Quotes About Farming

Crop rotation and contour plowing require no additional capital equipment and would contribute significantly to productivity. By raising grain storage bins a few inches above ground, a large amount of grain spoilage could be avoided. Although such changes may sound trivial to people of advanced nations, the resulting gains in productivity might mean the difference between subsistence and starvation in some poverty-ridden nations.

Sustainable farms are to today's headlong rush toward global destruction what the monasteries were to the Dark Ages: places to preserve human skills and crafts until some semblance of common sense and common purpose returns to the public mind.

There are many more ways we can adapt. For example, instead of using up our energies harping about big farmers (whom of course we need right now to provide enough food for all of us), buy your own little patch of land to turn into an oasis of food and wildlife abundance. More and more people are doing this rather than standing around wringing their hands about global warming. Your little sanctuary will not be prone to disappear when the inevitable financial crises hit the big commercial farms.

The point is that the overwhelming energy cost associated with food is not in the food itself (the 2,000 food calories a day per person) but in its production, transportation, distribution, and marketing through the supply chain from farms to stores to your house and ultimately to your mouth.

Farming is the recreation of great men, the proper pursuit of dull men.

New Zealand has incredible global recognition for grass-fed livestock.

I am also the product of a place called Paint Creek. Doesn't have a zip code. It's too small to be called a town along the rolling plains of Texas. We grew dryland cotton and wheat, and when I wasn't farming or attending Paint Creek Rural School, I was generally over at Troop 48 working on my Eagle Scout award.

A field becomes exhausted by constant tillage.

Blessed be agriculture! If one does not have too much of it.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.

The Lord said 'let there be wheat' and Saskatchewan was born.

Farming is a most senseless pursuit, a mere laboring in a circle. You sow that you may reap, and then you reap that you may sow. Nothing ever comes of it.

Some people tell us that there ain't no Hell, But they never farmed, so how can they tell?

The farmer works the soil, The agriculturist works the farmer.

Let us never forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

Dry August and warm, Doth harvest no harm.

I know how to set an irrigation tube, and I helped with the harvest. I learned the law of the harvest without even knowing I was learning it. On the farm, you learn early that you reap what you sow.

Our main deal is pastured livestock. So we have beef cattle, pigs, turkeys, laying chickens, meat chickens, rabbit, lamb and ducks - egg-layer ducks.

China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.

When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours.

A guy running, you know, fifteen, twenty stallions that are two years of age, never been touched by a human before, and you've got to start castrating them, that's pretty intimidating.

American farmers, by making the commitment to grow more corn for ethanol, are at the top of the spear on the war against terrorism.

Someone had to make sure that farmers, who grew more grain than their families needed, would sell food to the nonfarmers (the basketmakers, leatherworkers, and carpenters) who grew no grain themselves. Only in an inhospitable and wild place is this sort of bureaucracy—the true earmark of civilization—needed. In genuinely fertile places, overflowing with water and food and game and minerals and timber, people generally don't bother.3

Farmers could do better if the government didn't meddle and the free market was allowed to take its course. And we could all grow at least some of our food, if we invested a bit of work.