Family Farmers Quotes & Sayings

Eliminating the death tax is particularly important for the many small business owners and family farmers that call Central Washington home. — Doc Hastings

In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income. — Tom Vilsack

I would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin, or letin the light to, a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god. The Roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed, Whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my family, and children, etc. — Henry David Thoreau

The bailiff tucked the jurors into their windowless room where they could surf for porn on their PDAs, and the judge turned to me. "Mr. Lassiter, Ah assume you got some legal mumbo jumbo for the record." His Honor came from a family of gentleman farmers in Homestead by way of Kentucky, and his voice rippled with bourbon and branch water. — Paul Levine

A farmer's market is worth more than everything I've written. — Wendell Berry

The fight to save family farms isn't just about farmers. It's
about making sure that there is a safe and healthy food supply for all of us.
It's about jobs, from Main Street to Wall Street. It's about a better
America. — Willie Nelson

Sometimes film is just the family business. Some families are generations of carpenters or farmers, or they make clothes, or they're all lawyers. I'm in the family business. — Danny Huston

I come from a family of farmers on both sides of my family. — Eric Ripert

In Southeast Asia the world is understood to be a vast, complex network of interdependent relationships. So when global capitalism makes it impossible for small-time rice farmers to feed their families and make a living, it is a natural thing for anyone in the family who can find an alternative source of income to do so. — John Burdett

If you do just one thing - make one conscious choice - that can change the world, go organic. Buy organic food. Stop using chemicals and start supporting organic farmers. No other single choice you can make to improve the health of your family and the planet will have greater positive repercussions for our future. — Maria Rodale

When you meet the farmers and go to the farms, you see that they treat their animals like they're family. It makes a big difference. — David Chang

I think it's fascinating that I receive attention for what people perceive to be a level of manliness or machismo, when amongst my family of farmers and paramedics and regular Americans, I'm kind of the sissy in my family. — Nick Offerman

In six short years, small business owners and family farmers will once again be assessed a tax on the value of their property at the time of their death, despite having paid taxes throughout their lifetime. — Doc Hastings

Family farmers are victims of public policy that gives preference to feeding animals over feeding people. This has encouraged the cheap grain policy of this nation and has made the beef cartel the biggest hog at the trough. — Howard Lyman

I tried to turn my heart to the living, to the place I was, but putting seed in land not owned by me or my family seemed alien. The sandy, gray-white soil looked like dirty beach sand, not fit for growing anything. It smelled like dust. Yet weeds and trees and wildflowers grew along the roads. When we drove into town, we passed dense, impenetrable woods and fields of corn, peas, and peppers. Such new combinations of seemingly poor soil and happy flora puzzled me. Everywhere I went, I picked up the dirt, examining it for clues. Bringing anything out of such soil would require a whole new language on my part. I imagined there must be something richer and darker under the gray sand, or some trick the farmers all knew. Trick or no trick, what I had always been able to do well now seemed inaccessible. Still, I searched the yard around our house for the best spot to plant my fall garden. — Rhonda Riley

You can't save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They're kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they'll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional tastes into personal and family expectations. — Barbara Kingsolver

I do think that there is a big difference between family farms and agri-business, and one of the distressing things that I think has occurred is with consolidation of farm lands. You've seen large agri-businesses benefit from enormous profits from existing farm programs, and I think we should be focusing most of those programs on those family farmers. — Barack Obama

We'll be going to the fish market and a farmer's market this afternoon to get what we need to make and eat dinner as a family. I'm trying to expose my kids to going to a farmers market or the fish market and learning what that's all about. — Emeril Lagasse

Small family farmers are the only things that can save us because they take care of the land. Future farmers of America are going to be our heroes. Same with biodiesel, either way we need small family saustainable and organic farmers. — Willie Nelson

There wasn't a bigger issue in my campaign than Obamacare. Everyone I talk to, every business, a lot of family farmers, are concerned about how this will affect them. — Jason T. Smith

