Quotes About Agriculture

Farming is a most senseless pursuit, a mere laboring in a circle. You sow that you may reap, and then you reap that you may sow. Nothing ever comes of it.

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if He ever had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

The farmer works the soil, The agriculturist works the farmer.

Let us never forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

Dry August and warm, Doth harvest no harm.

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.

I know how to set an irrigation tube, and I helped with the harvest. I learned the law of the harvest without even knowing I was learning it. On the farm, you learn early that you reap what you sow.

You can't be elected president without passing though Iowa and bowing down before corn-based ethanol, before agricultural subsidies. I mean, even McCain was a critic of ethanol, but when he got to Iowa, he was singing a different tune.

China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.

Somali is turning into a desert. Rwanda, you can hardly find a place to plant a potato, it's so crowded.

Modern agriculture has been accurately described as a way of turning oil into food. As the price of oil continues to rise, so will the price of food.

I inherited the old family turkey farm, and I'm turning it into a fun place to go for my kids.

A guy running, you know, fifteen, twenty stallions that are two years of age, never been touched by a human before, and you've got to start castrating them, that's pretty intimidating.

Starbucks goes to a great effort, and pays twice as much for its coffee as its competitors do, and is very careful to help coffee producers in developing countries grow coffee without pesticides and in ways that preserve forest structure.

I want you to know that farmers are not going to be secondary thoughts to a Bush administration. They will be in the forethought of our thinking.

Alabama farmers want a chance to complete fairly in Japan, but they can't if the Japanese won't let us in.

After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed.

The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.

American farmers, by making the commitment to grow more corn for ethanol, are at the top of the spear on the war against terrorism.

There seems to be three ways for a nation to acquire wealth: the first is by war...this is robbery; the second by commerce, which is generally cheating; the third by agriculture, the only honest way.

Be careful," said Mark as Max picked up the potatoes Brandon T. unearthed with his hoe. "We don't want any fingers mixed in with our spuds.

Having a good team of oxen was the nineteenth-century version of macho, like having a fancy car today," said Gene, the oxen trainer. "A farmer was proud of owning a set matched in color and weight." Unlike a car, you can't take a team of oxen for a quick spin around the block; oxen don't do anything quickly.

I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later.

Someone had to make sure that farmers, who grew more grain than their families needed, would sell food to the nonfarmers (the basketmakers, leatherworkers, and carpenters) who grew no grain themselves. Only in an inhospitable and wild place is this sort of bureaucracy—the true earmark of civilization—needed. In genuinely fertile places, overflowing with water and food and game and minerals and timber, people generally don't bother.3