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Agriculture and Land Use
Mountain farms, gardening, ginseng, absentee landowners
Addis, Jimmy. 2015. “The Hive and the Honeybee.” Interview by Corey Lovell. Foxfire Magazine 49, no. 3-4 (Fall-Winter): 56-74. Details of beekeeping in Rabun County, Ga.
Bennett, David. 2015. “Moving Pawpaws into the Mainstream: Neal Peterson Has Been At It for Decades.” Delta Farm Press, 13 March. 1,894 words. Decades of domesticating and selectively cultivating; and world markets potential. http://deltafarmpress.com/orchard-crops/moving-pawpaws-mainstream.
Berry, Wendell. 2013. “Wendell Berry on His Hopes for Humanity.” Interview by Bill Moyers. Segment from full TV show, “Wendell Berry: Poet & Prophet,” Moyers & Company, 4 September, 39:39 min. With links to the transcript (4,950 words), plus “Wendell Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture,” and “The Berry Center.” http://billmoyers.com/segment/wendell-berry-on-his-hopes-for-humanity/. Also accessible at Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/76120469.
Best, Billy F. 2013. Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste: Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia. Athens: Ohio University Press. 200 pp. Contents: Heritage fruit and heirloom seeds: Beans | Tomatoes | Heritage apples | Corn | Candy roasters | Cucumbers; Seed savers: Seeds, family, community, and traditions | Keepers and distributors of the seeds.
Bettencourt, Denice. 2015. “Raising Free-Range Chickens.” Interview by Logan Bettencourt. Foxfire Magazine49, no. 1-2 (Spring-Summer): 57-61.
Black, Katherine J. 2015. Row by Row: Talking with Kentucky Gardeners. Athens, Oh.: Swallow Press. 221 pp. “Oral history interviews with 40 vegetable gardeners across the state, with a wide variety of backgrounds, result in a “powerful compilation of testimonies on the connections between land, people, culture, and home.”
Buchanan, Jonathan. 2013. “Bethel: Mountain Tobacco Farming in Western North Carolina” [Watauga Co.; history]. Appalachian Journal 40, no. 3-4 (Spring-Summer): 232-265. Maps, charts, photos.
Connor, Edith, Sue Patton, and Sandra Watson. 2013. “A Look at Canning” [Rabun Co.,Ga.]. Student interview by Hannah Watson. Foxfire Magazine 47, no. 1-2 (Spring-Summer): 36-41. Brief oral history on canning vegetables.
Dockery, Chris. 2014. “Heirloom Seed and Story Keepers: Arts-Based Research as Community Discourse in Southern Appalachia.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 20, no. 2 (Fall): 207-223. University of North Georgia, Appalachian Studies Center’s “Saving Appalachian Gardens and Stories” annual demonstration garden.
Ellifritt, Duane. 2013. “Puttin’ Up Hay in Doddridge County.” Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 39, no. 2 (Summer): 52-57. Memories of cutting and stacking. “The standard wage for hired hayfield hands in those days was three dollars a day and dinner.”
Farmer, James Robert, and Megan Betz. 2016. “Rebuilding Local Foods in Appalachia: Variables Affecting Distribution Methods of West Virginia Farms” [survey]. Journal of Rural Studies 45 (May): 34-42.
Feather, Carl E. 2013. “The Buckwheat Stops Here: Preston County’s Hazelton Mill.” Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 39, no. 3 (Fall): 58-65. Perhaps the last mill in the state devoted entirely to grinding buckwheat flour.
Feather, Carl E. 2013. “Everbreeze: Life at an Ohio County Landmark.” Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life39, no. 3 (Fall): 52-57. Everbreeze is one of the oldest working farms in Ohio County, run for five generations by the same family.
Fieselman, Laura. 2015. “Holler: Reflections on the Roots of the Contemporary Homestead” (Madison Co.; photo essay). North Carolina Folklore Journal 62, no. 1 (Winter-Spring): 36-42. “After a decade of informal study, my recent master’s thesis, Homestead: A Regional Moment in an American Movement (2014), explored the backyard and small-scale farms of five families across the Carolinas.”
Fletchall, Ann. 2013. “Making Sense of the Strip: The Postmodern Pastiche of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.” Southeastern Geographer 53, no. 1 (Spring): 102-22. Comparison to Las Vegas; “...themes of Appalachia, the South, Country, Fifties, and Mountains are identified through the content analysis, and all are found to play, broadly, to tourists’ nostalgic desires.”
Gibson, Sarah. 2014. “The Apple Search.” North Carolina Folklore Journal 61, no. 1-2 (Winter-Spring & Summer-Fall): 52-62. “Tom Brown has driven over 250,000 miles and talked to thousands of people to identify and sometimes save from extinction over 1,000 varieties of heritage apples from North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia.”
Gilbert, Richard. 2014. Shepherd: A Memoir. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 323 pp. Gilbert and his family leave their professional lives, move to Appalachian Ohio, and struggle to become sheep farmers and adapt to an agrarian lifestyle.
