Farming Quotes - Page 9

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

  Peter Singer

  Modern, Gross, Notion

  "Chew the Right Thing". Interview with Dave Gilson, www.motherjones.com. May 3, 2006.

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• 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

  Past, Years, United States

  "Rebuilding and Revitalizing America’s Rural Communities" by Sec. Tom Vilsack, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 3, 2010.

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• We need to realize that these industrial methods of farming have gotten us used to cheap food. The corollary of cheap food is low wages. What we need to do in an era when the price of food is going up is pay better wages. A living wage is an absolutely integral part of a modern food system, because you can't expect people to eat properly and eat in a sustainable way if you pay them nothing. In fact, it's cheap food that subsidized the exploitation of American workers for a very long time, and that's always been an aim of cheap food.

  Raj Patel

  Long, People, Realizing

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• [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

  War, Past, Civilization

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• 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

  Technology, Agriculture, Years

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• More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most.

  Michael Pollan

  Mean, What Matters, Diversity

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• In my opinion, if 100% of the people were farming it would be ideal. If each person were given one quarter-acre, that is 1 1/4 acres to a family of five, that would be more than enough land to support the family for the whole year. If natural farming were practiced, a farmer would also have plenty of time for leisure and social activities within the village community. I think this is the most direct path toward making this country a happy, pleasant land.

  Masanobu Fukuoka

  Country, Thinking, Years

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• Salmon farming-the placement of large metal or mesh net cages in the ocean to grow fish-was pioneered in Norway in the 1960s. Since then, the industry has expanded to Scotland, Ireland, Canada, the US, and Chile, but is dominated by the same multinational corporations. Wherever it is practiced, net-cage salmon farming is controversial and raises serious environmental concerns.

  David Suzuki

  Ocean, Scotland, Environmental

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• Organic farming has been shown to provide major benefits for wildlife and the wider environment. The best that can be said about genetically engineered crops is that they will now be monitored to see how much damage they cause.

  Prince Charles

  Agriculture, Environmental, Benefits

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• Many organic practices simply make sense, regardless of what overall agricultural system is used. Far from being a quaint throwback to an earlier time, organic agriculture is proving to be a serious contender in modern farming and a more environmentally sustainable system over the long term.

  David Suzuki

  Agriculture, Practice, Long

  David Suzuki, David Taylor (2009). “The Big Picture: Reflections on Science, Humanity, and a Quickly Changing Planet”, p.184, Greystone Books

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• My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature

  Josephine Hart

  Mother, Essentials, Passionate

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• Heredity is a splendid phenomenon that relieves us of responsibility for our shortcomings.

  Doug Larson

  Family, Responsibility, Unity

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• Fair Trade supports some of the most bio-diverse farming systems in the world. When you visit a Fair Trade coffee grower's fields, with the forest canopy overhead and the sound of migratory songbirds in the air, it feels like you're standing in the rainforest.

  Miguel A. Altieri

  Coffee, Air, Support

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• Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, the emptiness of ages in his face, and on his back the burden of the world.

  Edwin Markham

  Hoe, Age, World

  'The Man with the Hoe' (1899)

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• The people who benefit from this state of affairs have been at pains to convince us that the agricultural practices and policies that have almost annihilated the farming population have greatly benefited the population of food consumers. But more and more consumers are now becoming aware that our supposed abundance of cheap and healthful food is to a considerable extent illusory.

  Wendell Berry

  Pain, Practice, Convince Us

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• much agricultural land which might be growing food is being used instead to 'grow' money (in the form of coffee, tea, etc.).

  Frances Moore Lappé

  Coffee, Land, Tea

  Frances Moore Lappé (1971). “Diet for a Small Planet”

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• Music is my way to shine back and express positive vibrations for a common healing. It's similar to farming, or surfing, or yoga. Before world peace, we have to have inner peace and music helps us get there.

  Jason Mraz

  Yoga, Healing, Shining

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• Analysis of President Bush's tax plan has revealed that several elaborate tricks and gimmicks were used to make it look like a $1.35 trillion cut, but in reality it's going to be closer to costing $1.8 trillion. Critics claim it's math so fuzzy, you have to squint to see our nation's future of subsistence farming and post-apocalyptic roving motorcycle gangs.

  Jon Stewart

  Cutting, Math, Reality

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• Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Ninety Nine, Land

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, November 2, 2009.

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• A paradigm shift, where, in addition to, physical inputs for farming, a focused emphasis placed on knowledge inputs, can be a promising way forward. This knowledge based approach will bring immense returns particularly in Rainfed and Dryland farming areas.

  Pratibha Patil

  Rain, Way Forward, Land

  Pratibha Patil's Speech on the Eve of Demitting Office of the President, pib.nic.in. July 24, 2012.

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• Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no indsturial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.

  Yanis Varoufakis

  Past, People, Wish

  Yanis Varoufakis (2015). “The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy”, p.29, Zed Books Ltd.

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• There are 6.6 billion people on the planet today. With organic farming we could only feed four billion of them. Which two billion would volunteer to die?

  Norman Borlaug

  Two, People, Volunteer

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• Erotic practices have become diversified. Sex used to be a single-crop farming, like cotton or wheat; now people raise all kinds of things.

  Saul Bellow

  Sex, Practice, People

  1987 More Die of Heartbreak.

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• There I was out in the barn playing midwife to a pregnant mare. I remember sitting there, spinning yarn in the light of a little oil lamp, a city girl who knew nothing about farming, sitting on the deel beside that mother in pain, already beginning the birthing process. All around me there was darkness and perfect silence, except for the mother's pain. It was as if the war didn't exist in those hours.

  Diet Eman

  Girl, Mother, Pain

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• An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, immune to the methods of factory farming.

  Alain de Botton

  Teacher, Writing, Careers

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

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