Quotes About Soil

A field becomes exhausted by constant tillage.

I think a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen chickens, is good quality.

The farmer works the soil, The agriculturist works the farmer.

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.

China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.

I'm a scientist - a geobiologist who's been studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil for over twenty years. One day, I realized that I wanted, needed, to tell people - and not just other scientists - about my life in science.

We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood

Each position, each metre of the Soviet territory must be stubbornly defended, to the last drop of blood. We must cling to every inch of Soviet soil and defend it to the end!

The sinister nature of the American soil is apparent in places like Gettysburg. Fertilize it with the blood of heros, and it brings forth a frozen-custard stand.

War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.

Would you allow a people to come from somewhere else and occupy a part of the United States, and set up an independent state, and, after 50 years, you would not be able to stay on this land?

We must first and foremost defend Hungary's independence and sovereignty, and, if needed, we must regain it.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil.

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

As a result, much of the red Amazonian soil is weathered, harshly acid, and almost bereft of essential nutrients—one reason ecologists refer to the tropical forest as a "wet desert.

Amazon forest is uniquely diverse and beautiful. But its exuberant canopy is a mask covering an impoverished base. The base is the region's poor soil.

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.

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.

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.

Because charcoal contains few nutrients, Glaser argued, "high-nutrient inputs—excrement and waste such as turtle, fish, and animal bones—are necessary." Special soil microorganisms are also likely to play a role in its persistent fertility.

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.

Accordingly Attica, from the poverty of its soil enjoying from a very remote period freedom from faction