Quarter Acre Research Articles

Assessing the Impact of Land Fragmentation on Agricultural Productivity and Rural Development in Vihiga County, Kenya

Increased population pressures affect land as it is divided again and again resulting in poor yields in agriculture. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to establish the Legislative changes and population growth as factors leading to land fragmentation in Vihiga County, Kenya. Following the Agricultural Production Function Model, the study was descriptively cross-sectional. The study was undertaken in Vihiga County. Purposive sampling together with the stratified random sampling technique was adopted to recruit participants to the study. The population was over 10,000 therefore sample determination was done using Fisher’s formula which gave 384 peasant farmers with subdivided farms. Quantitative data were gathered using, Likert-scale questionnaires that were semi-structured, while qualitative data were gathered using interview guides. Quasi-experimental research design incorporated both quantitative and qualitative data that used both descriptive and inferential analysis. The study showed that 58percent of the households had land of half-quarter to half acre, 71 percent. 3 percent of farmers are owning the land for farming. On the issue of land fragmentation 94 % of the respondents agreed that this was prevalent mainly as a result of inheritance. Also, 48% of subdivisions produced subdivided plots that were less than a quarter acre, therefore reducing the productivity of farm land and posing difficultly in managing it. While 84% of responded farmers had less than one acre of land, only 16% had more than one acre of land which was strongly indicating the level of land fragmentation. Additionally, on 66 percent of the agricultural: land size farmed was between a quarter and half an acre. It revealed that farm productivity had positive relation with larger land size (r = 0. 888). Descriptive statistics and inferential tests showed a strong positive relationship between land size, land ownership and productivity found out that large block of size is productive. This also affected the investment in modern and mechanized farming practices with a correlation of -0. 598 as the fragmentation was associated with low yields and low profitability or economic return with r = - 0. 443. Based on the findings of the study, the researcher concludes that land consolidation is crucial in increasing agriculture productivity and supports the policies dealing with efficient use of the limited land resources. This study recommended that in the event of addressing the issue of fragmentation prioritization of land consolidation and the encouragement of land ownership reforms to accommodate investments in different techniques in support of superior usage of land, thereby increasing agricultural, production and sustainability levels.

Genoa, Nebraska, Settlement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Development, Demise, and Those Who Remained

Genoa, Nebraska, Settlement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Development, Demise, and Those Who Remained

Villain, victim or prophet?: William Gregory and the Great Famine

The name of Sir William Gregory features in most modern accounts of Ireland in the nineteenth century. It is fair to say, however, that usually he is regarded as a ‘villain’. Gregory is very widely known as the author of a piece of legislation introduced as part of relief measures during the Famine which sought to limit aid to those with a quarter acre or under of land and which became known as the Gregory clause or the quarter acre clause. An article in the New York Times on 16 July 2002 about the dedication of an Irish famine memorial in New York described the 5 million-dollar monument as follows: ‘The quarter-acre size of the monument adheres to the infamous Gregory clause passed by the British parliament in 1847, which decreed that cottiers whose plots exceeded that size would not be eligible for relief. The cottage is roofless because many farmers tore the thatches off their homes to prove destitution and qualify for relief.’ Most modern academic accounts of the Famine have been very critical of Gregory. It is widely accepted that the purpose of the Gregory clause was to assist landlords to clear their estates of pauperised smallholders who were paying little or no rent. This measure has been seen by some as leading to mass evictions and causing the clearance of many small farmers and labourers throughout Ireland.

Brisbane: Urban Construction, Suburban Dreaming

Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, has catapulted from a small, provincial town to a larger metropolis within two decades from the inception of urban renewal in 1992. Once a low-density suburban city, its inner-city and some suburban areas are now medium to high density, with the rise in apartment buildings creating new and denser modes of living. This article suggests that urbanism demands different habits of living from suburbanism and examines the relationship between the material and representational city to explore the ways in which promotions of the “new” Brisbane during its early urban renewal period reproduces the ethos of suburban living.

The Australian quarter acre block: the death of a dream?

The right to a backyard barbecue, swimming pool and ample space for ball games is a cherished aspect of the Australian suburban dream. This is exemplified in the concept of the quarter acre block as the required standard for all. However, rising land prices, a demographic shift away from the nuclear family and the imperatives of sustainability and climate change may stand in opposition to this utopian ideal. As Australian cities plan for increased density and urban consolidation, it is appropriate to question the continued currency of the quarter acre block. A survey of four suburbs in Adelaide, South Australia, investigates householders' preferences for a range of physical design factors including block size and garden availability. The results of the survey provide important evidence for policy makers at a time when radically new forms of housing in the form of apartments and transit-oriented developments are increasingly evident in Australian cities.

