Quotes About Agriculture

In the Netherlands - where I come from - you actually never see a pig, which is really strange, because, in a population of 16 million people, we have 12 million pigs. And well, of course, the Dutch can't eat all these pigs. They eat about one-third, and the rest is exported to all kinds of countries in Europe and the rest of the world.

A form of protectionism should be enforced at national level, at least on strategic areas such as agriculture.

So cotton growers, siphoning from the Ogallala, get three billion dollars a year in taxpayer money for fiber that is shipped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing sold back to American chain retail stores like Wal-Mart.

As it turns out, the world has plenty of cheap meat. Cattle feedlots are stuffed with steroid-pumped, ready-to-slaughter-and-wrap beef that can find its way into a hamburger bun much quicker and cheaper than anything a lone cowboy in southern New Mexico can do. The

The one-way plow would later be cursed as the tool that destroyed the plains because of its efficiency at ripping up grass.

He works twelve hours a day, with some of the world's stupidest animals, placed in an environment that is foreign to their native ground. He might as well be raising chickens in Rockefeller Center.

One hundred million acres had lost most of its topsoil and nearly half had been "essentially destroyed" and could not be farmed again, Bennett said.

More than twelve hundred wheat farmers in No Man's Land signed up for contracts and in turn got a total of $642,637—an average of $498 a farmer. Thus was born a subsidy system that grew into one of the untouchable pillars of the federal budget.

Of the roughly two hundred million acres homesteaded on the Great Plains between 1880 and 1925, nearly half was considered marginal for farming.

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.

That's what the suitcase farmers were doing. Salesmen, druggists, barkeeps, docs, mechanics, teachers—the range of day-jobbers who thought they wanted to be wheat farmers, ripping up a half-section here and there, trying to hit a crop—they were getting out before they got in any deeper.

What saved the land, this study found, was what Hugh Bennett had started: getting farmers to enter contracts with a soil conservation district and manage the land as a single ecological unit.

In the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prosperous farmers were portrayed on propaganda posters as pigs—a dehumanization that in a rural setting clearly suggests slaughter. This was in the early 1930s, as the Soviet state tried to master the countryside and extract capital for crash industrialization. The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had.

The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had. A

And what we're doing in Ohio is we're moving from a basic manufacturing economy to one that's diversified, including energy and health care and agriculture and IT.

It brings up happy old days when I was only a farmer and not an agriculturist.

One time we did have 300 acres in watermelons. That was fun.

Not many people know this but we come from a long line of chicken, pineapple and onion farmers at Ingham in Queensland.

I have always said there is only one thing that can bring our nation down - our dependence on foreign countries for food and energy. Agriculture is the backbone of our economy.

I opened an office in Terre Haute, established eight of them, and became one of the eight county agents.

Increased access to broadband expands our ability to do commerce and will help bring our farmers' operations into the 21st century.

It is pure unadulterated country life. They get up early because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.

Why the ancient rishis selected the cow for apotheosis is obvious to me. The cow in India was the best comparison; she was the giver of plenty. Not only did she give milk, but she also made agriculture possible. The cow is a poem of pity; one reads pity in the gentle animal. She is the second mother to millions of mankind. Protection of the cow means protection of the whole dumb creation of God.

The final payment for America's cheap food of the last century is still outstanding.