Gustafson, Seth, Nik Heynen, Jennifer L. Rice, Ted Gragson, J. Marshall Shepherd, and Christopher Strother. 2014. “Megapolitan Political Ecology and Urban Metabolism in Southern Appalachia.” Professional Geographer 66, no. 4 (October): 664-675. Rapidly urbanizing Piedmont megapolitan region.
Holland, Joseph “Jody.” 2016. “Examining Capacity within the Local Food Economy: Lessons Learned from the Appalachian Region in Mississippi.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 22, no. 1 (Spring): 31-44. Table; county outline map. This essay appears in the first of three special issues on sustainable development.
Hu, Elise. 2013. “Enter the Quiet Zone: Where Cell Service, Wi-Fi Are Banned” [W. Va.]. Morning Edition, 8 October. NPR radio. Transcript, 1,086 words; podcast, 5:25 min. National Radio Quiet Zone, Pocahontas Co., W. Va.; 13,000 square mile area. http://n.pr/19jdI4v.
James, Anna Dickson. 2016. “Fair Minded.” Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 42, no. 2 (Summer): 39-43. A visit to the state fair in Lewisburg.
Jost, Scott. 2013. Shenandoah Valley Apples [pictorial; oral histories]. Chicago: Columbia College Chicago Press. 125 pp. “Between 1977 and 2005, apple acreage in Virginia decreased by more than half, and 65 percent of all growers left the business.”
Keebler Joel F. 2013. “The Apple Cider Industry in Appalachia” [history]. Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine29, no. 1 (Summer): 15-17.
Keith, Steven. 2016. “The Roots Run Deep: Berry Farming in West Virginia. Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 42, no. 2 (Summer): 44-49. Includes a directory of fourteen pick-your-own berry farms.
Kennedy, Linda. 2016. “Nineteenth Century Legacy Mill Pond Sediment in the Southern Blue Ridge.” Southeastern Geographer 56, no. 1 (Spring): 101-117. Technical study; Bent Creek watershed, Pisgah N.F., Buncombe Co., N.C.
King, Barbara J. 2016. “The Seer: Wendell Berry and the Vanishing Beauty of Small Farms.” NPR radio, 12 March. Transcript, 944 words. Review of forthcoming documentary, The Seer: A Portrait of Wendell Berry, directed by Laura Dunn, produced by Robert Redford, and filmed in Henry County, Ky. “Wendell Berry asks us to remember farming families and farming communities as we discuss these hard issues. The Seer opens up a space — a visually beautiful space — to talk about the land and all of us who live on it and off it.” http://n.pr/1nCoor8.
Kingsolver, Barbara. 2014. “Where It Begins” [creative nonfiction essay]. Appalachian Heritage 42, no. 4 (Fall): 9-16. “It all starts with the weather. Comes a day when summer finally gives in to the faintest freshet of chill and a slim new light and just like that, you’re gone. Wild in love with the autumn proviso.”
Lee, Tom. 2014. “Southern Appalachia’s Nineteenth-Century Bright Tobacco Boom: Industrialization, Urbanization, and the Culture of Tobacco.” Agricultural History 88, no. 2 (Spring): 175-206. “...even as the profits reaped from tobacco fueled local, urban-led campaigns for industrial development and resource extraction that accompanied the creation of an Appalachian stereotype mocking rural mountain people.”
Limeberry, Veronica. 2016. “Seeding Food, Farms, and Freedom: Veronica Limeberry Links India to Appalachia.” Interview by Marat Moore. Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 31, no. 2 (Winter): 47-50, with sidebar, “Grow Appalachia Builds Regional Food Market” [Berea College program], by Candace Mullins. Limeberry traveled to India on a Fullbright Fellowship to meet with agroeconomist Dr. Vandana Shiva “and Indian women farmers with a goal of building ties between farmers in southern Appalachia and India.”
Mackey, Mark J., Grant M. Connette, William E. Peterman, and Raymond D. Semlitsch. 2014. “Do Golf Courses Reduce the Ecological Value of Headwater Streams for Salamanders in the Southern Appalachian Mountains?” Landscape And Urban Planning 125 (May): 17-27. Measures ten golf courses in western N.C.
Malot, Woody. 2013. “Barker’s Creek Mill” [Rabun Co., Ga.]. Student interview by Sherri Barker. Foxfire Magazine47, no. 1-2 (Spring-Summer): 42-49. History of a water powered gristmill and description of the traditional art of grinding corn.
McCaig, Donald. 2013. Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 193 pp. “McCaig draws on twenty-five years of experience raising” border collies in western Virginia.
McCrackin, Clod. 2013. “An Old-Timey Hog Killing” [Rabun Co., Ga.]. Student interview by Nathan Justice. Foxfire Magazine 47, no. 1-2 (Spring-Summer): 23-29.
