In November 2017, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at its headquarters outside Palmira, Colombia. As an important research center of the so-called Green Revolution in agricultural science and technologies, CIAT emphasizes its contributions to sustainability, food security, gender equity, inclusive markets, and resilient, climate-smart agriculture. Yet these terms hardly describe the Cauca Valley where CIAT is physically located, a place that has been transformed into an industrial monoculture of sugarcane where thirteen Colombian corporations oversee the vast majority of this valley's famously fertile soil. This exemplifies the paradox Timothy W. Lorek describes in Making the Green Revolution: an international research center emphasizing small-scale and sustainable agricultural systems sited conspicuously on a landscape otherwise dominated by a large-scale corporate sugarcane industry. Utilizing archives in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the United States, Lorek tracks the paradoxical but intertwined twentieth-century processes that produced both CIAT and sugar in the Cauca Valley. This history reveals how Colombians contributed to the rise of a global Green Revolution and how that international process in turn intersected with a complex and long-running rural conflict in Colombia.

The green revolution in India about 50 years ago transformed India's image then as begging bowl to bread basket. This transformation during the 1960s took just about 4 years. The yield increases achieved in wheat and then in rice which occurred in just about half decade is far in excess of the yield increases during the preceding 4000 years. This remarkable feat was achieved with the leadership of the author using the dwarf wheat types which had been produced by Norman Borlaug in Mexico. The research and development of green revolution of wheat and rice at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi was led by the author along with his team of students and co-workers. He has published over 100 papers on green revolution and the ever-green revolution which is a refinement of the former. This book is a compilation of just about 40 of his numerous research papers, monographs and books published by him on this subject. The papers in this book bring out the scientific basis of the modification of the plant type so as to be responsive to exogenous addition of chemical fertilizers and irrigation. The ideal plant type enables capture of adequate sunlight and using the chemical fertilizers added to the soil, produce substantial photosynthetic starch. And because the plants have short and thick culm, they are able to withstand enormous amounts of grains in their ears. This indeed was the basis of breaking the yield barriers associated with native varieties. The book also brings out that green revolution had established the food security at the national level but not at the individual household levels of millions of resource-poor rural small and marginal farming, fishing and landless families. Further green revolution was commodity-centric and the manner of its practice led to environmental degradation and social inequities. This author realized as early as 1972 that system of agriculture in India should be designed to fight both the famines of food and rural livelihoods. In pursuit of it, this author further designed an evergreen revolution with systems approach. What this means is providing concurrent attention to ecological foundations of agriculture and the livelihoods of the rural people. The book also brings out that green revolution was a team effort involving scientists, policy makers, administrators, farmers and students. This book is an outstanding example of green revolution providing a breathing space by putting the cereal grain production rate ahead of the population growth rate and then when food security has been adequately established, the system is changed to achieve productivity in perpetuity without causing environmental and social harm.

Explore the benefits of and necessity for sustainable agriculture!Here is an easy-to-read, practical introduction to sustainable agriculture: what it means and why it is needed. It is the first book to synthesize the goals of sustainable agriculture into eight comprehensive steps. The Next Green Revolution presents a convincing critique of our current agricultural system and an introduction to an alternative system which gives more consideration to future generations. Interwoven through the book are Dr. Horne's reflections on social justice, quality of life, and how farmers and rural communities are inextricably linked.The Next Green Revolution draws on the unique perspective of Dr. James E. Horne, President of a leading nonprofit agriculture organization, the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture. It is inspired by his experience as a traditional agriculturalist and educator coming to grips with the failings of the conventional system and searching for an alternative. Writing in the first person, he describes growing up in a sharecropper family in Oklahoma, running his own ranch, and consulting with farmers as an agricultural economist. He shares what he learned as the Kerr Center experimented with new “sustainable” approaches to old problems on the Center's ranch/farm, and his experiences working with the USDA's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. With The Next Green Revolution, you will explore: the major problems of contemporary industrial agriculture definitions of sustainable agriculture the historical roots of sustainable agriculture the politics of sustainable agriculture sustainable agriculture practices changes needed to encourage a sustainable agriculture and the eight steps to sustainable agriculture, which address: soil health and erosion water quality and use organic waste management crop and livestock adaptation biodiversity environmentally benign pest management energy use farm diversification profitability The Next Green Revolution is a well-researched introduction to the field, written with a minimum of jargon.

Activist Ben Lowe calls the present generation to come together and care for the earth in a way that recent generations have not. Telling real-life stories of community organizing on college campuses across the nation, Lowe shows us that little things can make a big difference when we all work together.

During the last 100 years, the worldwide yields of cereal grains, such as wheat and rice, have increased dramatically. Since the 1950s, developments in plant breeding science have been heralded as a "Green Revolution" in modern agriculture. But what factors have enabled and promoted these technical changes? And what are the implications for the future of agriculture? This new book uses a framework of political ecology and environmental history to explore the "Green Revolution's" emergence during the 20th century in the United States, Mexico, India, and Britain. It argues that the national security planning efforts of each nation were the most important forces promoting the development and spread of the "Green Revolution"; when viewed in the larger scheme, this period can be seen as the latest chapter in the long history of wheat use among humans, which dates back to the neolithic revolution. Efforts to reform agriculture and mitigate some of the harsh environmental and social consequences of the "Green Revolution" have generally been insensitive to the deeply embedded nature of high yielding agriculture in human ecology and political affairs. This important insight challenges those involved in agriculture reform to make productivity both sustainable and adequate for a growing human population.

This book features review articles that analyze current agricultural issues and knowledge. It also proposes novel, environmentally friendly solutions that are based on integrated information from such fields as agroecology, soil science, molecular biology, chemistry, toxicology, economics and the social sciences. Coverage examines ways to produce food and energy in a sustainable way for humans and their children. Inside, readers will find articles that explore climate change, food security, water pollution, soil erosion, fertility loss, pest control and biodiversity depletion. Instead of solving problems using the classical painkiller approach, which seeks only to limit negative impacts, sustainable agriculture treats challenges at their source. Because most societal issues are in fact intertwined, global and fast-developing, sustainable agriculture will bring solutions that have the potential to build a more peaceful world. This book will help scientists, decision-makers, professors, farmers and politicians build safer agriculture, energy and food systems for future generations.

This book, which is the result of an intellectual odyssey, began as an attempt to explore and map the environmental and cross-cultural dimensions of the continuing spread of the green revolution-that package of high-yielding varieties of grain, fertilizers, irrigation, and pesticides that constitutes the core of modern industrial agriculture. In the process of traversing the terrain of several intellectual traditions and cutting through various disciplinary forests and thickets, a number of striking observations were made-all leading to two sober ing conclusions. First, most intellectual maps dealing with agriculture fail to recognize it as the basic interface between human societies and their environment. Because of this, they are little better than the "flat earth" maps of earlier centuries in helping to understand global realities. Second, when agriculture is analyzed from a global perspec tive that takes evolution seriously, one sees that the ecological risks as well as the energy and social costs of modern industrial agriculture make it largely inappropriate for developing countries. Beyond that, one can see a great need within industrialized countries to develop less costly, less risky, and more sustainable agricultural alternatives. Early in the journey it became clear that conventional disciplinary approaches were inadequate to comprehend the scope and diversity of global agriculture and that a new multilevel approach was needed. It also became clear that any new approach would have to try to correct certain Western biases and blind spots.

Agricultural science and the socialist state -- Pu Zhelong: making socialist science work -- Yuan Longping: "intellectual peasant"--Peasants: "experience" and "backwardness"--Seeing like a state agent -- The Lei Feng paradox -- Opportunity and failure