Working With Agriscience Fundamentals And Applications L Devere Burton
I've spent more years than I care to count helping people navigate agricultural science materials, and this textbook comes up regularly. It's the kind of resource that tries to cover too much ground and occasionally drops the ball, but when used correctly it's useful. The problem most people have isn't the book itself—it's how they approach it. Devere Burton wrote this to serve as an introductory survey for agricultural science students, likely at the community college or early undergraduate level. The book runs through the major disciplines—plant science, animal science, soil management, ag economics, and the environmental side of things—and ties them together under the agriscience umbrella. That's the design intent anyway. In practice, the chapters feel padded with recycled content that shows up in nearly every intro ag textbook. Here's what people don't tell you about this book. It's not structured for deep learning. It's structured for coverage. You'll find definitions, glossary entries, review questions, and occasionally a case study, but the depth stops well before any real application. If you're using this as your primary resource for anything beyond a survey course, you're going to hit a ceiling around chapter eight. That's where the surface-level treatment starts to show its limits clearly.
I ran into this exact problem last year when a student asked me to help them prepare for a state FFA leadership event focused on precision agriculture. They had the Burton text as their main reference and were trying to work through variable rate fertilizer application rates. The book mentions GPS-guided equipment and data-driven field management in a single paragraph each. There was nothing about soil variability zones, ni-test interpretation, or even basic spreadsheet setup for rate calculation. I had them move to extension publications from U of Arkansas and Clemson alongside the textbook. Saved them two weeks of confusion. The real issue with this book is that it assumes you'll fill in the gaps yourself. That works for self-motivated students who already have some exposure to agriculture. For someone walking in cold, the transitions between topics are jarring. One section you're reading about crop rotation economics, the next you're on livestock nutrition without much connective tissue. The editorial handoff between contributors is visible in places. If you're using this for a class, here's the practical approach. Don't read cover to cover. Skim the chapter intros and conclusions to map the scope. Hit the case studies and review questions first—those are where the actual learning happens. The main text is reference material at best. Make notes in the margins when the explanation feels thin. Those spots are your cue to go find a second source.
The download situation depends on what edition you're looking for. The latest editions circulate on academic file-sharing sites, though I wouldn't recommend scanning them yourself if you have access through a library. Most community colleges have the text on reserve, and the open-stacks version sometimes appears on course pages. The older editions from around 2010-2014 are functionally identical for survey purposes since agriscience fundamentals don't change that fast. The publisher updates editions mainly for minor content refreshes and pricing reasons. One thing the book handles reasonably well is the interdisciplinary framing. That's genuinely hard to do, and Burton's attempt to connect plant and animal systems under one roof is better than most competitors. The charts and photos are competent if generic. The terminology is consistent. Those are underrated qualities in an intro text. Where it fails is in the technical detail. Soil pH buffers, manure nutrient calculations, basic genetic inheritance patterns—all of these get the bare minimum. If you need to actually compute something, you'll outgrow this book quickly. Pair it with a lab manual or a hands-on guide from your state extension service. The combination closes the gap sufficiently for most introductory coursework.
Don't bother with the online quiz banks tied to the textbook. They're shallow and the questions repeat across editions. Your professor's test bank will be three times more specific and far more useful. I've seen students waste hours on those publisher platforms when they could have been reading actual research summaries instead. The bottom line is practical. This book is a starting point, not an endpoint. It will get you through an intro semester if you know how to use it. It won't prepare you for upper-level work or real-world application on its own. That's true for most survey texts in this space, but it's worth stating plainly upfront rather than discovering it mid-semester when you already need the information.
Get the Full Details
