Homestead Farming Research Articles

When Jennie Took to Bed

When Jennie took to bed years ago, Uncle Bill and Aunt Jennie were living comfortably in their South Dakota homestead farm home. Bill and Jennie were brother and sister. Bill was a farmer and gentleman. Neither was married. Their parents had emigrated from an area near Prague in eastern Europe to Dakota territory, where, through sheer willpower and common sense, sickness and injuries were accepted and treated with patience and prayer. Jennie accepted with no obvious reservations the responsibility of raising the orphaned children of her sister, who died while being operated on for what was apparently a ruptured appendix. One of the girls she raised was my mother. Jennie was a beautiful woman of quiet dignity. All who knew her instinctively accepted her as a person of authority. She had the ability to analyze problems and make correct decisions in a straightforward way. I suppose she could be referred

The role of agroforestry in the farming systems in Rwanda with special reference to the Bugesera-Gisaka-Migongo (BGM) region

The Rwandan farmers, faced with a perpetual land shortage, have evolved certain intensive systems of organic agriculture. These systems, particularly the homestead (compound) farming, involve the combination of food, fodder and tree crops. to a certain extent these systems can satisfy the multiple needs of the subsistence farmers living under several risks and constraints. However, they cannot cope with the expanding food demand of the rapidly increasing population. Some multipurpose, low-input technologies and agroforestry approaches have been designed to improve the productivity of these traditional systems; these include inter/mixed cropping systems and rotations, alley cropping with leguminous trees and shrubs, use of planted ‘fallow’, planting tree legumes on anti-erosive lines, mixed farming,community forestry and woodlots, and tree planting on farm/field boundaries. The essential aspects of these technologies are briefly discussed.

The Elderly in Classical Antiquity

ABSTRACTFor evidence about the extent and experience of old age in classical antiquity, one must rely excessively on literature and mythology, with their heavy bias towards the leisured classes and their lack of quantitative data. Nevertheless, there are bases for some plausible inferences: both life expectancy and for most people the standard of living were low, with a consequence of an early commencement of ‘adult’ employment and the absence of any notion (or possibility) of retirement; those hardy and lucky enough to survive of ten appear to have retained a vigorous creativity into very old age; emotional relations (e.g. between parents and children) were coloured by such factors as high infant mortality and the relative early death of parents and grandparents. The absence of really large cities, other than Rome and one or two others, and of rural isolation (the homestead farm, for example) reduced the dangers of the kind of loneliness associated with the modern bed-sitter, though problems of old age fell solely on the family (rather than the community). Medical literature showed a surprising lack of interest in mental illness associated with old age or even in medical problems other than the obvious ones of debility, and there is no way for us to penetrate the silence.

Eight Letters to the Editor: The Genesis of the Townsend National Recovery Plan

The Townsend National Recovery Plan and the clubs which were organized around it provided one of the greatest grass roots political movements of the twentieth century. As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has pointed out, [Dr. Francis] Townsend and his followers were calling attention in a definitive way to a cruel problem which the American people had too long shoved under the rug. Now the nation could never ignore its old again.1 Yet the whole movement was largely accidental, stemming from eight letters to the editor written by an obscure sixtyseven-year-old physician down on his luck.2 Born on a homestead farm near the frontier community of Fairbury, Illinois, in 1867, Dr. Francis E. Townsend was a resident of Long Beach, California, when he first formulated his recovery plan. This he did in a letter to the editor of the Long Beach Press Telegram in late September 1933In all of his previous sixty-seven years the doctor had achieved little that could be interpreted in the conventional terms of outstanding success. The waning months of 1933 found him, after a lifetime of hard work, unemployed and his meager savings rapidly dwindling. Townsend had sought his fortune in one vocation after another first as a hay-farmer in California, then as a cowboy. He later filed a homestead claim in western Kansas. Though not himself well-educated, the young Townsend taught school to supplement the meager returns from his homestead. Finally, beaten by the drought, he sold his homestead and headed for Colorado where he worked briefly in the mines at Cripple Creek. Having decided in the fall of 1899 that the good earth gave up her generous bounty much too reluctantly, Townsend, now age thirty-one,

A Simple Institutional Framework for the Analysis of Agricultural Development Potential

Anthropologists' and rural sociologists' conceptions of agricultural economic institutions and organization are evidently influenced by the type of Western agriculture which they know best. In northwestern Europe, North America, and Australia, the most conspicuous type of agricultural organization is that in which the roles of landowner, operator, manager, and investor are vested in an individual or single family. There are other combinations, but these usually deviate from autonomous homestead farming in one respect alone. For example, (a) ownership is vested in a landlord, while the actual cultivator is his own manager and investor; (b) the cultivator is owner and manager, but capitalization rests with a private, cooperative, or public bank; or (c) the landlord may be his own manager and investor, but employs cultivators and other blue collar workers.