Quotes About Agriculture

The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.

people Trump had sent into the Department of Agriculture were white men in their twenties.

In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln had decided it was time to make U.S. agriculture more efficient: each person not needed on the farm was another person freed up to do something else. That's why the Department of Agriculture was created in the first place, as a vast science lab.

In 1872, the average American farmer fed roughly four other people; now the average farmer feeds about 155 other people.

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.

Sir Albert)Howard put it this way:Artificial manures (synthetic fertilizers)lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.

American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.

There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.

You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories).

A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.

You are what you eat is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.

The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.

The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.

But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. Joel Salatin

I wondered if this wasn't a case of making the ideal an enemy of the good, but Salatin was convinced that industrial organic was finally a contradiction in terms. I decided I had to find out if he was right.

I was struck by the fact that for Joel abjuring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is not so much a goal of his farming, as it so often is in organic agriculture, as it is an indication that his farm is functioning well. "In nature health is the default," he pointed out. "Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

Sometimes the large scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back.

Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.

Today promised not to be about the ecstasy of life on a farm. Today was the day we were processing broilers or, to abandon euphemism, killing chickens.

Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1

the typical item of food on an American's plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there