Farming for the long haul: resilience and the lost art of agricultural inventiveness

It's all but certain that the next fifty years will bring enormous, not to say cataclysmic, disruptions to our present way of life.

World oil reserves will be exhausted within that time frame, as will the lithium that powers today's most sophisticated batteries, suggesting that transportation is equally imperiled. And there's another, even more dire limitation that is looming: at current rates of erosion, the world's topsoil will be gone in sixty years.

In short, the large-scale agricultural and food delivery system as we know it has at most a few decades before it exhausts itself and the planet with it.

This book is about building a viable small farm economy that can withstand the economic, political, and climatic shock waves that the twenty-first century portends.