Quotes About Farming practices

Finally, after the fertilizer is applied to soil, much of the nitrogen that it contains never gets absorbed by the plant. In fact, worldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

Farmers are happy so long as their net income will not be adversely affected. In organic farming, in the first couple of years you may drop in yield until you build up the soil fertility - you need inputs for output.

The older, thinner, and less productive grass lands, however, frequently can be made to produce much larger yields of feed in corn than if left, as they are, in unproductive grass.

If you're buying animal products and can go to the farm and actually see how the animals are looked after, yes, that's an important point. That's definitely the best way of assuring yourself that the animals are being well treated.

To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmworker's bloodstream, no nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed, no soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no subsidy checks were written. If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from the larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in karmic terms, like a real bargain.

Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone.

We have domesticated crops over a very long period of time, like tens of thousands of years. And crops get - seeds get carried. Sometimes, if they're very small seeds, they get scattered off trucks. Pollen travels.

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.

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

Farming with live animals is a 7 day a week, legal form of slavery.

Food safety experts have discovered that some people who believe they have shellfish allergies are actually exhibiting reactions, like itching and swelling, to antibiotic residues in farmed species.

While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens, ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.

Consider the farmer who sprays his fields with insecticide to kill the bugs that are damaging his crops. He kills thousands of harmless insects as well, including some that actually do good, such as bees that pollinate the flowers and give us honey. Creatures that feed on insects, especially birds, also get sick and die. In the end, because the poisonous chemicals get widely distributed, humans may become sick, too.

and the horticulturalists really believed that gardening would save the world that agriculture was destroying.

At least five cents in every acre should be reserved for the construction of ponds to store rainwater.

One chart showed how quickly the grass was overturned. In 1879, ten million acres were plowed. Fifty years later, the total was one hundred million acres. Grass was needed to hold the soil in place; it was nature's way of adapting to the basic conditions of the plains, the high wind and low rainfall.

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

In human societies possessing domestic animals, livestock fed more people in four distinct ways: by furnishing meat, milk, and fertilizer and by pulling plows.

The linear, single species idea of farming is an assault on ecological function. Something's going to break down in that system - anything from soil structure, in economics... but where to start is with true ecological function.

I know quite a few farmers all over the United States who have tried this and have said the opposite, that they have to use more herbicides, not less. The same holds true with BT.

TWISTING THE TAIL OF A COW will encourage her to move forward," the text declared. "If the tail is held up over the back, it serves as a mild restraint. In both cases, the handler should hold the tail close to the base to avoid breaking it, and stand to the side to avoid being kicked.

The government only gives subsidies for nitrogenous fertilisers. With the result, farmers do not apply balanced fertilisers.

plants that are growing well, then no special preparation is needed. For a newly planted area, first remove any sod. Next, till or dig the soil to a depth of