Recommended Books

Regenerative Agriculture

- Mark Shepard: Regenerative Agriculture. This great book describes the benefits of natural, perennial ecosystems and create agricultural systems that imitate nature in form and function while still providing for food, building, fuel and many other needs. Both at farm level and bigger scale.

- J. Russell Smith: Tree Crops, a Permanent Agriculture. This book is a pioneering look at the use of trees for food, soil conservation, and sustainable agriculture. Also describes how trees such as carob, honey locust, persimmon, mulberry, oaks and pecans can be used to enrich the land and how animals dependent on it.

- Aranya: Permaculture Design, a Step by Step guide. This book leads you through the design process from beginning to end, using clear explanations, flowcharts and diagrams. It is based on course worksheets which have been designed, refined and tested on students over time

- Paul Stamets: Mycellium running, How Mushrooms can help save the world. Mycelium Running is a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet. That’s right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment, and in this groundbreaking text from mushroom expert Paul Stamets, you’ll find out how.

- Ben Falk: The resilient farm & homestead.The book is a manual for developing durable, beautiful, and highly functional human habitat systems fit to handle an age of rapid transition.

 

Sustainable meat production

- Nicolette Hahn Niman: Defending Beef.This book shows cattle are not inherently bad for either the Earth or our own nutritional health. In fact, properly managed livestock play an essential role in maintaining grassland ecosystems by functioning as surrogates for herds of wild ruminants that once covered the globe.

- Judith D. Schwartz and Laura Jorstad: Cows Save the Planet. And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth. The book looks at soil as a crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises. Schwartz reveals that for many of these problems climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, droughts, floods, wildfires, rural poverty, malnutrition, and obesity there are positive, alternative scenarios to the degradation and devastation we face.

- Kristin Ohlson: The Soil Will Save Us. How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet. In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"―a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon―and potentially reverse global warming.