Quotes & Sayings About Fertilizer

People see me going around constantly flipping off lights and think I'm OCD. No, I'm just turned off by lights that are turned on unnecessarily. It's not about wasted money, it's just about waste. Whenever I see someone throwing out food, I just picture all the energy that went into making that food being lost - the diesel in the farm equipment that picked it, the energy in the fertilizer and the whole fertilizer plant, the truck that brought it to the restaurant, the BTUs used to cook it, and the electricity for the heat lamp at the shitty restaurant. All gone because you couldn't finish your taco salad. — Adam Carolla

Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap. — Brian Christian

Whereas CO2 is the dominant greenhouse gas overall, it accounts for only 11 percent of agricultural emissions.2 The rest is nitrous oxide (53 percent) and methane (36 percent). Nitrous oxide is 296 times more potent per pound than CO2 as a climate-change gas, and on farms it results mainly from the use of fertilizer but also from cattle pee, especially if there is excessive protein in their diet, and from the burning of biomass and fuel.3 Methane, which is 25 times more potent than CO2, is mainly emitted by cows and sheep when they belch. Some is also emitted from silage. The CO2 comes from machinery but also from the heating of greenhouses to grow crops out of season or in countries that just don't have the right climate. — Mike Berners-Lee

I want my ashes either with some really good primo or as some fertilizer for plants. — Tommy Chong

The potatoes grew bigger as carbon dioxide increased. This was not a surprise. We also saw that these big potatoes were less nutritious, much lower in protein content, no matter how much fertilizer we gave them. This was a bit of a surprise. It is also bad news, because the poorest and hungriest nations of the world rely on sweet potatoes for a significant amount of dietary protein. It looks as if the bigger potatoes of the future might feed more people while nourishing them less. I don't have an answer for that one. The — Hope Jahren

I don't believe things happen by accident. I think that everything that comes into our life, even the really hard things, are intended for good. That they can shape us positively if we'll embrace them and remain teachable and purpose to use that almost like fertilizer to grow out of the experience. — Michael Hyatt

The trick is realize that the shit that falls on you is fertilizer. -Ron Mangravite — Sarah Susanka

Incidentally, if you really think organic means pure, then you're in for a helluva heartbreak. Organic farms do use pesticides and, as reported by Brian Palmer in Slate, organic wine needs eighty times more fertilizer than conventional vino. — Greg Gutfeld

When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity" - to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to - he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health. — Michael Pollan

You can clear the land, plow the field, spread the fertilizer, and plant the corn. But you cannot make it rain. You cannot prevent an early frost. You cannot determine exactly what will happen in your life. The rain may or may not fall, but one thing is certain: you will get a harvest only if you planted something in the field. It's important to do everything in our power to ensure our success, but we also need to let the universe take its course. — Melody Beattie

I am a rose that grew from concrete. There was no soil, fertilizer or water to nourish me; just the hand of God to show that miracles can and do happen. — Teleah Scott

Don't bury me but instead use me as fertilizer to grow a tree..I can prove to you im useful both alive and dead — Me

The sea is a spirit level, a pantry, a playground, a mansion rowdy with life, a majestic reminder of our origins, another kind of body (a body of water), and female because of her monthly tides. But her bones are growing brittle, her brine turning ever more acidic from all the CO2 we've slathered into the air and all the fertilizer runoff from our fields. — Diane Ackerman

Music is the fertilizer for heart to bloom the flower of love and peace. — Debasish Mridha

To say that a man is made up of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer. — Hermann Joseph Muller

Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia's pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living room window. The recovering terrorist
holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew
moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling. — Zsuzsi Gartner

Anger is the agro-chemical that makes the weeds of failure to germinate and compete with your crops of success. Don't apply it. — Israelmore Ayivor

I wish I had more hair on my head. Maybe if I sprinkled fertilizer on it, it would grow. — Kylie Bax

I wish we could do something useful with tobacco - like making fertilizer out of it. — Paul Dudley White

Her son must have folded her up, shoved her in, fired up the stove, and burned her into an ashen pile, ideal for fertilizer. That's why our tree kicked ass. — Trinie Dalton

