Alternative Agriculture: A History

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. Yet crops from the past like flax, hemp, and woad, are gradually reappearing in our modern countryside, which may in the past have looked at the same time both more and less familiar than we imagine. Joan Thirsk reveals how the forces which drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture -- a glut of mainstream meat and cereal crops, changing eating habits, the needs of medicine -- have striking parallels with earlier periods of our history, emphasizing that we can still find solutions to todays problems in the experience of people from the past.