Review: Organic Farming & Sustainable Agriculture Book

"Cultivating a Movement: An Oral History of the Organic Farming & Sustainable Agriculture on California’s Central Coast"

Fresh, Local, and Organic

We are blessed with a generous growing season around the CA Central Coast, as well as a wealth of progressive thinkers and activists. So it’s natural that the Santa Cruz area, like certain other areas in the US, became a hotbed for development of organic farming and sustainable agriculture. Since the 1960s, local interest in political activism, research, and education, as well as organic farming itself, has helped to make organic farming and sustainable production practical for farmers and appealing for consumers throughout the US.

"Cultivating a Movement" chronicles this process of popularizing organic and sustainable agriculture by interviewing contributors to the movement from many backgrounds and walks of life. This volume is excerpted from a ten-volume set of transcribed oral histories on organic and sustainable farming. In turn, these ten volumes are part of University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Library’s ambitious Regional History Project, in which librarians are interviewing hundreds of Central Coast area movers and shakers, recording and transcribing their stories.