People have been using human waste as fertilizer for centuries. It's even got a pleasant name: "night soil. — Andy Weir

[When her daughter suggested the President refer in his conversation with foreign dignitaries about lawn care to 'fertilizer' instead of to 'manure':] But remember, it took me almost thirty years to get him to call it manure. — Bess Truman

By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt ... After Nixon's 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have probably starved. — Michael Pollan

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer — Alfred De Musset

The feeling for what ought and ought not to be grows and dies like a tree, and no fertilizer of any kind will do much good. What the individual can do is give a fine example, and have the courage to firmly uphold ethical convictions in a society of cynics. I have for a long time tried to conduct myself this way, with varying success. — Albert Einstein

Well, I certainly don't," said Percy sanctimoniously. "I shudder to think what the state of my in-tray would be if I was away from work for five days."
"Yeah, someone might slip dragon dung in it again, eh, Perce?" said Fred.
"That was a sample of fertilizer from Norway!" said Percy, going very red in the face. "It was nothing personal!"
"It was," Fred whispered to Harry as they got up from the table. "We sent it. — J.K. Rowling

Don't worry. We'll farm, soon's he finishes wi' that new-style Scanran fertilizer. — Tamora Pierce

The Times Square Incident wasn't a terrorist attack, it was a Jim Carrey movie. The terrorist locked the keys to the safe house he was going to escape to in the carbomb. And I love that he locked the carbomb. Nobody's getting my Ipod. Then he left the keys to carbomb hanging out of the tailgate of the carbomb, and built the carbomb out of fertilizer that wouldn't explode. I have been doing comedy for 25 years and I have never been that funny. — Christopher Titus

Imagine the great depths of time required for countless generations of corals, clams, and microorganisms to live out their lives, pass on their legacy, then die and sink to the ocean floor - just so you can have a gravel driveway. Our own lives, of course, are far less meaningful. We leave nothing, decaying into plant food and fertilizer in just a few years. These creatures built mountains. Our cities rest on their bones. — Theodore Gray

Life didn't explode in the sunshine and pretty places. Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and with a whole lot of shit for fertilizer. Although love could grow in times of peace, it tempered in battle. — Karen Marie Moning

The master's eye is the best fertilizer. — Pliny The Elder

No matter how much we love them, we all grow up surrounded by our parents' shit. You'll either be buried in it and suffocate, or use it for fertilizer and thrive." I stare at him for a moment, then laugh. "You're right," I say. "That's probably the most profound - and disgusting - thing that I've heard in a long time. — J. Kenner

Any meal at the front was an exercise in war-time ingenuity and devotion of the lower classes for their officers. The Petite Marmite a la Thermit was from beef-broth cubes, the tinned Canadian salmon was called Saumon de Tin A & Q Sauce. The Epaule d'Agneau Wellington, N.Z. was army ration lamb, and the terrine of foie gras aux truffes was a can of foie gras that I had bought from the French commanding general. There was a salad of fresh lettuce from somewhere (no one asked in what or whose fertilizer it had been grown in since we would all soon be dead anyway) and the Macedoine de Fruits a la Quatre Bas was a can of mixed fruit. Then fresh strawberries soaked in Cognac. All the usual wines starting with an amontillado, Pommery Extra Sec, Chateau Steenworde Claret, Graham's Five Crowns Port, Bisquit Dubouche Grande Champagne Cognac, Brandy and a Waterloo Cup. — Jeremiah Tower

Some years ago one oil company bought a fertilizer company, and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company. And there was no more damned reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies, but they didn't know exactly what to do, and if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil and vice versa. — Charlie Munger

Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems. — Wendell Berry

For there to be pain, there has to be kindness. For darkness to standout there has to be the sun. You can't have one without the other, and both have their uses. So even if you stumble and make mistakes, that's not useless. Think of it as fertilizer, sure it feels like crap, but it will help you grow!" ~Kyoko Honda — Natsuki Takaya

