Farmers and gardeners face all sorts of difficulties in the course of growing crops—weeds and insect pests, low levels of fertility, lack of water, soil compaction, and erosion of topsoil. Usually seen as separate issues and dealt with individually, weeds, insects, nematodes, and plant diseases are controlled by pesticides; nutrient deficiencies are overcome through use of commercial fertilizers; drought stress is mitigated through irrigation; and compacted layers of soil are broken up by machinery. But all of these problems can be eliminated, or at least alleviated, by proper soil management that emphasizes organic matter build-up and maintenance.At the forefront of a reawakening interest in sustainable agriculture, this book is written for farmers, gardeners, extension specialists, and others interested in the practical stewardship of our natural resources. Fred Magdoff, noted for his expertise in soil fertility, presents the latest information on soil organic matter and explains modern management techniques along with the best of the older practices. He opens with a discussion of the nature of organic matter and its function in the soil and then reviews practices for building up and maintaining soil organic matter, including reduced tillage, residue management, and crop rotations. A final selection offers an overview of the dynamics and chemistry of organic matter.

Building Soils for Better Crops: Organic Matter Management (Our Sustainable Future, Vol 2)

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Magdoff, Fred

Gardening & Landscape Design

University Of Nebraska Press

More than forty years after its initial publication, William Hinton’s Fanshen continues to be the essential volume for those fascinated with China’s revolutionary process of rural reform and social change. A pioneering work, Fanshan is a marvelous and revealing look into life in the Chinese countryside, where tradition and modernity have had both a complimentary and caustic relationship in the years since the Chinese Communist Party first came to power. It is a rare, concrete record of social struggle and transformation, as witnessed by a participant. Fanshen continues to offer profound insight into the lives of peasants and China’s complex social processes. Rediscover this classic volume, which includes a new preface by Fred Magdoff.

Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village

History

HINTON, William

Asia

Monthly Review+press

The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences

In the fall of 2008, the United States was plunged into a financial crisis more severe than any since the Great Depression. As banks collapsed and the state scrambled to organize one of the largest transfers of wealth in history, many—including economists and financial experts—were shocked by the speed at which events unfolded.
In this new book, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff offer a bold analysis of the financial meltdown, how it developed, and the implications for the future. They examine the specifics of the housing bubble and the credit crunch as well as situate current events within a broader crisis of monopoly-finance capitalism—one that has been gestating for several decades. It is the "real" productive economy’s tendency toward stagnation, they argue, that creates a need for capital to find ways to profitably invest its surplus. But rather than invest in socially useful projects that would benefit the vast majority, capital has constructed a financialized "casino" economy that neglects social needs and, as has become increasingly clear, is fatally unstable. Written over a two-year period immediately prior to the onset of the crisis, this timely and illuminating book is necessary reading for all those who wish to understand the current situation, how we got here, and where we are heading.

Business & Money

Foster, John Bellamy

Economics

The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know

The economic crisis has created a host of problems for working people: collapsing wages, lost jobs, ruined pensions, and the anxiety that comes with not knowing what tomorrow willbring. Compounding all this is a lack of reliable information that speaks to the realities of workers. Commentators and pundits seem more confused than anyone, and economists—the so-called "experts"—still cling to bankrupt ideologies that failed to predict the crisis and offer nothing to explain it.
In this short, clear, and concise book, Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates explain the nature of the economic crisis. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the authors demonstrate that this crisis is not some aberration from a normally benign capitalism but rather the normal and even expected outcome of a thoroughly irrational and destructive system. No amount of tinkering with capitalism, whether it be discredited neoliberalism or the return of Keynesianism and a "new" New Deal, can overcome the core contradiction of the system: the daily exploitation and degradation of the majority of the world’s people by a tiny minority of business owners.
While the current economic maelstrom has laid bare the web of greed, corruption, and propaganda that are central to capitalism, only an aroused public, demanding the right to health care, decent employment, a secure old age, and a clean and healthy environment, can lead the United States and the world out of the worst crisis since the Great Depression and toward a system of production and distribution conducive to human happiness. This book is aimed primarily at working people, students, and activists, who want not just to understand the world but to change it.

Yates, Michael D.

The failures of “free-market” capitalism are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the production and distribution of food. Although modern human societies have attained unprecedented levels of wealth, a significant amount of the world’s population continues to suffer from hunger or food insecurity on a daily basis. In Agriculture and Food in Crisis, Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar have assembled an exceptional collection of scholars from around the world to explore this frightening long-term trend in food production. While approaching the issue from many angles, the contributors to this volume share a focus on investigating how agricultural production is shaped by a system that is oriented around the creation of profit above all else, with food as nothing but an afterthought.
As the authors make clear, it is technically possible to feed to world’s people, but it is not possible to do so as long as capitalism exists. Toward that end, they examine what can be, and is being, done to create a human-centered and ecologically sound system of food production, from sustainable agriculture and organic farming on a large scale to movements for radical land reform and national food sovereignty. This book will serve as an indispensible guide to the years ahead, in which world politics will no doubt come to be increasingly understood as food politics.

Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal

Tokar, Brian

What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

Praise for Foster and Magdoff’s The Great Financial Crisis: In this timely and thorough analysis of the current financial crisis, Foster and Magdoff explore its roots and the radical changes that might be undertaken in response. . . . This book makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing examination of our current debt crisis, one that deserves our full attention.—Publishers Weekly
There is a growing consensus that the planet is heading toward environmental catastrophe: climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, global freshwater use, loss of biodiversity, and chemical pollution all threaten our future unless we act. What is less clear is how humanity should respond. The contemporary environmental movement is the site of many competing plans and prescriptions, and composed of a diverse set of actors, from militant activists to corporate chief executives.
This short, readable book is a sharply argued manifesto for those environmentalists who reject schemes of “green capitalism” or piecemeal reform. Environmental and economic scholars Magdoff and Foster contend that the struggle to reverse ecological degradation requires a firm grasp of economic reality. Going further, they argue that efforts to reform capitalism along environmental lines or rely solely on new technology to avert catastrophe misses the point. The main cause of the looming environmental disaster is the driving logic of the system itself, and those in power—no matter how “green”—are incapable of making the changes that are necessary.
What Every Environmentalist Needs To Know about Capitalism tackles the two largest issues of our time, the ecological crisis and the faltering capitalist economy, in a way that is thorough, accessible, and sure to provoke debate in the environmental movement.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Magdoff, Fred. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Magdoff, Fred

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Magdoff, Fred. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Building Soils for Better Crops: Organic Matter Management (Our Sustainable Future, Vol 2)

Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village

The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences

The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences

The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know

The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know

Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal

Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal

What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism