Quotes About Agriculture

The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It's the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn't Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on postcards?

Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales--if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely.

GM [genetically modified] plants are virtually everywhere in the US food chain, but don't have to be labeled, and aren't. Industry lobbyists intend to keep it that way.

Several studies, including research done by Allison Byrum of the American Chemical Society, have shown fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides and herbicides to contain 50 to 60 percent more antioxidants than their sprayed counterparts.

Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm. It's a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses. The green spaces surrounding your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you.

We drove around with "Proud Tobacco Farmer" stickers on our trucks till they peeled and faded along with our good health and dreams of greatness. If you're standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that current food production can sustain world food needs even for the 8 billion people who are projected to inhabit the planet in 2030. This will hold even with anticipated increases in meat consumption, and without adding genetically modified crops.

Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby--if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone ... If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home.

For some, a lousy day's work will get you yelled at. For farmers, it's live or die.

Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there's a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it's inferior.

Now I need to be careful where I go next, because (for their own protection) there are laws in thirteen states that make it illegal to say anything bad about cows.

U.S. policies restrict feeding cow tissue directly to other cows, but still allow cows to be fed to other animals (like chickens) and the waste from the chickens to be fed back to the cows.

Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who've ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.

The Bolsheviks desperately needed the peasants to produce good harvests, but the better the peasants did, the more they turned into class enemies, that is, kulaks.

Collectivize one sixth of the earth? How? With what levers? Even the ultraleftist Trotsky, in a speech a few years back, had called a "transition to collective forms" of agriculture a matter of "one or two generations.

In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads, representing more capital than any other American asset except land, but instead of the slave-based, cotton-growing South, the industrial North triumphed.

Lenin suggested that all peasants be compelled to deliver grain by name, and that those who failed to do so "be shot on the spot.

Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system.

Los rumiantes del mundo son responsables, aproximadamente, de un 50 por ciento más de gas de efecto invernadero que todo el sector de los transportes.

Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world's population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.

In addition to beating back hunger, the ability to grow more food from less land has been, on the whole, good for the planet.

If agricultural efficiency had remained the same over the past fifty years while the world grew the same amount of food, an area the size of the United States, Canada, and China combined would have had to be cleared and plowed.

A snapshot of these forces pushing in the same direction may be found in an advertisement for tractors in a 1921 issue of the magazine Successful Farming entitled "Keep the Boy in School": The

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.