Quotes & Sayings About Agribusiness

Spiritual healing is KNOWING that the body is perfect. Mental healing is effecting a perfect body by visualizing the body as perfect. — Lester Levenson

It is the destiny of stars to collapse. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Agribusiness could provide an opportunity for joint Israeli-Palestinian projects, spurred on by Israeli technical expertise in this field. — Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

This initiative requires one major change in government policy: Shift the massive subsidies that currently find their way to agribusiness and use that taxpayer money to create the infrastructure for a healthy, affordable food system. This will not happen overnight; it is a long-term initiative that could eventually bring us a sustainable agricultural system. Let's — George Lakoff

EACH OF US IS BORN INTO GENIUS. Sadly, most of us die amid mediocrity. — Robin S. Sharma

I hate spinach," the President of the United States blurted out. "Not the least bit sorry to see it happen." He spoke these candid words in a hush-hush, closed-door meeting with a "special advisor" from agribusiness giant, AgriNu. "Hate it." The President went on, "You know what else I hate? Peas. Despise peas ... and there's so many of them." Edwin Edwards (why do parents do that?), otherwise known as Mr. Ed, leaned back with a sly smile. "What if I told you there was a way to get rid of spinach? And peas? And, at the same time, break open this damned European block to our special genetically modified seeds, allowing us to finally take control of the world market?" The President settled back in his seat, indicating for him to go on. Despite not liking vegetables, the President liked a man with a big appetite. — Sharon Weil

The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute. — Gloria Steinem

Whatever we want, we just imagination it; the core of attraction. — Lailah Gifty Akita

You're not ... her." His voice, distant. A mere echo. "You could never be her. — James Dashner

The spread of BSE [mad cow disease] in Europe has revealed how secret alliances between agribusiness and government can endanger the public health. It has shown how the desire for profit can overrule every other consideration. British agricultural officials were concerned as early as 1987 that eating meat from BSE-infected cattle might pose a risk to human beings. That information was suppressed for years, and the possibility of any health risk was strenuously denied, in order to protect exports of British beef. Scientists who disagreed with the official line were publicly attacked and kept off government committees investigating BSE. Official denials of the truth delayed important health measures. — Eric Schlosser

Torture a single chicken and you risk arrest. Abuse hundreds of thousands of chickens for their entire lives? That's agribusiness. — Anonymous

For us hunting wasn't a sport. It was a way to be intimate with nature, that intimacy providing us with wild unprocessed food free from pesticides and hormones and with the bonus of having been produced without the addition of great quantities of fossil fuel. In addition, hunting provided us with an ever scarcer relationship in a world of cities, factory farms, and agribusiness, direct responsibility for taking the lives that sustained us. Lives that even vegans indirectly take as the growing and harvesting of organic produce kills deer, birds, snakes, rodents, and insects. We lived close to the animals we ate. We knew their habits and that knowledge deepened our thanks to them and the land that made them. — Ted Kerasote

Let me leave you with one very recent example of Berry at his best, drawn from an op-ed piece that he published (with his old friend and collaborator Wes Jackson) shortly after the economy crashed in the fall of 2008. For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. This is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations. I — Wendell Berry

So if we have a mouth problem, in actuality what we really have is a mind and heart issue. — Karen Ehman

Doesn't the Federal Farm bill help out all these poor farmers?
No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare ... It is this, rather than any improved efficiency or productiveness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by families.
But those family-owned farms are the ones more likely to use sustainable techniques, protect the surrounding environment, maintain green spaces, use crop rotations and management for pest and weed controls, and apply fewer chemicals. In other words, they're doing exactly what 80 percent of U.S. consumers say we would prefer to support, while our tax dollars do the opposite. — Barbara Kingsolver

The paradox: is God a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semetic? Or is God testing to see if I am? — Chuck Palahniuk

Harl is a tenacious advocate for antitrust action against agribusiness, but he's not optimistic that without pressure from consumers, the government will go after these huge monopolies that control our food. "There's a huge amount of money and a lot of pressure applied whenever someone in Washington tries to do something about this," he told me. "That pressure is applied in the form of messages like 'Look, if you let this go on, we're going to diminish our support for your campaign.' When things get bad enough that consumers rise up, that's when we'll get another era of antitrust." How much money is involved? — Kristin Ohlson

Corn is at the core of modern agribusiness, the most important food crop in North America. In no other crop are the values of modern commercial agribusiness as thoroughly embedded. There is nothing we can do that is ultimately subversive - there is no act of gardening that is so profound a rebellion, there is no act of eating that is so potent a blow for food quality and food system sanity - as to take back the corn crop in our own backyards, and grow, breed, eat, and save seed of corn based upon an entirely different set of values. — Carol Deppe

