Agriculture

Includes works on farming, animal husbandry, growing crops, soil, agro-business.

In the "Business" thread, I'm thinking agriculture should go there, and be lumped with forestry and fishing, a la NAICS.

Please check out this thread (http://www.librarything.com/topic/60594) for a link to the new OSC blog and a call for specific volunteer involvement. Thanks!

I think it would be a mistake to classify agriculture as existing under the rubric of business. Agriculture is not only a component of human activity according to a "work" model, but also a component of socio-political administrative activity, as evidenced in authoritarian and command economies (Such as Soviet Russia and Qin China). More importantly, agriculture is a primary socio-environmental linkage and so straddles the environmental sciences quite handily. My intuition is that agriculture should probably exist as a top-level category, or reside in some kind of socio-environmental sub-category, alongside horticulture, foraging and pastoralism.

# 4

How would you place forestry and fishing in the OSC scheme? Perhaps they belong also in a socio-economic category.

From my own work (Which takes an environmental historical perspective) I see each of these practices as related to something called "Ecosystems Services", which would include beekeeping (A rather famous example), forest management as well as plantations, fishing and fish farming, but also wetlands management (Which clean the water, another ecosystems service), soil conservation, and a host of other issues.

One of the troublesome cross-categories relates to a major aspect of agriculture: Management and transportation of food resources. The Holodomor Famine in the Ukraine, for instance, is a political act, but it was carried out through the auspices of agricultural management. I realize that what you guys are creating is an ontology, and so to a certain degree it's simply declarative, and I'd imagine a scheme that deals with this delineation using the language and practices of environmental services and ecology would be cumbersome for a librarian, but maybe there's a more vernacular manner in which to present all of these things, which would be informed by the scholarly manner in which their described in the academy.

I'd be inclined to suggest a top-level category called Ecosystems Services, under which Natural Resources, Management, Agriculture, Pastoralism, &c all fall. But this may, as I was saying, prove too cumbersome.