Quotes About Farming practices

Without food, we cannot survive, and that is why issues that affect the food industry are so important.

Consumers of meat, eggs and dairy products might well ask what they are supporting. Do farmers care about anyone but themselves? Can't anyone see the cow for the cheese?

Food production has affected the environment more than any other activity humans have engaged in. Humanity devotes more land to food production than anything else - roughly a third of the surface area of the earth, much of which was once forest but has been converted by humans into farms or grazing lands.

Coexistence: what the farmer does with the turkey - until Thanksgiving.

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.

The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.

I know that organic farms can be industrial and just as large and impersonal as conventional farms. Sometimes the free-range chickens aren't even allowed outside, and so they cluck-walk packed tight in a dim lit barn. But organic farms use fewer chemicals.

The mere phrase 'artificial manure' told the whole story.

For many years, the proposed influenza epicenter has been thought to be Southeast Asia. Farming practices there bring pigs, fowl, and people into close contact, allowing swine, avian, and human flu viruses to mix. The cycle is thought to be birds to pigs to humans.

Saying you must rotate three crops a year, a certain percentage of your land must be set aside, and some of the other proposals, my sense is that it's a little anti-technology, and the ability of European farmers to feed Europe is reduced as a result.

Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

Several studies, including research done by Allison Byrum of the American Chemical Society, have shown fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides and herbicides to contain 50 to 60 percent more antioxidants than their sprayed counterparts.

You can't save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They're kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they'll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional tastes into personal and family expectations.

from an entry by her daughter Camille] Organic produce actually delivers more nutritional bang for the buck. These fruits and vegetables are tougher creatures than those labeled conventional, precisely because they've had to fight off predators themselves.

Since the raisins are basically concentrated grapes, they are believed to have the highest pesticide residue of any fruit. Which would be a good reason to go organic. Raisins

If agriculture goes wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right.

Sir Albert)Howard put it this way:Artificial manures (synthetic fertilizers)lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.

American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.

There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

Sometimes the large scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back.

La actividad agrícola no se adapta a las explotaciones a gran escala por la siguiente razón: la actividad agrícola se ocupa de plantas y animales que nacen, crecen y mueren».

Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state's farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.)

The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.