Best 137 quotes in «farming quotes» category

It's not the deprivations of winter that get you, or the damp of spring, but the no-man's land between.

It was summer in the Midwest and thus idyllic. Long days rolled out like the land before us, expansive and dotted with wild flowers and fireflies. It’s a potent season that can enchant away all thoughts of our protracted northern winters, which seem not only far off but altogether improbable. I blamed it on the heady billow of chlorophyll and vitamin D. In this unfiltered sunshine even a non-agrarian like me could see that this swelling farmland was beautiful and precious, a ripe expanse of great potential. I just wasn’t convinced it was our potential. But we were about to find out. With a transition as subtle as an ax, today would come to have a story, a moniker, and forever more be The Day the Chickens Came.

I was struck by the fact that for Joel abjuring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is not so much a goal of his farming, as it so often is in organic agriculture, as it is an indication that his farm is functioning well. “In nature health is the default,” he pointed out. “Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.

Magic was precarious by nature, and potatoes were safe by comparison.

Many years from now, our descendants will look back on the use of animals for food—particularly the intense animal suffering in factory farms—as a moral atrocity.

My father worked on a farm - and his father. They both got very near to ninety, I believe. They were hardy old sorts. They never had a thing amiss with them. They worked and lived, and then kind of toppled over at the end. I should have been like them but my accident made the difference to me. The horses ran away with me on the farm. It was only two fields away from this house. It was a terrible accident; it jagged me all to pieces. The horses bolted in the field and ruined me. We were using the self-binder at the time. It was the second year I was in this village and thirty-eight year ago or more. I was at the top of the field whole and then at the bottom of the field, broken, and all in minutes. I should not have come here.

Men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men.

Many talk of what they can do and what they cannot do, and I fear they miss the vital point. Faith is leaving off the can-ing and cannot-ing, and leaving it all to Christ, for he can do all things, though you can do nothing.

Not every environment accepts the dream shaping progress you want to put across. Take a second look at what you dream about, be sure it can progress very well where you are; Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not fertile grounds for a farmer’s dream seeds. Go and relocate!

Neither in theory nor in practice does one farmer in a hundred realize how important it is to cultivate, cultivate, and cultivate.

Never underestimate a farmer.

...no matter how rhapsodic one waxes about the process of wresting edible plants and tamed animals from the sprawling vagaries of nature, there's a timeless, unwavering truth espoused by those who worked the land for ages: no matter how responsible agriculture is, it is essentially about achieving the lesser of evils. To work the land is to change the land, to shape it to benefit one species over another, and thus necessarily to tame what is wild. Our task should be to deliver our blows gently.

Of course, chaos can lead to failure and extinction. But so can order. Far more nations, people, and ideas die of atrophy than die from revolution. Both order and chaos are necessary ingredients for long run success - for sustainability.

Not long ago, local farms and markets were the only source of food in one's life. We understood where our food came from, the ground in which it grew, and its link to our Creator. Today, however, with the globalisation of the food industry and the ever-increasing urbanisation of humanity, we've lost this link to the earth and forgotten our dependence on the Creator to provide food for us.

Only a very foolish person would think that specialized knowledge is important in everything apart from agriculture and farming

Prune my ambition to the lowly prayer That I may drive the furrow of my tale Straight, through the lives and dignities I know.

Opportunity is born with each new year.

She allowed herself the luxury of a good cry, figuring that her tears were mingling with the downpour to soak into the soil. It was relief. It was joy. It was the knowledge that she had overcome, and it spilled out with her tears onto the ground that she had toiled with, to become a part of the crop she had planted with her own hands. It had sought to defeat her, and she had prevailed. Now, she was permanently a part of it.

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.

Sorry I didn’t do better,” he said. “I’ll have to come back another year and have another lesson.” I clenched my hands and clung hard to this promise that I knew he couldn’t keep. I wanted to rebel against what was happening, against the clumsiness and crudity of life, but instead I stood quiet a moment, almost passive, then wheeled away and carried his cornet to the buggy. (Cornet at Night)

So even though Grandpa's life has closed its final chapter, the story that he embodied continues each time we take a handful of dirt to check moisture levels or turn our head at the sound of the wind shifting directions before a storm. It lives on as we give thanks for the abundance that we have, whatever it looks like. It lives on in every decision we make that puts someone else first.

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

The cost to reconnect animals to live in natural settings without human support is a debt that many animals in transition must honor with their lives.

Studying wine taught me that there was a very big difference between soil and dirt: dirt is to soul what zombies are to humans. Soil is full of life, while dirt is devoid of it.

The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful or plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa.

The cheap-food boom has been seductively comfortable for us all. Let's face it: Farming is damn hard work, typically done for damnable pay. By relinquishing this burden, by handing the reins to the corporations, we relieved ourselves of a lot of backaches, sunburns, and financial strains. We struck a deal: The agribusinesses got a guaranteed chunk of our income and our full faith in their ability to keep us sustained. In return, we got to pursue lifestyles that don't revolve around soil and toil and that allow us a measure of leisure time unprecedented in human history.

That leaves the category of pasture-raised chickens. It seems they’re living the poultry dream—and, according to Jason, we could be, too. I nod as I take another swallow of beer. I don’t say that it sounds like an enormous amount of work or that we live in arguably one of the harshest climates in the continental United States. Nor do I point out that having spent our entire careers jockeying keyboards to make a living, we are not farmers. So while I don’t exactly tune him out, I become a passive listener. A very passive listener. Poultry isn’t exactly the foreplay talk I was hoping for, so instead I just enjoy the rhythm and cadence of his voice. I hear something about pastured hens for- aging on fresh grasses producing healthier, delicious eggs with less fat and cholesterol, something about the local food movement and its ability to remake America’s food system. I signal the server for a second beer and let it all wash over me with an occasional nod until an utterly un-ignorable statement pulls me out. “This is the kind of farm I want to start.” Now I’m listening. In fact, I’m listening so hard I realize that this particular corner of the restaurant is a convergence point for the piped-in music from two separate rooms, and they’re competing against each other like dueling mariachi bands.

The challenge is clear: we have to conserve and improve the soil we have, and we need to turn dirt into soil wherever people need to grow food. That's true in America's breadbasket, it's true in the tropics, and it's true in the dry, hardscrabble, weathered soils that cover much of sub- Saharan Africa.

The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

The ripen fruit is for a sacred season.

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

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.

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)

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

Wine is a gateway drug to environmentalism.