Quotes About Agriculture

I don't understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It's a pretty gross interference with nature.

My real emphasis is on the farmers who are taking care of the land, the farmers who are really thinking about our nourishment.

Average tariffs between rich countries are only 3 per cent. But developing countries face tariffs of more than 300 per cent in the EU for meat and more than 200 per cent in the US for fruit and nuts. These need to come down dramatically.

Fair Oaks Farm in Indiana - listen, if you have a chance to go there, it's better than Disney World, because it's all real.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.

If the farmer should make a mistake and sow thistle seed instead of wheat, the soil-doesn't say to him, My friend, you have made a mistake. You have been sowing thistle seed instead of wheat, so we will change the law, so that you may get what you thought you were going to get. No, the soil will always give us a harvest like our sowing. If we sow thistle seed it will be just as faithful in producing thistles as it will in producing wheat or cabbages or potatoes.

Whereas land reform was the first act of the Bolsheviks, it was the last act of the Whites: that, in a peasant country, says it all.

Americans were all farmers and shopkeepers at heart....

Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.

But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man.

How about this: What's black and white and red all over? I cant begin to think. Trotsky in a tuxedo. Great. Okay. How about this one. A farmer finds two boll weevils in his cotton patch. You told me. I never. He chose the lesser of two weevils.

Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat.

But the most important harvest, after gleaning for frumenty, was the blackberries.

III. THE PLANTER How seven per cent of a section within a nation ruled five million white people and four million black people and sought to make agriculture equal to industry through the rule of property without yielding political power or education to labor.

The Negro farmer started behind,—started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge.

Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages."9

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.

It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.

We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.

For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.

Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become wrong by being too small - too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community - and this is crucial.

A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.' The husband, unlike the manager or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble.