Library4Farming - Farming and Agriculture Series

Welcome to Library4Farming - a new online resource for everyone involved in farming, agriculture and associated occupations.

This site is intended to grow into a major knowledge base for anyone working in agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry and related disciplines. It will provide a unique resource for farmers, agriscientists, growers, gardeners and anyone else who can benefit from fast, easy, free-of-charge access to the scientific and professional literature that underpins modern farming.

Over the centuries farming has come to rely on science to improve efficiency and production. This site chronicles some of the major contributions of science over the last century, by making available on the World Wide Web some of the core material relevant to gardening and farming.

We aim to gather together in one place and make freely available some of the most fundamental literature now in the public domain (i.e. out of copyright) as online books, offering a wealth of information that is still of intrinsic value. We scan and convert these indispensable texts into web pages that are easy to find and read, broken down into convenient short sections and sub-sections in line with the chapter and sub-section divisions of the original book. This makes it easy for you to home in on exactly the material you need, with minimal scrolling.

One major source of information is the comprehensive and authoritative USDA Yearbook of Agriculture series which has been published almost every year from 1894 to 1992 and which contains, even in the older volumes, a vast amount of essential and still-relevant material about livestock, crops, soils, insects, agrochemicals, gardening and more.

The initial plan for the Science In Farming website is to scan and convert the Yearbooks of Agriculture to web pages that are easy to find and use. The current Yearbooks in our online series are the Yearbooks of Agriculture entitled 'Gardening for Food and Fun', 'Insects' and 'Science in Farming'. The online books are broken up into sections of about 100 pages each as the intention is to make them available as pdf files of reasonable size.

The USDA content is just the start. As with our highly successful sister site, www.library4science.com, we plan to offer a broad and growing range of material, including non-copyright resources and new books that authors agree to license to us. These will eventually cover all aspects of farming, agricultural science, animal husbandry, dairy science, food production, horticulture, arboriculture, gardening, seed technology, entomology, plant and animal disease, soil science, land management, ecology, environmental issues and more.

Online books currently available are listed on the left, as live links. Our Resources section contains links to a broad selection of farming journals, blogs and forums; suppliers of equipment, garden tools, plants, seeds, insecticides and fertilizers; information on plant, soil and livestock health; and other resources.

All material on this site is available free of charge to farmers, gardeners, scientists and researchers, with no subscription fees.