Quotes About Agriculture

A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume).

Today, about 85 percent of Israel's wastewater—more than 100 million gallons a year—is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli water use that I am following here.

A careful investigator, Young interviewed farmers, recording their methods and the size of their harvests. According to his figures, the average yearly harvest in eastern England from an acre of wheat, barley, and oats was between 1,300 and 1,500 pounds. By contrast, an acre of potatoes yielded more than 25,000 pounds—about eighteen times as much.

Beginning in about 1200 A.D., according to Woods, Cahokia's maize fields repeatedly flooded, destroying the harvests.

Farmers grab a few harvests, but the soil is not bared to rain and sun long enough to incur permanent damage. Switching from field to field to field, swidden farmers live in the forest without destroying the ecosystems they depend on: a supple, balanced harmony.

Even with slash-and-burn, ecologists say, the forest can take as much as a hundred years to return completely to its previous state. European-style agriculture would not only fall victim to mega-Niños, it would permanently ruin the forest soils.

Within a few centuries, the Indians of the eastern forest reconfigured much of their landscape from a patchwork game park to a mix of farmland and orchards. Enough forest was left to allow for hunting, but agriculture was an increasing presence. The result was a new "balance of nature.

The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a consequence of a more general "law of environmental limitation of culture." And she stated the law, italicizing its importance: "The level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies

European visitors marveled at the number of nut and fruit trees and the big clearings with only a dim apprehension that the two might be due to the same human source.

Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms.

Likely the milpa cannot be replicated on an industrial scale. But by studying its essential features, researchers may be able to smooth the rough ecological edges of conventional agriculture. "Mesoamerica still has much to teach us," Wilkes said.

The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation—to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajío. As Vietmeyer put it, Borlaug thought the objective should be to "feed everyone; not just the hungry. Opt to feed the whole populace." Produce enough not only to feed every man and woman in Mexico but also to export to other food-short nations.

Only when an unknown genius discovered naturally mutated grain plants that did not shatter—and purposefully selected, protected, and cultivated them—did true agriculture begin.

Borlaug thought, the process would be too slow. As a rule of thumb, wheat breeders needed ten to fifteen harvests to select, test, and propagate a new variety. The process couldn't be hurried; farmers could grow only one crop of winter or spring wheat a year. But the Rockefeller Foundation wasn't going to wait fifteen years. And the farmers needed help now.

elegantly than Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire. As Pollan observed, large-scale potato farmers now douse their land with so many fumigants, fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides that they create what are known, euphemistically, as "clean fields"—swept free of life, except for potato plants. (In addition, the crops are sprayed with artificial fertilizer, usually once a week during growing season.)

Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.

Vaclav Smil has calculated that fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process was responsible for "the prevailing diets of nearly 45% of the world's population." Roughly speaking, this is equivalent to feeding about 3.25 billion people. More than 3 billion men, women, and children—an incomprehensibly vast cloud of dreams, fears, and explorations—owe their existence to two early-twentieth-century German chemists.

For aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread.

About 40 percent of the fertilizer applied in the last sixty years wasn't assimilated by plants; instead, it washed away into rivers or seeped into the air in the form of nitrous oxide.

Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into their fields that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, almost half of all the crops consumed by humankind depend on nitrogen derived from synthetic fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled our species to extract an additional 3 billion people's worth of food from the same land.

in the Middle East, for example, the wild barley harvest from a small piece of land can feed a family. By contrast, no wild maize ancestor has ever been found, despite decades of search.

Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woodspeople; indeed, they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt obliged to comment in his journal when Francis Billington . . . climbed to the top of a tall tree to look around. As Thoreau noted with disgust, the colonists landed at Plymouth on December 16, but it was not until January 8 that one of them went as far away as two miles--and even then the traveler was, again, Francis Billington.

De Soto died of fever with his expedition in ruins. Along the way, though, he managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing he did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice—he brought pigs.

Maize is one of the few farm species that is more diverse than most wild plants.