Murrey, Lou. 2014. “All Gathered Here: Boiling Sorghum Molasses in Watauga County” [photo essay]. North Carolina Folklore Journal 61, no. 1-2 (Winter-Spring & Summer-Fall): 38-51.
Nava, Margaret M. 2013. Along the Pocatalico [River; Roane Co., W. Va.]. Charleston, W. Va.: 35 Star Publishing. 122 pp. Memories of moving “back to the land” in the 1970s.
Oliver, Robert, and Valerie Thomas. 2014. “Micropolitan Land Conversion to Development in Appalachia and the Black Belt.” Southeastern Geographer 54, no. 4 (Winter): 366-383. “...total development in both rural and micropolitan areas in the Black Belt and Appalachia is higher than the national average. However, short-term conversion to development in micropolitan areas (2001-2006) is consistent across the two regions and nationally.”
Quinn, Kate. 2016. “City Kids on the Farm.” Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 42, no. 2 (Summer): 56-61. Childhood memories of her Wheeling family’s 1950s vacation farm in Ritchie Co.
Roberts, Anna Duggins. 2013. “The Tomato Route.” Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 29, no. 1 (Summer): 24-25. “...[we] planted a garden every year big enough to supply all of Greene County, Tennessee.”
Ross, Jamie S. 2013 Listening to the Land: Stories from the Cacapon and Lost River Valley [W. Va. eastern panhandle]. Photographs by Tom Cogill, foreword by Peter Forbes. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. 224 pp. Oral history conversations “between the people...and their land,” in partnership with the Land Trust.
Shirley, Leon, Eddie Barker, and Jim Harmon. 2013. “Rabun County Farmers” [Ga.]. Student interviews by Sherri Barker. Foxfire Magazine 47, no. 1-2 (Spring-Summer): 30-35. Short overviews of farmers’ tasks.
Smith, Anne Chesky. 2014. “This Was Our Valley: Taking Asheville’s Watershed.” Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 30, no. 1 (Spring): 6-8. Discusses North Fork Valley families and communities from whom extensive watershed property was taken by the city of Asheville at the beginning of the 20th-century.
Spence, Beth, Cathy Kunkel, Elias Schewel, Ted Boettner, and Lou Martin. 2013. Who Owns West Virginia? Charleston: West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy, and the American Friends Service Committee. 57 pp. Tables: top landowners by county. Appendix lists and describes landowners. Updated study of land ownership, using 2011 data. “The top ten largest private landowners are all out-of-state natural resources or railroad corporations....And concentration in the southern coalfields is much higher.” http://www.wvpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/land-study-paper-final3.pdf. See also: “Who Owns West Virginia?” [podcast; 4:01], by Glynis Board, West Virginia Public Radio, Charleston, W. Va.: WVPN, December 11, 2013. http://wvpublic.org/post/who-owns-west-virginia?nopop=1.
Stroud, Annie, Fritz Boettner, Evan Fedorko, and Emily Carlson. 2015. Hub Connectivity Feasibility Assessment [W. Va.]. Huntington, W. Va.: Robert C. Byrd Institute, Marshall University; Morgantown, W. Va.: Downstream Strategies. 32 pp., with maps, charts, appendices. “...examines the effectiveness of going beyond standard farming to hub/market supply chains to create a consortia of aggregators for increased access to markets and products.” http://www.downstreamstrategies.com/documents/reports_publication/hub-connectivity-final_9-18-15.pdf.
Vercoe, Richard A., M. Welch-Devine, Dean Hardy, and others. 2014. “Acknowledging Trade-offs and Understanding Complexity: Exurbanization Issues in Macon County, North Carolina.” Ecology and Society 19, no. 1 (March): Article no. 23. “Exurbanization, the process by which urban residents move into rural areas in search of unique natural amenities and idealized lifestyles, can often have a dramatic impact on the local economy, culture, and environment.”
Veteto, James R., and Stephen B. Carlson. 2014. “Climate Change and Apple Diversity: Local Perceptions from Appalachian North Carolina.” Journal of Ethnobiology 34, no. 3: 359-382.
Wilson, Michael K. 2013. “Pleasant Island: Sin and Salvation in the Elk River.” Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 39, no. 3 (Fall): 26-33. A century of changes on an island fourteen miles up the Elk River from Charleston.
Yeargin, Billy, and Christopher Bickers. 2015. History of Burley Tobacco in East Tennessee & Western North Carolina. Charleston, S.C.: History Press. 159 pp.
Zhu, Chunhao, and Yingkui Li. 2013. “High Temporal Resolution Land Use/Land Cover Change from 1984 to 2010 of the Little River Watershed, Tennessee, Investigated Using Landsat and Google Earth Images” [Blount Co.]. Southeastern Geographer 53, no. 3 (Fall): 250-266. “This detailed long-term record...would provide valuable information for local land-use planning and management in assessing the potential impacts...in this critical watershed” which includes the towns of Alcoa, Maryville, and Townsend.