Quotes About Agriculture

Thousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce in the last century as industrial agriculture has focused its attentions on a small handful of high yielding and usually patented varieties, with qualities that suited them to things like mechanical harvesting and processing.

Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.

To eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do) is to consume all the energy in that corn, but when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90 percent of its energy is lost—to bones or feathers or fur, to living and metabolizing as a steer or chicken.

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well—everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn.

pile, I started to see the golden kernels everywhere, ground into the mud by tires and boots, floating in the puddles of rainwater, pancaked on the steel rails. Most of this grain is destined for factory farms and processing plants, so no one worries much about keeping it particularly clean. Even so, it was hard not to register something deeply amiss in the sight of so much food lying around on the wet ground.

The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.

How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world's greatest success stories. I say

By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 50k kernels) goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America's 100 million beef cattle

How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world's greatest success stories. I say the plant world's success story because it is no longer clear that corn's triumph is such a boon to the rest of the world, and because we should give credit where credit is due.

A mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Company, and National) now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country

What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.

Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That's why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees. •

Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone.

The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.

century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans.

Monoculture is where the logic of nature collides with the logic of economics; which logic will ultimately prevail can never be in doubt.

So much of the intelligence and local knowledge in agriculture has been removed from the farm to the laboratory, and then returned to the farm in the form of a chemical or machine. "Whose

The healthiest food in the supermarket - the fresh produce - doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have the budget or the packaging.

Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.

For us, the first big change came ten thousand years ago with the advent of agriculture. (And it devastated our health, leading to a panoply of deficiencies and infectious diseases that we've only managed to get under control in the last century or so.) The biggest change in our food environment since then? The advent of the modern diet.

Try as we might, each of us can eat only about 1500 pounds of food a year. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1% every year (growth of American population).

Around the world, countries flush with cash but poor in arable land are now rushing to secure vast amounts of acreage in land-rich but underdeveloped nations. In theory, of course, such trades could benefit both sides, but in practice they usually raise extraordinarily troubling ethical and political questions. What

Hemos matado la cultura campesina pero no la hemos sustituido por nada, al menos, por nada noble