Quotes & Sayings About Conventional Farming

Ivanov: You only qualified last year, my dear friend, you're still young and confident, but I am thirty-five. I have the right to give you some advice. Don't marry a Jew or a psychopath or a bluestocking but choose yourself someone ordinary, someone a shade of grey, with no bright colour and no superfluous noises. In general, construct your whole life on a conventional pattern. The greyer, the more monotonous the background, the better. My dear fellow, don't do
battle against thousands all on your own, don't tilt against windmills, don't beat your head against walls ... And may
God preserve you from all kinds of rational farming, newfangled schools, fiery speeches ... Shut yourself in your shell and do your little God-given business ... It's snugger, healthier and more honest. — Anton Chekhov

It's true that Doug and Anna live in their own universe, complete with its own language. Like Tuna McAlpine, the Crabtrees eschew the term "conventional" farming, preferring "chemically dependent." Doug can tell you exactly why. "We've been practicing agriculture foe approximately twelve thousand years and using poisons in great quantities for just sixty of them," he reasons, " so to label that 'convention' is a huge insult to eleven thousand nine hundred and forty years of agriculture. — Liz Carlisle

The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients. — Barbara Kingsolver

Fish farming, even with conventional techniques, changes fish within a few generations from an animal like a wild buffalo or a wildebeest to the equivalent of a domestic cow. — Charles Clover

David Pimentel, a Cornell University professor of ecology and agriculture analyzed a 22-year organic versus conventional farming trial done at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania. He concluded that organic farming produced the same yields of corn and soybeans as conventional farming, but used 30 percent less energy (Pimentel 2005). Scientists at the Research Institute — Pamela C. Ronald