Quotes & Sayings About Farmers And Farming

in a short essay I wrote in 1991, Gardening As Agriculture. In that essay I asserted that gardening should be recognized as a serious and important form of agriculture that functions as an incubator for new farmers and farming methods. — Peter Bane

A farmer's work is more like that of a horse trainer than a mechanic, more like that of a healer than a computer repairperson. It is not really accurate to say that farmers grow food or raise animals. Farmers alter environmental conditions in such a way as to maximize a plant's or an animal's innate ability to do its own growing -- in the same way that the best horse trainers seek to draw out abilities already within their horses or in the way the best healers know when to stand back and let their patients' bodies do the work. There is mystery in farming. — Ben Hartman

Approximately eight hundred skeletons from the Dickson Mounds in the lower Illinois Valley have been analyzed. They reveal a clear picture of the health changes that accompanied the shift from foraging to corn farming around 1200 AD. Archaeologist George Armelagos and his colleagues reported that the farmers' remains show a 50 percent increase in chronic malnutrition, and three times the incidence of infectious diseases (indicated by bone lesions) compared with the foragers who preceded them. Furthermore, they found evidence of increased infant mortality, delayed skeletal growth in adults, and a fourfold increase in porotic hyperostosis, indicating iron-deficiency anemia in more than half the population. — Christopher Ryan

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery. — Wendell Berry

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 see a time when the farmer will not need to live in a lonely cabin on a lonely farm. I see the farmers coming together in groups. I see them with time to read, and time to visit with their fellows. I see them enjoying lectures in beautiful halls, erected in every village. I see them gather like the Saxons of old upon the green at evening to sing and dance. I see cities rising near them with schools, and churches, and concert halls, and theaters. I see a day when the farmer will no longer be a drudge and his wife a bond slave, but happy men and women who will go singing to their pleasant tasks upon their fruitful farms. When the boys and girls will not go west nor to the city; when life will be worth living. In that day the moon will be brighter and the stars more glad, and pleasure and poetry and love of life come back to the man who tills the soil. — Hamlin Garland

A robust regional food system that benefits eaters and farmers cannot be achieved in a marketplace that is controlled, top to bottom, by a few firms and that rewards only scale, not innovation, quality, or sustainability. — Wenonah Hauter

The mutualistic relationships between bees, the flowers that they pollinate, and the bacteria that live within the roots of those plants are at the heart of the functioning of a natural, species-rich meadow. The problem is that these relationships can be ruined by application of a sack of fertiliser, which allows the grasses to swamp the legumes and other wild flowers, swiftly resulting in a bright green, flowerless sward, with no legumes, no Rhizombium, and no bees. In the farming world this is known as "improved" grassland. In the 1940's Britain had in the region 15 million acres of flower rich grasslands. It is hard to get precise figures, but about 250,000 acres remain; a staggering loss of over 98 percent. Fertilisers were cheap, and successive governments were keen to persuade farmers to boost productivity, so ecosystems that had taken hundreds of years to develop were subject to swift and wholesale destruction. — Dave Goulson

Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative ... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture. — Jared Diamond

the cobra effect." As the story goes, a British overlord in colonial India thought there were far too many cobras in Delhi. So he offered a cash bounty for every cobra skin. The incentive worked well - so well, in fact, that it gave rise to a new industry: cobra farming. Indians began to breed, raise, and slaughter the snakes to take advantage of the bounty. Eventually the bounty was rescinded - whereupon the cobra farmers did the logical thing and set their snakes free, — Anonymous

[Dagley] had also taken too much in the shape of muddy political talk, a stimulant dangerously disturbing to his farming conservatism, which consisted in holding that whatever is, is bad, and any change is likely to be worse. — George Eliot

All good farmers become connoisseurs of dirt and dust. — David Mas Masumoto

In olden times there were warriors, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. Agriculture was said to be closer to the source of things than trade or manufacturing, and the farmer was said to be "the cupbearer of the gods." He was always able to get by somehow or other and have enough to eat. — Masanobu Fukuoka

Adults who could digest raw milk had an excellent source of food on the hoof. Cattle could go on turning grass into milk for years before they were slaughtered for beef. It has been proposed that lactase persistence was the genetic edge that allowed the dairy pastoralist Indo-Europeans to spread. Dairy farming produces five times as many calories per acre as raising cattle for slaughter.61 The protein and calcium of milk certainly build bones. Prehistoric dairy farmers tended to be taller than other farmers.62 — Jean Manco

