and maintain a vast array of appropriate technology systems and devices - Unique coverage on healthcare, basic business and project management, principles of design, promotion, scheduling, training, microlending, and more - Teachers, doctors, construction workers, forest and agricultural specialists, scientists and healthcare workers, and religious and government representatives will find this book a first source for advice - Step-by-step instructions and illustrations showing how to build and maintain a vast array of appropriate technology systems and devices - Unique coverage on healthcare, basic business and project management, principles of design, promotion, scheduling, training, microlending, and more - Teachers, doctors, construction workers, forest and agricultural specialists, scientists and healthcare workers, and religious and government representatives will find this book a first source for advice

Winston Hardegree was born in the throes of the Great Depression in 1932, but spent happy boyhood summers on his grandparents' rural Alabama farm, where hard work and adventure led to a deep appreciation for life's simple pleasures. At nineteen, Winston lost his father and suddenly became family patriarch for his mother, siblings, and new bride. He took a job in the local textile mill, and over thirty-five years of unrelenting hard work became a successful top-executive of this international company. Disenchanted, Winston decided to return to the simpler way of life he had so loved as a boy. Winston's quest to reintroduce the man he had become to the boy of his youth brought about these stories of gardening, life with regular folk and beloved animals, and adventures that Winston and his wife, Beth, shared in the garden, in love, and in living the autumn and winter of his years at The Blessed Earth Farm in the rural upstate of South Carolina. This book is a compilation of essays and short stories written during Winston's search for simplicity, and his observations on life and on death, as he faces the final days of a terminal illness. This is Winston Hardegree's Legacy.

In 1860 farmers accounted for 60 percent of the American workforce; in 1910, 30.5 percent; by 1994, there were too few to warrant a separate census category. The changes wrought by the decline of family farming and the rise of industrial agribusiness typically have been viewed through historical, economic, and political lenses. But as William Conlogue demonstrates, some of the most vital and incisive debates on the subject have occurred in a site that is perhaps less obvious--literature. Conlogue refutes the critical tendency to treat farm-centered texts as pastorals, arguing that such an approach overlooks the diverse ways these works explore human relationships to the land. His readings of works by Willa Cather, Ruth Comfort Mitchell, John Steinbeck, Luis Valdez, Ernest Gaines, Jane Smiley, Wendell Berry, and others reveal that, through agricultural narratives, authors have addressed such wide-ranging subjects as the impact of technology on people and land, changing gender roles, environmental destruction, and the exploitation of migrant workers. In short, Conlogue offers fresh perspectives on how writers confront issues whose site is the farm but whose impact reaches every corner of American society.

Bibliography pp. 195-209.