People say to us how brave we are, fighting the wilderness, braving the isolation of the Outback. But these are easy opponents, compared with drought. To watch your land shrivel and die, year in and year out, to see beautiful fields turn to dust bowls, to watch your animals starve and die. To suffer all this, only to be then washed away in a flood, your home and your family treasures lost and destroyed. And then to pick up the pieces and start again. The farmers of the South are brave! — Sara Henderson

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

Tobacco farmers would say, "Look, I'm just trying to make a living and feed my family." Nevertheless, tobacco is incredibly harmful and kills people. — William Davis

And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day. — Barbara Kingsolver

In life, there are a lot of expectations. I see why in the South, especially, there's a simple existence. People, whether they're cowboys or farmers or ranchers, you just get up, you do your job, you have a family, you come home. — Scott Haze

The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America's rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of U.S. citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty. — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

What our family has done is participate in the farm programs. And so the farm programs I think essentially almost every farmer in South Dakota has participated in those, and they haven't been bailouts, they have been programs that the United States has put forward for farmers to participate in. — Kristi Noem

In 1997, the National Bankruptcy Review Commission recommended that chapter 12 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code, the chapter that contains bankruptcy protection for family farmers, be made permanent. — Tim Holden

The economic hardship of my family and of many others, a century ago, was caused by a monopoly, the American Tobacco Company, which had eliminated all competitors and thus was able to reduce as it pleased the prices it paid to farmers. The American Tobacco Company was the work of James B. Duke of Durham, North Carolina, and New York City, who, disregarding any other consideration, followed a capitalist logic to absolute control of his industry and, incidentally, of the economic fate of thousands of families such as my own. — Wendell Berry

Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard. — Barbara Kingsolver

The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the leading textbook used in elementary school. They were so widely used that sections in them became part of the national language. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesman, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the sections in the McGuffey Readers. — Charles Murray

I just love Wisconsin. I'm a fourth-generation Wisconsinite,and my great grandparents were farmers. My grandfather delivered the mail. My mom was the first in her family to go to college. My dad started this business that becomes an international success. And I just believe very strongly in Wisconsin and who we are and the potential that this state has. And I'm really concerned about the direction that we're headed. — Mary Burke

Family farmers are small farmers who love the land. They're still not getting enough money for their product and are rapidly losing their battle to stay in business. By helping the American family farmer, we will in turn help ourselves out of the economic hole that we find ourselves in today. It doesn't really matter how we got here; the point is, we have to dig our way out. — Willie Nelson

We've got nine generations of farmers in my family, in Warwickshire. And I do feel connected to being a farmer's son. There was a time when I didn't, when I rebelled against it, but there's certainly that sort of work ethic within me. — Joseph Mawle

I've worked with farmers in Zimbabwe who've lost their lands. I've worked with people in Venezuela, under threat of kidnappings, whose external world is unstable. But they have very strong social connections with their family and friends. And as a result, they're able to maintain a greater level of happiness and optimism than I've seen from bankers, consultants, or salespeople who are on the road all the time, who follow jobs separated from their families, and, as a result, find themselves missing out on the happiness that comes from those very connections that they severed. — Shawn Achor

With the permanent elimination of this tax, farmers and business owners will have the sense of security they need to plan for the financial future of their business or farm and their family. — Doc Hastings

When I visited Vietnam for Oxfam, the thing that really struck me was how the local farmers had to prepare to evacuate or climb to their mezzanines with their valuable family possessions. — Martin Parr

I love the idea that biodiesel has the potential to support farmers, especially the family farms. — Daryl Hannah

Gay people are born into, and belong to, every society in the world. They are all ages, all races, all faiths. They are doctors and teachers, farmers and bankers, soldiers and athletes. And whether we know it or whether we acknowledge it, they are our family, our friends, and our neighbors. Being gay is not a Western invention. It is a human reality. — Hillary Rodham Clinton