In the food case in particular, one of the technologies that could help there - genetic technologies that could create better crops with higher yields and less need for water and fertilizer - is tremendously feared. Very little of that fear is scientifically grounded. — Ramez Naam

After a few days of rain, the seedlings will push through the soil and unfold their tiny leaves. Two weeks later, if the rain is still good, we then carefully apply the first round of fertilizer, because each seedling requires love and attention like any living thing if it's going to grow up strong. — William Kamkwamba

Down in Texas, Rick Perry announced he will not run for reelection. He said 'I executed one last woman, that fertilizer plant exploded, I returned abortions to back alleys where it belongs, my work here is done.' I think that's what he said, he was chewing a crayon. — Bill Maher

When tending a vast and beautiful garden, you have to plant many seeds, never knowing ahead of time which ones will germinate, which will produce the most glorious flowers, which will bear the sweetest fruit. A good gardener plants them all, tends and nurtures them, and wishes them well. Optimism is the best fertilizer. — Kevin J. Anderson

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer. — Kurt Vonnegut

Your methods are like slow release fertilizer; over time they produce a bountiful harvest. — Vicki Caruana

It takes 25 years or so for a male sperm whale to reach the edge of social maturity, when it attains the size and weight of those I saw being butchered. It took less than four hours to transform those once vibrant creatures into the basic ingredients of candle wax, lubricating oils, cosmetics, fertilizer, ivory trinkets, and food for domesticated animals. — Sylvia Earle

Since chemical fertilizer burns out the soil organic matter, other farmers struggle with tilth, water retention, and basic soil nutrients. The soil gets harder and harder every year as the chemicals burn out the organic matter, which gives the soil its sponginess. One pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water. The best drought protection any farmer can acquire is more soil organic matter. — Joel Salatin

Coral reefs are under assault. They are rapidly being degraded by human activities. They are over-fished, bombed and poisoned. They are smothered by sediment, and choked by algae growing on nutrient-rich sewage and fertilizer run-off. They are damaged by irresponsible tourism and are being severely stressed by the warming of the world's oceans. Each of these pressures is bad enough in itself, but together, the cocktail is proving lethal. — Klaus Topfer

A distant warm look entered Major Danby's eyes. "It must be nice to live like a vegetable," he conceded wistfully.
"It's lousy," answered Yossarian.
"No, it must be very pleasant to be free from all this doubt and pressure," insisted Major Danby. "I think I'd like to live like a vegetable and make no important decisions."
"What kind of vegetable, Danby?"
"A cucumber or a carrot."
"What kind of a cucumber? A good one or a bad one?"
"Oh, a good one, of course."
"They'd cut you off in your prime and slice you up for a salad."
Major Danby's face fell. "A poor one, then."
"They'd let you rot and use you for fertilizer to help the good ones grow."
"I guess I don't want to live like a vegetable, then," said Major Danby with a smile of sad resignation. — Joseph Heller

Anger is an agro-chemical that makes self-destruction to grow faster. Like a stone thrown upward, all angry people eventually fall down into the dirty ditch of sorrowful self-harm and a pathetic loss of real-self. — Israelmore Ayivor

I hereby grant you permission to write crap. The more the better. Remember, crap makes the best fertilizer. — Pat Pattison

Another agricultural trend of growing concern is the increased nutrient content of coastal waters resulting from fertilizer runoff in agricultural regions. Augmented by urban sewage discharge in some situations, this results in huge algal blooms, which, as they die and decay, deplete the oxygen content in the water, leading to the death of the fish. — Lester R. Brown

Those words of my friend were like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me. — Yukio Mishima

But hippies always forget that old Gaea can be one heartless bitch. Spend a little time wandering lost in the woods as she attacks you and tries to reduce you to fertilizer." She snorted. "You won't be singing kumbayas very long." She paused to make sure Janus would get the point. "In this world, Gaea's the predator and we're the prey. — Jenifer Mohammed

Patents are like fertilizer. Applied wisely and sparingly, they can increase growth. But if you apply too many chemicals, or make patents too strong, then you can leach the land, making growth more difficult. — Alex Tabarrok

Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things. — Norman Borlaug

If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I'm not satisfied knowing that I'll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again.* — Scott Adams

Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain's coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer. — Bill Bryson

A failure is like fertilizer; it stinks to be sure, but it makes things grow faster in the future. — Denis Waitley

Failure is good. It's fertilizer. Everything I've learned about coaching, I've learned from making mistakes. — Rick Pitino

Fertilizer played a greater role in this case than computers. — Mike Godwin

Author points out how easily non-agricultural people miss the picture of God as all-providing in Psalm 50:10, Word to a people for whom cattle meant plowing and fertilizer as well as meat. — Matt Chandler

Optimism is the best fertilizer. — Kevin J. Anderson

Religious dogma creates a perfect fertilizer for the weeds of hypocrisy. — Steve Maraboli

Ashes are excellent fertilizer — Brandon Sanderson

Lord Emsworth was a man with little of the aggressor in his spiritual make-up. He believed in living and letting live. Except for his sister Constance, his secretary Lavender Briggs, the Duke of Dunstable and his younger son Frederick, now fortunately residing in America, few things were able to ruffle him. Placid is the word that springs to the lips. But the Church Lads had pierced his armour, and he found resentment growing within him like some shrub that has been treated with a patent fertilizer. He brooded bleakly on the injuries he had suffered at the hands of these juvenile delinquents. The — P.G. Wodehouse

Dig into the roots of culture, and it will grow. It's like a grass that is growing, and it cannot stop, and music is like the fertilizer for that. — Burning Spear

The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place. — David R. Brower

The glial-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) that he referred to is a brain growth factor. It functions like a growth-promoting fertilizer in the brain. GDNF is made by glial cells, one of the major types of cells in the brain. Fifteen percent of our brain cells are neurons; the other 85 percent are glial cells. — Norman Doidge

If there were any seeds of doubt in my mind as to whether I really loved Adam or just some image of Adam, they were all killed by the frost that was tonight's dinner party. No, wait, that sounds like it was some cold, deadly evening. I mean the opposite. I guess I mean that if the flower of my love for Adam wass being stunted by any feelings of doubt, then tonight fully fertilized my seed and allowed it to grow. That works if you don't think about the face that fertilizer is made if shit. — Daniel Handler

Every human being is a wet, gassy katamari of triumphs, traumas, scars, coping mechanisms, parental baggage, weird stuff you saw on the Internet too young, pressure from your grandma to take over the bodega when what you really want to do is dance, and all the other fertilizer that makes a smear of DNA grow into a fully formed toxic avenger. — Lindy West

A fertilizer bomb that kills hundreds in Oklahoma. Fuel-laden civil jets that kill 4000 in New York. A sanctions policy that kills one and a half million in Iraq. A trade policy that immiserates continents. You can make a bomb out of anything. The ones on paper hurt the most. — Raj Patel

Golf has an ambivalent relationship with the environment. On one hand, it's a great preserver of open spaces. Golf doesn't pave the world - it helps to green the world. But the downside is, it uses a lot of fertilizer, pesticides and water. — Thomas Friedman

Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and a whole lot of shit for fertilizer. — Karen Marie Moning

What the new fertilizer technology has accomplished for the farmer is clear: more crop can be produced on less acreage than before. Since the cost of fertilizer, relative to the resultant gain in crop sales, is lower than that of any other economic input, and since the Land Bank pays the farmer for acreage not in crops, the new technology pays him well. The cost-in environmental degradation-is borne by his neighbors in town who find their water polluted. The new technology is an economic success-but only because it is an ecological failure. — Barry Commoner

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. — P. J. O'Rourke

Before artificial nitrogen fertilizer became widely available, the world's population was around 2 billion. When we no longer have it - or if we ever decide to stop using it - that may be the number to which our own naturally gravitates. — Alan Weisman

I have used all the manure that has been thrown on me as fertilizer to make me stronger. — Eartha Kitt

Nitrogen fertilizer is used on all crops produced in this country, but it is a key plant nutrient to produce corn a critical crop to Illinois farmers. — John Shimkus

