Best 137 quotes in «farming quotes» category

The nutritional composition of beef provides much-needed protein, vitamins and iron.... Let us also not gloss over what is beef's most obvious benefit: Livestock take inedible and untasty grains and convert them into a protein-packed food most humans love to eat.

The perfect weather that had allowed us to get the oats and corn in ahead of time probably also contributed to the dearth of migrating warblers. With no storms to force the birds down, they overflew this area on their northward journey. At least I hope that is the reason. I fear, though, that the cutting down of the tropical rain forests (the winter home for many warblers) to create ranches that will provide cheap beef for fast-food restaurants in the United States may also be partly responsible for the dearth.

The ripen fruit is for a sacred season.

The rain began to fall harder, and it distracted him, but he tried to pull himself back because he felt on the verge of understanding something large and important. It seemed to him that this moment—the light and wind, the sweep of fields, the falling rain, the lowing cows, Leah’s form as it twisted to one side and then another—captured a sort of life that he longed for, a life of order and harsh beauty, and although this was his farm and his vision, it did not seem to be his life. It seemed instead to be the thing for which he must daily give up his life, an act of submission to something he could not name and only rarely, in moments such as these, have a sense of. Life during these moments seemed neither lost nor ruined but a power to be shared, as the grass shares its power with the living things that devour it.

There's a saying that to really know someone you have to walk a mile in their shoes. I'd add that to really know our ancestors, we have to put on more than their shoes, which were generally poor- fitting and leaky. Hitch a plow to an ox and work a field for a few hours, and you come away with a whole new appreciation for what your great-great-grandpa did come spring on the Ohio frontier. Pick up a Kentucky long rifle and aim it at fleeing whitetail, and you'll learn real quick about how important it is to use every bit of an animal you harvest; you may not have another one down for quite a while.

There's relief in not having to be outside. No gardening, no mowing the lawn, no tyranny of long daylight hours to fill with productive activity. We rip through summer, burning the hours and tearing up the land. Then snow comes like a bandage, and winter heals the wounds.

There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love.

These memories are part of my heritage, the fabric of my personality, and as real to me as the land itself.

Today, it is the scent of honeysuckle that takes me back in time and lays me down near a barn. I pick a honeysuckle blossom, touch the trumpet to my nose and inhale. With sticky filthy fingers, I pinch the base of its delicate well then lick the drop of nectar. The sweet liquid makes me thirst for more, and I reach for another and another, the same hands that reach again and again for tobacco as I string. I separate honeysuckle blossoms and taste.

Through my history's despite and ruin, I have come to its remainder, and here have made the beginning of a farm intended to become my art of being here. By it I would instruct my wants: they should belong to each other and to this place. Until my song comes here to learn its words, my art is but the hope of song. (Part 2 from History is Clearing, p 174)

We got a saying around here about our corn, ‘it grows knee-high by the Fourth of July.

To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.

We have been living through a time of sorrow. Our seed remains seed. Our nostrils are dusty.

When Geoffrey was away, the goat often took himself off. He had soon got the goats at Granny’s cottage doing his bidding, and Nanny Ogg said once that she had seen what she called ‘that devil goat’ sitting in the middle of a circle of feral goats up in the hills. She named him ‘The Mince of Darkness’ because of his small and twinkling hooves, and added, ‘Not that I don’t like him, stinky as he is. I’ve always been one for the horns, as you might say. Goats is clever. Sheep ain’t. No offence, my dear.

What exactly she was thinking I never knew. Perhaps of the crop and the whole day’s stoking lost. Perhaps of the stranger who had come with his cornet for a day, and then as meaninglessly gone again. For she had been listening too, and she may have understood. A harvest, however lean, is certain every year; but a cornet at night is golden only once. (Cornet at Night)

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.

Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

...when I offered to either stay and help or go bake a pie, it was the pie that was most needed. It took six pies to finish the roof. I had not known that pies were such an important part of construction.

When we destroy the fertile lands, we destroy our own good life!

Wine is a gateway drug to environmentalism.

Your little eco-friendly fairy tale ain’t going to happen. This was farming land long before it was cute-house land.

Animals die even if you eat vegetables. That is the nature of farming. There is a certain sacrifice involved.

A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.

As you have sown so shall you reap.

Even if you live in New York City, you can have a little basil plant in your window, and that could be considered urban farming.

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.

Farming implements are as cheap in Sydney as in England.

Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians.

Farming, if you do one thing late, you will be late in all your work.

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

Farming -- a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it.

Family, work, familiarity. Listen, if I had a magic wand and I could make myself really be happy, I'd zap me onto a farm. And I know nothing about farming.

A technological revolution on the farm has led to an output explosion--but we have not yet learned to harness that explosion usefully, while protecting our farmers' right to full parity income

Farming, from an outside perspective, can be viewed as a romantic, free and off-the-grid life, but the constant work of it means a routine you must follow or everyone dies.

Farming out atrocities to paramilitaries is standard operating procedure.

From my standpoint, coca should be neither destroyed nor completely legalized. Farming should be controlled by the state and by the coca farmers' unions.

I became a vegetarian after I became aware of factory farming and slaughterhouses and the torture and inhumane handling of all these animals.

I don't know Hillary's Clinton stance on urban farming. I don't know Donald Trump's stance or Bernie Sanders's for that matter. But the Obamas have been amazing. You know, Michelle Obama, she planted that garden. She keeps bees there at the White House. Little known fact, though, is that Laura Bush also had an organic garden but she never told anyone about it.

I don't like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don't like factory farming. I'm not an advocate for the meat industry.

Improving Africa's farming sector would have multiple positive outcomes for African people.

I don't understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It's a pretty gross interference with nature.

I'm very familiar with the importance of dairy farming in Wisconsin. I've spent the night on a dairy farm here in Wisconsin. If I'm entrusted with the presidency, you'll have someone who is very familiar with what the Wisconsin dairy industry is all about.

My label is just "good farming", which isn't something you can put on a t-shirt.

I like to hunt. After baseball, I'll go back and buy some land and do some farming.

Natural farming is just farming, nothing more. You don't have to be a spiritually oriented person to practice my methods.

On a farm the best fertilizer is the master's eye.

Networking is more about farming than it is about hunting.

Organic farming is about buying out of a corrupt, illegal and dishonest system.

Organic farming is personal.

Somerset has a wonderful wildness about it - it hasn't been tamed. This is farming country, and there's a realness here - I love it.