We basically used oil and aquifer water to temporarily boost the carrying capacity of the land, all for economic growth demanded by Wall Street investors. It's a crazy system that only makes sense when you foist all the costs onto taxpayers in the form of crop subsidies that benefit agribusiness, and defense spending to secure fossil fuels. We're basically paying for corporations to seize control of the food supply and dictate to us the terms under which we live. — Daniel Suarez

Intuitive design is how we give the user new superpowers. — Jared Spool

The sad thing is, when it comes to diet, is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us, they fail. Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness, or they are puppets of agribusiness. — Mark Bittman

Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's free market enthusiasms. — Noam Chomsky

There is a growing scientific consensus that animals have emotions and feel pain. This awareness is going to effect change: better treatment of animals in agribusiness, research and our general interaction with them. It will change the way we eat, live and preserve the planet. — April Gornik

There are moments as a teacher when I'm conscious that I'm trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It's an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece. — Abraham Verghese

The word agriculture, after all, does not mean "agriscience," much less "agribusiness." It means "cultivation of land." And cultivation is at the root of the sense both of culture and of cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in culture. And these words all come from an Indo-European root meaning both "to revolve" and "to dwell." To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle. It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term "agribusiness." (pg. 285, The Use of Energy) — Wendell Berry

Agribusiness - with its wicked powerful lobby and its infiltration of top bureaucratic posts - essentially runs roughshod over the government agencies that are supposed to monitor it. It's the rich fox guarding the filthy, overcrowded henhouse. — Jane Velez-Mitchell

Music was a college attendee's survival essential; he'd need that to keep himself sane. — Kirsty Moseley

I cleaned the attic with the wife the other day. Now I can't get the cobwebs out of her hair. — Tommy Cooper

The sole purpose of life is to gain merit for life in eternity. — Saint Augustine

If we make it national policy that we will support small farmers the way we support agribusiness, we'll suddenly see it change in terms of the cost of organic food. — Ruth Reichl

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were almost defeated and ready to surrender ... In being the first to use it, we adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages. — William D. Leahy

Thanks to farm subsidies, the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress, soy, corn and cattle became king. And chicken soon joined them on the throne. It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began, the thing we're only realizing just now. — Mark Bittman

Over the following years, the concept of "person" was changed by the courts in two ways. One way was to broaden it to include corporations, legal fictions established and sustained by the state. In fact, these "persons" later became the management of corporations, according to the court decisions. So the management of corporations became "persons." It was also narrowed to exclude undocumented immigrants. They had to be excluded from the category of "persons." And that's happening right now. So the legislations that you're talking about, they go two ways. They broaden the category of persons to include corporate entities, which now have rights way beyond human beings, given by the trade agreements and others, and they exclude the people who flee from Central America where the U.S. devastated their homelands, and flee from Mexico because they can't compete with the highly-subsidized U.S. agribusiness. — Noam Chomsky

Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village". — David James Duncan

It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.' — Wendell Berry

Parental anxieties: A timeline. Pre-1800s: Potato famine, death of entire villages. 1900s: Trying to keep dad's job through depression so entire family does not starve or have to sell off children to agribusiness. 2000: Infringement of Parenthood on sense of Personhood. — Sandra Tsing Loh

Our food chain is in crisis. Big agribusiness has made profits more important than your health - more important than the environment - more important than your right to know how your food is produced. But beneath the surface, a revolution is growing. — John Robbins

Too many land users and too many conservationists seem to have accepted the doctrine that the availability of goods is determined by the availability of cash, or credit, and by the market. In other words, they have accepted the idea always implicit in the arguments of the land-exploiting corporations: that there can be, and that there is, a safe disconnection between economy and ecology, between human domesticity and the wild world. Industrializing farmers have too readily assumed that the nature of their land could safely be subordinated to the capability of their technology, and that conservation could safely be left to conservationists. Conservationists have too readily assumed that the integrity of the natural world could be preserved mainly by preserving tracts of wilderness, and that the nature and nurture of the economic landscapes could safely be left to agribusiness, the timber industry, debt-ridden farmers and ranchers, and migrant laborers. To — Wendell Berry

When a couple turns domestic, for the first while having to talk about the need for aluminum eaves troughing and other matters only gets in the way of the relationship. Then, magically, these negotiations take the place of the relationship. — Marni Jackson

Adopting big-business practices is one thing, and adopting agribusiness practices that would dilute the meaning of 'organic' is another. On the whole, I think we're doing a pretty good job of preserving the integrity of organic foods. — Nell Newman

Between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed related to growing "climate-ready" crops - seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta. — Naomi Klein

In the heat of unprecedented technological breakthroughs it is easy to think that we are invincible, like gods who would rule the world. But none of us need be reminded that the future of our planet is being held hostage by our own cleverness, with nuclear physics, chemistry, agribusiness, mineral exploration, and bioengineering threatening our biosphere in ways we could never have imagined even twenty years ago. — Hal Zina Bennett