WINNER of the British Agricultural History Society's 2022 Thirsk Prize WINNER of the 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award An investigation into farming practices throughout a period of seismic change.

From the large corporation using enormous machines in the USA, to the woman with her hoe and her plot of cassava in Mozambique, to a Chinese collective farm worker in the rice fields, agriculture is essential for humanity to eat. This book looks at the many different types of agriculture and considers the challenges facing farmers today.

At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 British agriculture was largely powered by the muscles of men, women, and horses, and used mostly nineteenth-century technology to produce less than half of the country's temperate food. By 1985, less land and far fewer people were involved in farming, the power sources and technologies had been completely transformed, and the output of the country's agriculture had more than doubled. This is the story of the national farm, reflecting the efforts and experiences of 200,000 or so farmers and their families, together with the people they employed. But it is not the story of any individual one of them. We know too little about change at the individual farm level, although what happened varied considerably between farms and between different technologies.0 Based on an improbably-surviving archive of Farm Management Survey accounts, supported by oral histories from some of the farmers involved, this book explores the links between the production of new technologies, their transmission through knowledge networks, and their reception on individual farms. It contests the idea that rapid adoption of technology was inevitable, and reveals the unevenness, variability and complexity that lay beneath the smooth surface of the official statistics.0WINNER of the British Agricultural History Society's 2022 Thirsk Prize.

For an industry which accounts for a small and decreasing proportion of the output of the European economy, agriculture gets a large slice of the European Union's budget and accounts for many of the political arguments which beset that organisation. Every family in the European Union has its food prices determined by the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the incomes of millions of farmers across Europe depend on the decisions made by those who control it. Yet few understand why the CAP exists, or on what basic principles it is managed. This book offers a simple and concise guide to the economics (and relevant history and politics) of the agricultural industry and the CAP. Assuming no knowledge of economic theory, it covers the economics of agriculture and provides an intelligible outline of the CAP's main features.