E-Learning through Digital Theatre: Breaking Down the Tyranny of Distance and Limits of Location

In this article, we report on a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural digital exchange project between Australian Drama and Education students and Dutch English Language and Culture students, and examine the impact of the place-independent, technology-mediated communications and collaboration on their learning trajectories. The intensive, intercultural collaboration between the two groups of students resulted in a 50-minute group-devised, digital theatre play entitled Quarter Acre Dreaming. This play, performed through live interactive media by both Dutch and Australian students, traced the historical development of the Australian suburb, while integrating scenes of Dutch immigration into Australia. In the creative process, the students on either side of the globe interacted through Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), and used videoconferencing and Skype for live rehearsals and discussions to advance their learning of English, their performance repertoire and cross-cultural understanding.

C M Woolgar, D Serjeantson, and T Waldron (eds), Food in medieval England: diet and nutrition, Medieval History and Archaeology, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. xv, 347, £55.00 (hardback 978-0-19-927349-2).

Food in medieval England—what could be a better subject except, perhaps, food in medieval France? In this collection, an archaeologist, a physician and a librarian bring together nineteen essays summarizing the last two decades of archaeological, scientific and documentary research. Details of digs, analyses of carbon ratios in bones, close studies of manorial and monastic accounts, palaeopathological reports, intricate tables and graphs of seed and bone findings make for tedious reading, but also for conclusions about medieval diet and nutrition anchored, for once, in facts. And these essays leave a surprising impression: the medieval diet was more varied, more delicious, and healthier than has been supposed, with all but the poorest having access to fish and fowl, fruit, vegetables, and meat, most of the time, in most places. Part I surveys the documentable food-stuffs of medieval England. Grain, including wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans and vetch, provided the bulk of calories as bread, ale and pottage. Vegetables and fruit were the next main constituent of the medieval diet; most people (including town dwellers) cultivated small (quarter acre) gardens of vegetables and fruit. These supplied not only the traditional leeks, onions and garlic, but also plums, walnuts, cherries, pears, apples and, in the warmer south, grapes, and even saffron. In addition to home-grown produce, the remains of figs, raisins and almonds in various sites suggest access to imported Mediterranean produce. Both archaeological remains and documents confirm that beef and mutton were the most important meats in the medieval diet, though pork was popular, especially in the pre-Norman period. Fish—saltwater and freshwater—trapped in rivers, farmed in ponds, or fished in the sea, had an important place in the diet; cod, herring and eel bones being especially prevalent in digs. Everyone kept and ate chickens and, to a lesser extent, ducks and geese. Wild fowl, by contrast, was the prerogative of the upper classes. Indeed, the aristocrats seem to have eaten almost anything with wings, including seabirds and larks, though not birds of prey (or crows). Meat of the hunt—boar, hare and especially venison—was also mainly the food of the upper classes. Part II covers medieval nutrition, which was more dependent on climate and season than is the modern, for cultural, medical, and agricultural reasons. Thus little meat was eaten in spring, because of Lent; in summer, when cows and chickens were producing well, the consumption of milk and eggs went up, and pork consumption, thought to be unhealthy in summer, went down. Many special foods were reserved for religious celebrations, especially Christmas and Easter. Despite, or perhaps because of, these seasonal variations, medieval nutrition does not seem to have been as poor as the common canard would have it. At any rate, palaeopathology has not been able to document much vitamin deficiency or disease: medieval skeletons are no shorter than pre-twentieth century European skeletons, nor are they commonly iron-deficient, scorbutic or tuberculous. It was a pleasure to examine such careful documentation of medieval life, and to find conclusions at odds with the fixed idea that life in the medieval period was poor, brutish and short. I recommend that a variety of scholars take the time to read and assimilate the conclusions of this volume. Perhaps then we can lay to rest, and even inter (for future research) the attractive but, apparently, wrong-headed idea of a premodern population hungry for the invention of industrial farming.

