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The accommodation of livestock husbandry with crop agriculture is crucial for the future of the West African Sahel. Present trends are leading to greater restrictions on livestock husbandry and a growing convergence of livelihood practices among groups whose identities are tied to herding and farming. Using the cases of four rural communities in Niger, this study adopts an 'access to resources' framework to analyse the causal connections among: rural peoples' livelihood strategies, everyday social relations of production, perceptions of social groups' identities, and the potential for farmer-herder conflict. While the convergence of livelihoods arguably increases the frequency of conflict triggers, it has also, through the expansion of shared common interests and cross-group, production-related relationships, improved the ability of communities to effectively manage these incipient conflicts.

Composite farming systems, first clearly identified by Rambo, are those in which radically different technologies are found together in a single farming complex. Data from diaries kept by groups of farming families in two Angami Naga villages in northeast India, Khonoma and smaller Tsiesema, detailing inputs into and outputs from wet-rice terraces and jhum (swidden) fields in the years 2000 and 2001, are presented and discussed to detail the workings of related but different composite systems. The 2000–2001 survey caught an important set of changes in midstream. Although returns to labour from the first-year jhums were much higher than those from the wet-rice terraces in 2000–2001, jhums were declining in significance as a growing non-farm economy joined the production of cool-climate vegetables and a spice crop for the Indian market as principal sources of livelihood. This story is told in the light of recent writing on the demise of swidden in the larger Southeast Asian region, and it is suggested that greater attention be paid to the composite systems, which are not uncommon in this region. This might help diversify what has perhaps been an oversimplified discussion.

Having been evicted from their homes because of incentives created by the New Deal's AGricultural ADjustment Act, sharecroppers in Arkansas formed the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) in 1934. Led by socialists and radicals, the organization ultimately claimed upward of thirty thousand members and constituted an assault on the social, economic, and racial status quo of the South. Historians have celebrated the STFU, especially its commitment to biracial cooperation and equality. This article digs beneath this carefully constructed image of the union to scrutinize the internal dynamics of the movement. It revises a number of interpretations surrounding the STFU. Although the greatest obstacles to the union's success were external, it also faced internal divisions that diminished its efficacy. The STFU's decentralized structure did not foster strong connections between leadership and membership, resulting in misunderstandings. But most importantly, the union struggled to live up to its creed of biracialism and equal treatment of African Americans. Ultimately, the STFU was less an aberration that tirelessly confronted the social and racial ills of the South and more an organization that reflected some of those ills even as it grappled with them.

Despite extensive literature both supporting and critiquing the Green Revolution, surprisingly little attention has been paid to synthetic fertilizers' health and environmental effects or indigenous farmers' perspectives. The introduction of agrochemicals in the mid-twentieth century was a watershed event for many Mayan farmers in Guatemala. While some Maya hailed synthetic fertilizers' immediate effectiveness as a relief from famines and migrant labor, other lamented the long-term deterioration of their public health, soil quality, and economic autonomy. Since the rising cost of agrochemicals compelled Maya to return to plantation labor in the 1970s, synthetic fertilizers simply shifted, rather than alleviated, Mayan dependency on the cash economy. By highlighting Mayan farmers' historical narratives and delineating the relationship between agricultural science and postwar geopolitics, the constraints on agriculturists' agency become clear. In the end, politics, more than technology or agricultural performance, influenced guatemala's shift toward the Green Revolution.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s brought about a dramatic rise in global crop yields. But, as most observers acknowledge, this has come at a considerable cost to biodiversity. Plant breeding, synthetic fertilizers, and mechanization steadily narrowed the number of crop varieties commercially available to farmers and promoted fencerow-to-fencerow monocultures. Many historians trace the origins of this style of industrialized agriculture to the last great plow-up of the Great Plains in the 1920s. In the literature, farms in the plains are often described metaphorically as wheat factories, degrading successive landscapes. While in many ways these farms were a departure from earlier forms of husbandry in the American experience, monocultures were quite rare during the early transformation of the plains. Analysis of a large representative sample, based on manuscript agricultural censuses and involving twenty-five townships across the state of Kansas, demonstrates that diverse production reached even the most challenging of plains landscapes.