In Spain, hilly terrain and antiquated planting and harvest practices keep farmers from retrieving more than about 100 pounds [of almonds] per acre. Growers in the Central Valley, by contrast can expect up to 3000 pounds an acre. But for all their sophisticated strategies to increase yield and profitability, almond growers still have one major problem - pollination. Unless a bird or insect brings the pollen from flower to flower, even the most state-of-the-art orchard won't grow enough nuts. An almond grower who depends on wind and a few volunteer pollinators in this desert of cultivation can expect only 40 pounds of almonds per acre. If he imports honey bees, the average yield is 2,400 pounds per acre, as much as 3,000 in more densely planted orchards. To build an almond, it takes a bee. — Hannah Nordhaus

The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What to wear on a Minnesota farm? The older farmers I know wear brown polyester jumpsuits, like factory workers. The younger ones wear jeans, but the forecast was for ninety-five degrees with heavy humidity. The wardrobe of Quaker ladies in their middle years runs to denim skirts and hiking boots. This outfit had worked fine for me in England. But one of my jobs in Minnesota will be to climb onto the industrial cuisinart in the hay barn and mix fifty-pound bags of nutritional supplement and corn into blades as big as my body. Getting a skirt caught in that thing would be bad news for Betty Crocker. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics. — Michael Pollan

As I string, a swift rhythm is played out with my hands, a cadence known only to those who have strung tobacco. To many of the poor workers, the meter and rhythm of stringing tobacco is the only poetry they've ever known. — Brenda Sutton Rose

Now that we've discovered how to actually develop policies and projects holistically, if we can get the barriers out of the way and release the creativity that's in our universities, our farming organizations, amongst our farmers and land managers, we'll be astounded. As I'd like to express it, the human spirit will fly. — Allan Savory

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

You do need some dispensation for local farmers, because the fast food industry will promote the unsanitary conditions of farming. With vegetables, you have to be careful where they come from; you have to know the farmers and trust them. If you buy from the farmers' market, it's already been investigated. — Alice Waters

Green meant water, green patches meant farmers and farmers meant agriculture. Agriculture meant food to eat and food to sell, which meant towns and transport. They had reached civilization. — T.K. Naliaka

Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss. — Wendell Berry

There's no money in that," said Will. "Farmers don't make any money. It's the man who buys from him and sells. You'll never make any money farming." Will knew that Cal was feeling him, testing him, observing him, and he approved of that. — John Steinbeck

Globalized industrialized food is not cheap: it is too costly for the Earth, for the farmers, for our health. The Earth can no longer carry the burden of groundwater mining, pesticide pollution, disappearance of species and destabilization of the climate. Farmers can no longer carry the burden of debt, which is inevitable in industrial farming with its high costs of production. It is incapable of producing safe, culturally appropriate, tasty, quality food. And it is incapable of producing enough food for all because it is wasteful of land, water and energy. Industrial agriculture uses ten times more energy than it produces. It is thus ten times less efficient. — Vandana Shiva

Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn] — Michael Pollan

It's like if every single male artist dressed up as farmers. In every video they were on a farm. Whether it was Jason Derulo or Oasis, they're always on a tractor, they're always surrounded by sheep and always in boots. And all the songs are about enjoying farming, and this is all you've had for 10 years - you'd think you were going mad. — Caitlin Moran

We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about - farming replacing hunting. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby
if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone ... If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home. — Barbara Kingsolver

This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes ... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations — Aldo Leopold

A farmer's work in many ways is like setting a stage. In theater, stage managers lay out furniture and props, set up lights, and clean to get a set ready for actors to take over and create a show. Farmers plow, fertilize, set up irrigation systems and fences, and otherwise prep the stage of their farms for the real actors -- the sun and the life within the seeds and animals -- to create the show. — Ben Hartman

An environmentalist can oppose factory farming because it's reckless stewardship. A conservative can oppose factory farming because it is destructive to small farmers and to the decent ethic of husbandry those farmers live by. A religious person can oppose factory farming because it is degrading to both man and animal - an offense to God. — Matthew Scully

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor. — Henry David Thoreau

[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village. — Daniel Quinn

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds. — Thomas Jefferson

Raw ingredients trump recipes every time; farmers and ranchers who coax the best from the earth can make any of us appear to be a great cook. — Judy Rodgers