Quotes About Farming

But good farming is first and last an art, a way of doing and making that involves human histories, cultures, minds, hearts, and souls. It is not the application by dullards of methods and technologies under the direction of a corporate-academic intelligentsia.

This view of farming has been dominant now for a generation, and so it is not too soon to ask: How well does it work? We must answer that it works as any industrial machine works: very "efficiently" according to the terms of an extremely specialized accounting. That is to say that it apparently makes it possible for about 4 percent of the population to "feed" the rest.

Farming cannot take place except in nature; therefore, if nature does not thrive, farming cannot thrive. But we know too that nature includes us. It is not a place into which we reach from some safe standpoint outside it. We are in it and are a part of it while we use it. If it does not thrive, we cannot thrive. The appropriate measure of farming then is the world's health and our health, and this is inescapably one measure.

Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.

At every point in our food economy, present conditions remaining, we must expect to come to a time when demand (for quantity or quality) going up will meet the culture coming down. The fact is that we have nearly destroyed American farming, and in the process have nearly destroyed our country. from the essay Nature As Measure

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized.

Si los conocimientos agrícolas existentes se aplicasen en todas partes, el planeta podría alimentar al doble de su población actual.

After December 1, horses, cows, and pigs not residing on regular farms are to get food cards too.

cassava pots

There's sugar beets and sweet corn and green peas. And those low buildings way over there? Turkey farms. Minnesota is the biggest producer of turkeys in the country. There'd be no Thanksgiving without Minnesota, that's for darn sure. And don't get me started on hunting. We've got pheasants, quail, grouse, whitetail deer, you name it. It's a hunter's paradise.

Mr. Grote shows me how he grows wild rice in the stream and collects the seeds. The rice is nutty and brown. He plants the seeds after harvest in late summer for the crop the following year. It's an annual plant, he explains, which means that it dies in the autumn.

It's easy for Americans to forget that the food they eat doesn't magically appear on a supermarket shelf.

In Maie get a weede hooke, a crotch and a glove, And weed out such weedes as the corne doth not love. Slack never thy weeding, for dearth nor for cheape, The corne shall reward it er ever ye reape. [Thomas Tusser, 'Five hundred points of husbandry: directing what corn, grass, is proper to be sown: what trees to be planted: how land is to be improved: with with whatever is fit to be done for the benefit of the farmer in every month of the year' (1557).]

This is reflected in the fact that Ladakhis measure land according to how long it takes to plough it. The size of a plot is described as "one day," "two days," and so on.

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

My field was God's earth. Wherever I ploughed, there was my field. Land was free. It was a thing no man called his own. Labor was the only thing men called their own.

Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

The usefulness of cow-peas and soy-beans as human food has been recognized only recently in this country.

Middle-income countries are the biggest users of GMOs. Places like Brazil.

Sometimes I feel people think I live on a commune but I don't. We are all solar, though. There are no power lines. It's mostly farmers, so everyone who has tractors uses bio-diesel.

Agriculture looks different today - our farmers are using GPS and you can monitor your irrigation systems over the Internet.

My mom did not have money. She was a single mom, on and off in periods between marriages. My husband, however, grew up on a wonderful farm in Tuscany, in Florence, and his family was so entertaining in terms of growing their own food and using the fruit of their land. We have very, very different experiences.

I take my vacation on the combine and tractor.