Increasing attention has been given to “indigenous” knowledge in Third World rural societies as a potential basis for sustainable agricultural development. It has been found that many people have functional knowledge systems pertaining to their resources and environment, which are based on...

This paper has two purposes: To report the findings of a study of ethnic differences in cognition in a rural West Sumatran area; and to demonstrate the importance of ethnicity—in at least some contexts—for tailoring agricultural research to farmers' needs. A cognitive mapping technique, called...

Recent debates over the persistence of family farms have focused on the importance of “naturalistic” obstacles to the capitalist development of agriculture. According to these arguments, the existence of these barriers in some realms of agricultural production precludes the development of...

Agriculture in the Netherlands is a critical industry, in terms of both its share of available land and its importance to the Dutch economy. Cultural-technical improvements and intensification of land use have resulted in increased productivity, but have also threatened vulnerable and valuable...

Animal rights and experimentation have become the focus of a major controversy in the United States, with acute implications for animal-related research in the laboratories and veterinary schools of many American universities. To date, efforts to reduce fundamental disagreements between animal...

Family farming became a major social force in the Federal Republic following World War II. Several political, economic and social factors facilitated the development of a unified political representation within the farm sector. The German Farmers Union (Deutscher Bauernverband) became the main...

In this paper the authors analyze the two most important interrelated processes of social change in Italian agriculture: first the increasing productive specialization of family farming, both full and part-time, lending to the persistence of small farms but also to their growing integration and...

This paper presents a framework for exploring the temporal and behavioral aspects of the responses of various involved parties that may lead to governmental intervention in situations involving exposure of the public to hazardous substances. The activities of key individuals are closely...

The current financial stress in the countryside and the future of the family farm are likely to be major issues in the formulation of the 1990 Farm Bill. Medium-sized commercial family farms may be especially targeted for support. These farms are the basis of rural economies and settlement...