Quotes About Agriculture

The predominant system of farming bolstered by all of this is accurately named industrial agriculture. It is capital-intensive, not labor-intensive, which largely explains the region's depopulation. Industrial agriculture considers the countryside as a factory.

We are beginning to understand that by the time the conquistadors struck the Andes or Custer reached the Black Hills of South Dakota, only shadow populations of natives remained. The Indian wars got the headlines, but they were mopping-up operations. The shock troops were diseases, especially smallpox, aided by weeds and a few other members of catastrophic agriculture's evolved coalition.

But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren't plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring.

By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that's when the tree of life becomes something else again. That's when the giant trunk starts to teeter.

farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. As the eye moved from

The value of turpentine production in the United States approached $7.5 million in 1860 ($210 million today), of which North Carolina accounted for more than $5 million.

sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse.

The substitution of the automobile for the horse left farmers poorer. "By using the power produced by gasoline instead of by corn- and hay-burning horses," a rural economist wrote in 1938, "we have deprived the farmer of a market for the crops from many million acres.

Horses increased in number after the commercialization of the steam engine because horsepower filled the niche below steam power. A horse stood ready to pull a cart or plow a field on command, without the delay of building up a head of steam. Energy transitions are seldom so complete that they drive out every competitor. Much of the world still relies on animals for farm work and transportation: horses, oxen, camels, llamas, water buffalo, elephants, even fellow humans.

Feeding the urban fleet of horses hay and grain supported many thousands of farmers. An idle riding horse in New York City required about 9,000 calories of oats and hay per day. A draft horse in the same city working in construction required almost 30,000 calories of the same feeds.

By 1879, national hay production totaled 35 million tons, a figure that had nearly tripled to 97 million tons by 1909. More than half the land in New England was devoted to hay by 1909 as well, and at least twenty-two states harvested more than a million acres a year of hay and forage.11 The mechanization of American agriculture with horse-drawn or horse-powered machinery supported this vast expansion.

By a decade after the 1521 fall of Tenochtitlán, the Mexican natives had already adopted a new set of flavors into their existing large assortment. There seemed to be an "absence of strong cultural resistance to the introduction and use of foreign plants," as one researcher found recently when he tried to discover what had become of so many of those pre-Columbian crops in modern Mexico.11

Feel the wrath of wheat!

Este trigo hundirá sus vigorosas raíces en la tierra, soportará el frío, el viento y la nieve, y crecerá con fuerza apuntando al cielo. Con el tiempo, terminará coronándose de una espléndida espiga. Aprended del trigo, hijos míos.

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

There is no technical reason why we could not feed a world of nine billion people. Hunger is a matter of buying power, not of shortages.

The moment the cultivators of the soil realize their power, the evil of Zamindari will be sterilized.

Without the potatoe, the balance of European power might never have tilted north

We the people, so to speak, need to realize that if we can keep ourselves fed, we might get through this long dark tunnel of power down, and mitigate the consequences of CO2.

There are a lot of farmers and ranchers who are struggling. I get on my knees every day. If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it.

We have to bring children into a new relationship to food that connects them to culture and agriculture.

I feel it is an obligation to help people understand the relation of food to agriculture and the relationship of food to culture.

More than a mere alternative strategy, regenerative agriculture represents a fundamental shift in our culture's relationship to nature.

new ruler occupied himself largely with reforming Persia: its administration, its army, its treasury, and its capital. To Khusro, such categories were not discrete. One of the relatively few maxims that can be reliably attributed to him reads, "The throne depends on the army, the army on revenue, revenue on agriculture, and agriculture on justice.