Quotes About Soil

For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China's continued development.

My father was a soil scientist with the Geological Survey.

In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.

Naturally healthy soil can sustain coffee crops for generations to come. All of this contributes to the quality of the bean.

The soil is not a mass of dead debris, merely resulting from the physical and chemical weathering of rocks; it is a more or less homogeneous system which has resulted from the decomposition of plant and animal remains. It is teeming with life.

Since Roman times, farmers have periodically planted their fields with Rhizobia-toting legumes to add fixed nitrogen to the soil.

Can you believe where we just were? Oh, this planet was a good one, and we too were good - as good as the burn of the sun, and the rain's sting and the smell of living soil - the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.

He stands near the planting, its black ring of soil like a promise at his feet.

Hulking conifers that sprout adventitious roots high in the canopy that dip back down to feed on the mats of soil accumulating in the vees of their own branches.

The hardest challenge of early coal mining was drainage. Rainwater flows through rills and streams into brooks and brooks into rivers, drawn always downward by gravity to the sea. About a third of any rainfall soaks into the soil and percolates downward into the earth. Eventually it encounters impermeable layers of rock. There it spreads out and flows along the rock layer until it finds cracks or permeable rock, when it continues percolating down to the next impermeable layer.

There were oil wells everywhere. The soil had been abandoned to dust and lizards, and the backyard of every wind-blistered bungalow in town had thrown over ideas of shade or geraniums in favor of the whiskey promise in the mutter of those green grasshopper pumps...A dozen ravenous steel insects sucked at the shit-caked loam in the mile-square meatfield of empty pens where the beeves, when there were beeves, milled waiting for the knife. (125)

When my own time comes, will I too long for the sea? I think I will be content enough with the soil. And I will not demand the exact spot, but let it be within this country Horace and I have spent the years roaming contentedly.

in the end there's no way to get rich crops out of poor earth.

All good farmers become connoisseurs of dirt and dust.

many currently profitable conventional farming methods would become uneconomical if their true costs were incorporated into market pricing. Direct financial subsidies, and failure to include costs of depleting soil fertility and exporting pollutants, continue to encourage practices that degrade the land

In many ways, soil degradation set the long-wavelenght pattern of history, as wars, natural disasters, and climate shifts pulled the trigger on environmental guns loaded by soil loss and degradation.

Time had erased me a little, rubbed me out. I had faded like a photograph buried under soil. I was tanned and older, weathered and experienced and fat. I was what we all become, a by-product of the torture of ourselves.

Sow some good. The soil is ready. Your harvest is guaranteed.

If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.

As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with them.

The best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same kind of soil. The former article is of the first necessity to the wealth and protection of the country. The latter, never useful.

The atmosphere of the night, the smell rising from the blocked latrines, overflowing with shit and yellow water, stir childhood memories which rise up like a black soil mined by moles.

New York state grape scientists go so far as to say that 'the site characteristics of rain fall, soil nutrients, organic matter, high lime, soil texture and pH are minor compared with soil depth, temperature and replant status.

High soil potassium is directly linked to high pH in the juice.