Quotes About Farming

Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca's day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real-estate developments.

In my boyhood, cattle-raising ran almost neck and neck with grain-raising. In my secluded little valley in the Suisun Hills, the rodeo was the most exhilarating spectacle in the round year.

You know what they want in the Central Valley? They want water.

I come from a farming culture, where we valued raw materials above all.

food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.

The table gives major crops, of five crop classes, from early agricultural sites in various parts of the world. Square brackets enclose names of crops first domesticated elsewhere; names not enclosed in brackets refer to local domesticates. Omitted are crops that arrived or became important only later, such as bananas in Africa, corn and beans in the eastern United States, and sweet potato in New Guinea. Cottons are four species of the genus

Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed for us a stage where we made one of the most crucial decisions in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population growth or trying to increase food production, we opted for the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. The same choice faces us today, with the difference that we now can learn from the past.

Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world's actual food producers, aren't necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do.

Montana farmers today who continue to farm into their old age do it in part because they love the lifestyle and take great pride in it. As Tim Huls told me, "It's a wonderful lifestyle to get up before dawn and see the sunrise, to watch hawks fly overhead, and to see deer jump through your hay field to avoid your haying equipment.

In a society that espouses tolerance, it's amazing how intolerant some folks are to animal agriculture and what comes with producing food.

the wheats offered the additional advantage of a high protein content, 8–14 percent. In contrast, the most important cereal crops of eastern Asia and of the New World—rice and corn, respectively—had a lower protein content that posed significant nutritional problems. THOSE

Our modern acorn squashes and summer squashes are derived from those American squashes domesticated thousands of years ago.

A mere dozen species account for over 80 percent of the modern world's annual tonnage of all crops. Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc, and sweet potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana.

Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.

Why dig a hole in the garden, when potatoes grow wild in Finland?

Goats and oxen, pulling carts in from the fields, left their big, smelly plops all over.

The tillage of the soil occupies the vast majority of those who work for their own bread.

My family has spent 400 years farming on the banks of the Rio Grande. We know the value of hard work, love of the community, love for water and land.

I was raised to farm work.

Farming, from an outside perspective, can be viewed as a romantic, free and off-the-grid life, but the constant work of it means a routine you must follow or everyone dies.

I grew up believing that the willingness and ability to work is the basic ingredient of successful farming. Hard, intelligent work is the key. Use it, and your chances for success are good.

Farmers and agricultural authorities must take account of climate change and the prospect of increased rainfall in designing strategies to mitigate the effects of nutrient pollution.

I grow strawberries, watermelon, onions, you name it.

The farmers are older; they are under financial stress to produce more margins, yet they keep getting less.