Title: Fields without dreams : defending the agrarian idea /
Authors: Hanson, Victor Davis
Publisher: Free Press,
Year: 1996
Subjects: Family farms United States; Agriculture Economic aspects United States
Abstract: America's disappearing family farmer is often portrayed as either a figure of pitiable tragedy or glorified romance. But in one of the most unusual books ever written on farming, farmer and Greek scholar Victor Davis Hanson eloquently explains how neither portrait conveys what really matters about farming. As the family farm all but vanishes in our nation, it is neither food production nor the environment that will most suffer - but rather our nation will lose its last real connection with the virtues and work ethic that our founding fathers had themselves inherited from the wisdom of classical Greek culture and upon which American society rests.
Contents: In the beginning -- The raisin cosmology -- The great raisin crash of 1983 -- To save a farm -- Bus Barzagus and his mountain -- Briars and thorns: vines with no grapes, trees without plums -- The mountain, part two -- The agrarian pantheon -- The first and last: family farming at the millennium -- Postscript: Year's end 1994.