At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms

At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms

Theory of Garden Art by C. C. L. Hirschfeld

79 varied’’ lives of businessmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘‘The patriarchal family and kinship networks coexisted with possessive individualism. Thecapitalistethossurfacedintraditional families alongside conventional social ambitions.’’ Mr. Grassby’s iconoclasm pursues the ‘‘facts’’ so intently that, with the refreshing candor of an ‘‘independent scholar,’’ he sometimes vindicates the work of his targets. As part of his argument that, ‘‘Marriage in thebusinesscommunitydid not just transfer power over women from father to husband,’’he asserts that ‘‘Companionate marriage’’ flourished during his period of study, a position that vindicates Stone’s Family, Sex and Marriage . His work in ‘‘apprenticeship registers ’’ finds women joining ‘‘the cutlers, pewterers, drapers, glasssellers, girdlers, basketmakers, scriveners, gunmakers, weavers, clockmakers, goldsmiths, carpentersand stationers.’’However,thepercentage of women apprentices was so ‘‘tiny,’’ and the ‘‘disadvantage’’they suffered from ‘‘lack of capital’’so great, that he, like any good gender theorist, concludes , ‘‘Apprenticeship brought women into the economy without changing the patriarchal character of society.’’ Perhaps most revealing, as Mr. Grassby moves through the topics of marriage, family, men in business, and women in business, he repeatedly corroborates the demographic analysis that underlies much of Stone’s recent work. Although a period of scientific advancement and increasing material wealth, 1580–1740 also wasatimeofdemographiccrisis.‘‘In the early eighteenth century 45 percent of . . . [London] aldermen had no male issue .’’ ‘‘Of the 1,226 baronetcies created (1611–1800), 55 percent were extinct by 1800, and only 295 existed by 1928; only fourteen of ninety-three families achieved succession in single direct male line, often through grandsons.’’ Whether we find it in Nancy Armstrong’s comments upon the ‘‘dismantling’’of the ‘‘aristocratic body’’or in Michael McKeon’s upon ‘‘categorial instability,’’ the claim that patrilineal succession failed in early modern England underlies many of the cultural, gender, and literary studies of which Mr. Grassby is so suspicious. That he unwittingly spreads the ‘‘virus’’ of which he is so contemptuous hardly diminishes his achievement. Rather, it betokens the purity of his method. This book is a ‘‘must-read’’foranyhistorian or literary critic who wishes to attempt (or rely upon) generalizations about marriage, family, and property in eighteenth-century England. Its great lesson is that such generalizations always risk being ‘‘anachronistic’’ and must be offered cautiously, charily—even by Mr. Grassby himself. Brian McCrea University of Florida C. C. L. HIRSCHFELD. Theory of Garden Art, ed. and trans. Linda B. Parshall.Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture. Philadelphia : Pennsylvania, 2001. Pp. ix ⫹ 496. $59.95; £42. C. C. L. Hirschfeld’s five-volume Theorie der Gartenkunst (1779–1785), one of the most influential and popular books on landscape design published in the later eighteenth century, has never been available in English. (This may be because it appeared simultaneously in French; because large swatches of the book are lifted from British and French treatises and guidebooks; or because others later plundered his work, making it seem less original that it actually is.) Hirschfeld’s Theory is both a hymn of praise to the new, ‘‘natural’’ English gar- 80 den and a critique, not only of ‘‘artificial’’ French gardens but of many contemporary garden practices: mixing Chinese, Moorish, and Gothic styles; ignoring the contours and character of the landscape; building ostentatious structures too big for their context and function. Throughout he advocates simple, expressive gardens , ‘‘free of empty ornamentations and trivial affectations,’’ and ‘‘naturalness improved by a restrained art.’’ While he acknowledges that ‘‘princes’’ are necessary to build the more elaborate gardens, he often sounds as if he and his readers would be happy with a carefullydesigned and tended quarter acre. Unlike many other eighteenth-century garden theorists, Hirschfeld is remarkably eclectic and non-dogmatic: ‘‘In matters that theory has not yet exactly determined , perhaps cannot determine, people follow established linguistic practice ; and we understand and are understood , without tying ourselves to the precision of logic and the stubbornness of an arbitrary terminology.’’ He was a professor of philosophy and aesthetics at the University at Kiel, but also the director of a fruit tree nursery. His publishedwork reflects this unusual marriage of the theoretical and the pragmatic. He criticizes landscape theorists like Whately for elevating ‘‘pure metaphysics’’ over ‘‘feeling ,’’ as well as for giving very little ‘‘practical guidance.’’ He...