This article uses Barra do Piraí as a case study of rural land tenure, production, consumption, and labor in Brazil's Middle Paraíba Valley during the half century following abolition of slavery in 1888. Dairy farming and railroad development distinguished Barra do Piraí from other coffee-producing areas that suffered from ecological devastation. By 1900 the land's loss of fertility precluded further plantation agriculture in Barra do Piraí, leading to the transition from lucrative coffee cultivation to dairy farming based on meager capital inputs. Compared to the earlier coffee culture, dairy farms produced only modest wealth for landlords and required fewer laborers, compelling impoverished tenants to migrate in search of employment. Since Barra do Piraí was an important railroad junction, many rural laborers ended up in the locale after using the railroad as a migratory path. At the same time, the railroad and proto-industries that it stimulated provided alternative employment for rural laborers, thereby partially mitigating the leverage landlords had over the abundant labor force. The availability of industrial and proto-industrial employment created occupational diversity among rural tenants and introduced them to work routines that would become commonplace when the region more fully industrialized after 1940.

For over thirty years (1653-1685), Thomas Minor kept a diary recording his activities as a farmer in Stonington, Connecticut. This article uses Minor's diary, the only extant document of its kind for the seventeenth century, to reconstruct key features of the colonial New England agrarian experience. Arguing that work played as significant a role as religion in shaping early New Englanders' lives, the article examines not only how farming contributed to the Minors' economic prosperity and independence, but also how its physical demands and seasonal rhythms shaped Thomas Minor's worldview more generally. Agriculture provided an important context for Minor's relations with his wife and sons, with nature, and even with a sense of his own mortality. Minor emerges as someone less interested in calculating profit and loss on his farm than in accomplishing a hard day's work as a steward of the land that he hoped would support his family for generations to come.

Modern environmental activists unified behind calls for a change in how humans understood their relationships with nature. Yet they approached their concerns through a variety of historical lenses. Countering arguments that suggest environmentalism had its deepest roots in outdoor leisure, the countercultural back-to-the-land movement turned to a markedly American practice of pastoral mythmaking that held rural life and labor as counter to the urban-industrial condition. Counterculturalists relied specifically on notions of simple work in rural collective endeavors as the means to producing a healthy body and environment. Yet the individuals who went back-to-the-land often failed to remedy conflicts that arose as they attempted to abandon American consumer practices and take up a "primitive" and down-to-early pastoral existence. Contact with rural nature time and again translated to physical maladies, impoverishment, and community clashes in many rural countercultural communes. As the back-to-the-land encounter faded, the greater movement's ethos did not disappear. Counterculturalists used the consumption of nature through rural labor as a fundamental idea in a growing cooperative food movement. The back-to-the-land belief in the connection between healthy bodies, environments, and a collective identity helped to expand a new form of consumer environmentalism.

This article investigates the links between market-oriented activities and subsistence production among peasant farmers in the Thyolo and Mzimba districts in Malawi from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. The two districts were chosen because of their differences in terms of land-labor ratios, quality of soils, and structure of market engagement. Exploring the different paths of agrarian change in these two districts demonstrates that they were dependent on the structure of market engagement and its effects on the supply and flexibility of labor. African agricultural history is best understood when agricultural systems are viewed in connection to the overall economic activities of rural households. More simply put, the dynamics of agrarian change in rural Africa cannot be understood without linking such changes to the wider economy and their impact on local labor processes.

The légende noire of the French Revolution has been the underlying paradigm of much modern French environmental history. This legend contends that peasants were reckless land clearers and tree cutters who disregarded the environment and unleashed an unmitigated natural disaster in the countryside. But the legend is misconceived in many ways. The purpose of this article is to investigate Ancien Régime land-clearance legislation in a non-forested region of France: Lower Languedoc. The results of this land-clearance demonstrate that far from being culpable, the rural masses were officially encouraged to clear and cultivate land on the eve of the Revolution. The French peasantry were not as destructive as the légende noire suggests; the crops they chose to plant on their newly cleared plots reflected a sensitivity towards the environment. Vines were planted on much of the new land-viticulture was not only a sound ecological choice, well-suited to the landscape, but was also attuned to the economic realities of the day.

This article examines proto-industrialization and the social relations of production in a rural parish in eastern Westphalia that experienced large-scale outmigration to the American Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century. Relying on local and individual-level Prussian tax and emigration records, the study identifies and analyses the socio-economic background of the migrant cohort in terms of proto-industrial activity and peasant economy. Preceded by the downfall of domestic textile industries due to British industrial competition, outmigration was highly selective, drawing individuals from specific socio-economic niches. Landless sharecroppers - linked by debt and labour obligations to better-off peasants and landlords - were underrepresented in the migration, while smallholding peasants and day-labourers - 'free' to commodify their labour power through the sale of home-produced textile products or seasonal migratory labour - were overrepresented. The findings of the study have implications for an understanding of the localized nature of the relations of production in proto-industrial regions, the historical nature of German emigrations, and the dynamics of the German transition to industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century.