Quotes from John Connell

Behind every statistic there is an individual, there is a story.

To tell the history of the Americas is to tell the story of bovine expansion. Settlers may have made the Wild West and the frontier, but they followed in the wake of their bovine brother. No other animal has so shaped a culture. So many American icons are associated with the cow: the cowboy, the western, the rodeo, the hamburger, the steak house, the Marlboro Man, the very notion of the frontier itself. The story began more than five centuries ago.

To be a farmer is to be a student forever, for each day brings something new.

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place, A green stone lying sideways in a ditch, Or any common sight, the transfigured face Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

I have come to love health and life and work, to think of each day as a gift, tomorrow a bounty, a land of unknown triumph and tragedy, and for all of it I am ready.

I do this because we have always done this. I do this in a way beyond religion. I do this in a way of culture

Senility is best described in the old tongue, duine le Dia, for in that phrase is a kinder, more understanding view of the condition. Its literal meaning is "a person of God," for only the person's maker can now understand him.

We were silent awhile and simply eyeballed one another. "Then there's nothing more to say," I said quietly. "Nothing." I should have cried then, had life not made me a stronger man. It crossed my mind to shake his hand to say goodbye, for it all seemed so final, but I did not. Too much had been said to forgive or see a way to forgiveness.

Farming in America soon became less a family enterprise than a business endeavor, and by the year 2000, 80 percent of America's beef was produced by just four main companies. The plains and the range had given way to concrete and steel.

The long-term risks of intensive farming are not yet known, for it is still in its first generation, but the BSE epidemic was a warning that caution is necessary. Perhaps in the future our industrial meat will come, like cigarettes, with a warning: FACTORY FARMED: EAT AT YOUR OWN RISK.

I feel that I only began to live a year ago, for then I feared I was to die, but I think it is beyond that. I am no longer content merely to be alive—no, not when there is living to be had.