Ecological scenario building guides policy in North America

The Pacific Northwest Ecosystem Research Consortium (funded primarily by the US Environmental Protection Agency) is soon to release an atlas of ecological scenarios for Oregon. The project maps out current land use and land cover at the quarter acre resolution, and then produces three different maps of the future assuming different ecological trajectories (http://www.fsl.orst.edu/pnwerc/wrb/atlas/atlas_toc.html). The three alternative scenarios are an aggressive development scenario, a conservation scenario and a business-as-usual scenario. These ‘future maps’ make clear to both the public and decision-makers that choices available now will have consequences in the future.In addition, the project also produces a map depicting conditions in 1850. All the maps are then interpreted in terms of what they imply for effects on ecological conditions. The Oregon project is noteworthy because it is probably the finest-scale scenario analysis yet completed, and the one most soundly based on measured data. The use of alternative scenarios is becoming increasingly popular in environmental decision making, because scenarios bundle together assumptions and values in coherent packages that are easier to understand than are complex models with innumerable permutations of parameters. PK

A Very Small Farm

Review: A Very Small Farm By William Paul Winchester Reviewed by Irwin Weintraub Rutgers University Winchester, William Paul. A Very Small Farm. Tulsa, OK, Council Oak Books, 1996. Illustration by Carol Stanton. 229 p. US $17.95. ISBN: 1- Have you ever wondered what it would be like to buy some land and make a living as a small farmer? After receiving his bachelor's degree in botany from the University of Tulsa, William Paul Winchester followed his dream and bought a 20 acre farm in northeastern Oklahoma in order to find out. A Very Small Farm chronicles Winchester's daily life on the farm he calls Southwind. Southwind has an apple orchard, a peach orchard, a poultry yard, and a quarter acre of garden. He describes his daily routines and management techniques at the farm including repairs to his house, planting and tending his crops, looking after his chickens, and collecting eggs. His main source of income is the sale of honey from fifty beehives and occasional odd jobs in the community. Although he learned farming on the job, Winchester is also a skilled mechanic, carpenter, cook, writer, and naturalist. In A Very Small Farm, we learn of his life at Southwind through his thoughts about the weather, seasonal changes, machinery repair, vegetarian recipes, cooking, and the flora and fauna of the region. His thoughts about bees and their social structure are entertaining and insightful. We get to know Isabel, his Jersey cow, as he warmly describes how he raised her from a calf and continues to cater to her needs in return for the milk she produces twice daily. Berenice, his dog, and many cats, are also Southwind inhabitants. Winchester's success as a subsistence farmer is illustrated by his comment: The produce from my garden is so abundant, it's been five months since I was last at the grocery store, and then for so few items I can still list them from memory .... (12). He produces enough food for the whole year and cans many items to keep him supplied. His pantry includes asparagus, peas, carrots, zucchini, green beans, sweet corn,

Nesting of the Ruddy Duck in Iowa

THE Ruddy Duck (Erismatura jamaicensis rubida), though often elusive and secretive to the hunter and of late years relatively scarce in hunting bags, affords a great deal of pleasure to the Nature lover who seeks the bird in its native haunts. Aside from its esthetic value, a knowledge of the Ruddy Duck's habits during the critical period of reproduction is essential to the conservationist who would wisely perpetuate and increase this game bird. The nesting habits and habitat requirements of the Ruddy Duck were investigated as part of the waterfowl-research program of the Iowa Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit. The results of the research conducted in northwestern Iowa during the 1938, 1939 and 1940 seasons are here presented. Acknowledgments are made to Dr. George 0. Hendrickson, Zoology Department, Iowa State College, and to Mr. Thomas G. Scott, U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for suggestions and supervision of this work. An area with an abundance of natural lakes and marshes extending from two to three miles on either side of the Clay and Palo Alto County line was chosen for intensive observations. Within a radius of five miles of the city of Ruthven lie six lakes and numerous marshes constituting the largest single remnant of duck-breeding habitat in Iowa. The lakes, in common with other lakes scattered throughout northern Iowa, are the result of the relatively late Wisconsin glaciation which extended from the north-central part of the State as far south as Des Moines. Glacial debris in the form of morainic hills surrounds the lakes in the southern part but gives way to a high rolling plain in the northern part of the area. Approximately 53 square miles were included although only the 6000 acres of lakes, marshes and sloughs were of particular interest. Lost Island Lake, the largest lake of the group, has a surface area of 1260 acres, while marshy spots as small as a quarter acre are numerous.