Lindsay Falvey
1996
Foreword It was agriculture that enabled human beings to become producers rather than hunters and gatherers, and in doing so to settle into communities. From these earliest settlements have developed the elaborate and complex societies of today. During all these millennia, we have tended to take agriculture for granted. This is unfortunate, and unfair by all those - farm men and women in the fields, scientists in their laboratories, and policy makers in parliaments and elsewhere, for instance - who have contributed to the development of agriculture; an enterprise that is as significant as it is exciting. The history of modern agriculture which has made possible the greatest leap in well-being that the human family has yet experienced, has seen the integration of research-based knowledge with traditional wisdom to bring about great improvements in agricultural varieties, farming techniques and management practices. The consequence of that “marriage” has been undreamed of increases of food productivity which served as the center of concentric circles of progress. Understanding that process and, more important, the substance that made - and can continue to make - that process work, is the task of agricultural education. The origins of agricultural education as we know it today, and the challenges that lie ahead of it, are the central themes of this marvelous little book by Dean Lindsay Falvey. This is a very personal book. It is not just a scholarly recounting of events, an arid collection of theories, or a series of anecdotal episodes strung together. It bespeaks intense knowledge of the subject and material as well as personal experience in the field. Most of all, however, it presents agricultural education as a societal endeavor whose future development is of clear relevance to the progress of all people everywhere. It is presented with a rare combination of erudition and a warm sense of humanity. The major challenge for the future, as he points out, is for agricult
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