Weeds don't need planting in well-drained soil; they don't ask for fertilizer or bits of rag to scare away the birds. They come without invitation; and they don't take the hint when you want them to go. Weeds are nobody's guests: More like squatters. — Norman Nicholson

I wondered if the owners would mind if I murdered someone in their front yard. A big red-headed someone. He was so full of shit, he'd make fantastic fertilizer for their garden — Karina Halle

A breeze had come up and there was the scent of loam in the air. Hay and fertilizer. Sweet grass and wild ginger. April. — Alice Hoffman

The Stetson passage is an allusion to Frazer theory in The Golden Bough that religion originated as agricultural engineering. Through a grotesque process of literalization, all of the dying gods and heroes in The Golden Bough, along with Christ and the Fisher King, are transferred from mythic to modern consciousness ( Frazer himself was an unabashed positivist) to be made explicable in scientific terms as fertilizer. — Jewel Spears Brooker

From the cradle to the grave, joy and pain is the fertilizer for wisdom. — T.F. Hodge

Among the many important provisions in the energy bill are the creation of an estimated half million new jobs, increased oil production, blackout protection, controlling fertilizer costs by stabilizing natural gas prices and enacting new efficiency benchmarks. — Paul Gillmor

Nobody is going to invest a fortune into good orchard land, all the farming equipment necessary, the fertilizer, the seedlings, the nonstop Herculean work effort needed to grow apples, then bring them to the fruit stand for people to take home for free. — Ted Nugent

Nobody adores fertilizer. Nobody devotes their life to fertilizer (unless they own a fertilizer company). But, shit, you need it to grow the crops. The land is arid and dry without it, and trying to grow things is likely to be futile. — Shellen Lubin

Soulcial Shit. [Fertilizer]
you climbed under the skin I'm trying to escape. — Antonia Perdu

Like every human we have to categorize ourselves, so you kind of start to build a mythos 'cause I had no information about [ biological mother]. So you have to build a mythos around yourself. And so my mythos included me not being wanted or me being a wretched person, which is just great fertilizer for comedy. — Keegan-Michael Key

Wow. This place looks classy. The smell of fertilizer and rot is really in this season. Remind me, what are we doing here?" she asked looking at him with a coy smile. "Did we come for bait? — Dennis Sharpe

Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,
for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,
sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! — Upton Sinclair

Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

Money is like manure, you don't have to spread it around, you can just sell it to Potash Corp as fertilizer. — J. Paul Getty

Growing is a lifetime job, and we grow most when we're down in the valleys, where the fertilizer is. — Barbara Johnson

I look at failure as the fertilizer to success. — Thomas Jones

Do not waste ... Don't waste the vegetable-washing water, splash it on the grapefruit tree instead ... Don't waste anything made of glass or plastic because glass and plastic can be reused ad nauseam ... Don't waste ... a string for retying, a rubber band for conquering dry noodles or hair, rice bags for dishcloths, fish bones for fertilizer ... Anything that comes out of the earth must be returned to the earth ... "If everyone uses more than their share, how can the earth support us?" — Thanhha Lai

This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without fertilizer, forget it. The game is over. — Norman Borlaug

Someday men will learn to irrigate and spread fertilizer instead of praying for fertility. — Warren Eyster

Don't be afraid to write crap - it makes the best fertilizer. The more you write the better your chances of growing something wonderful. — Pat Pattison

Programs that pay farmers not to farm often devastate rural areas. The reductions hurt everyone from fertilizer companies to tractor salesmen. — Dick Armey

If you have the 'Total Information Awareness' project working, it might be relatively easy to find everyone who had bought more than a ton of fertilizer and 500 gallons of diesel in the last year, which would be a great way of spotting potential Tim McVeighs - but it would also spot half the farmers and ranchers in America. — John Perry Barlow

The best fertilizer for a piece of land is the footprints of its owner. — Lyndon B. Johnson

As of now, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of food energy for humans - somewhere between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for a calorie of food. The fossil fuel is in both the fertilizer and the pesticides, and it's essential to the machinery needed to plant, harvest, process, and transport grain. All told, an acre of corn drinks about fifty gallons of oil. — Lierre Keith