Quotes About Farming

You reap what you sow, and sometimes the soil can be very dry, and sometimes it will bring a lot of rain.

If you know how many acres you have sown of each kind of corn, inquire how much the acre the soil of that land takes for sowing, and count the number of quarters of seed, and you shall know the return of seed, and what ought to be over.

My first love was, and remains, manual labor; sowing and harvesting, the pastures, the flock, and the cattle.

There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love.

By the end of the first millennium A.D., Wari techniques had reclaimed more than a million acres of cropland from mountainsides that almost anywhere else would have been regarded as impossibly dry, steep, and cold.

Farmers learned to plant fallow fields with clover, which recharges the soil with nutrients.

A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume).

A careful investigator, Young interviewed farmers, recording their methods and the size of their harvests. According to his figures, the average yearly harvest in eastern England from an acre of wheat, barley, and oats was between 1,300 and 1,500 pounds. By contrast, an acre of potatoes yielded more than 25,000 pounds—about eighteen times as much.

Farmers grab a few harvests, but the soil is not bared to rain and sun long enough to incur permanent damage. Switching from field to field to field, swidden farmers live in the forest without destroying the ecosystems they depend on: a supple, balanced harmony.

Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms.

The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation—to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajío. As Vietmeyer put it, Borlaug thought the objective should be to "feed everyone; not just the hungry. Opt to feed the whole populace." Produce enough not only to feed every man and woman in Mexico but also to export to other food-short nations.

elegantly than Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire. As Pollan observed, large-scale potato farmers now douse their land with so many fumigants, fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides that they create what are known, euphemistically, as "clean fields"—swept free of life, except for potato plants. (In addition, the crops are sprayed with artificial fertilizer, usually once a week during growing season.)

Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.

For aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread.

in the Middle East, for example, the wild barley harvest from a small piece of land can feed a family. By contrast, no wild maize ancestor has ever been found, despite decades of search.

Maize is one of the few farm species that is more diverse than most wild plants.

Unsurprisingly, the new techniques, uncomplicated and inexpensive, spread far and wide. The more people worked the soil, the richer it became, the more trees grew.

For obvious reasons its farmers did not relish the prospect of buffalo herds trampling through their fields. Nor did they want deer, moose, or passenger pigeons eating the maize. They hunted them until they were scarce around their homes. At the same time, they tried to encourage these species to grow in number farther away, where they would be useful. "The net result was to keep that kind of animal at arm's length

terra preta is "not associated with a particular parent soil type or environmental condition," suggesting that it was not produced by natural processes. Another clue to its human origin is the broken ceramics with which it is usually mixed. "They practiced agriculture here for centuries," Glaser told me. "But instead of destroying the soil, they improved it, and that is something we don't know how to do today" in tropical soils.

The key to terra preta's long-term fertility, Glaser says, is charcoal: terra preta contains up to sixty-four times more of it than surrounding red earth.

Slash-and-char is very clever," Ogawa told me. "Nobody in Europe or Asia that I know of ever understood the properties of charcoal in soil.

Early farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty to an unusual extent—the Haudenosaunee especially, but many others, too.

Plots with charcoal alone grew little, but those treated with a combination of charcoal and fertilizer yielded as much as 880 percent more than plots with fertilizer alone.

Because terraces soak up more sunlight than steep slopes, maize can be grown at higher than usual altitudes on them; irrigation similarly increases the area available for maize farming.