Visits to 'the country' were very important to me growing up, especially working on the farm, experiencing all the wonders of cats and chickens and pigs and calves and outhouses!
Net result [of the Dept. of Agriculture's Payment in Kind - PIK - program]: total farm income, now expected to be around $25 billion, this fiscal year, will exceed total federal subsidies by only a couple of billion. You could argue that those fellows out there on the fruited plain are in effect working for the federal government and that, therefore, the U.S. now has socialized agriculture under the Reagan Administration. Rich, eh?
If Reagan wins, I'd sell the farm and buy a bomb shelter.
A lot of people come to America all the time for economic opportunities. This country is this huge work farm and you can make a lot of money here.
The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.
There is a religious principle: Love thy neighbour as thyself. But it's also an economic asset. If you've got a neighbour, you've got help, and this implies another limit. If you want to have neighbours, you can't have a limitless growth economy. You have to prefer to have a neighbour rather than to own your neighbour farm.
The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
When you take away the subsistence economy, then your farm population is seriously exposed to the vagaries of the larger economy. As it used to be, the subsistence economy carried people through the hard times, and what you might call the housewife's economy of cream and eggs often held these farms and their families together.
The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
A border collie named Orson inspired me to buy a 110-acre farm with four barns and a sheep. That led to a series of books about Bedlam Farm and about dogs, rural life, lambing and herding sheep.
I was born and grew up in Vandalia, Illinois, a small town of about 6,000. It was farm country, and this was the little county seat.
People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it.” They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.
Gail Anderson-Dargatz has a noticing eye, a voice as unique as the countryside she writes about, and a heart large enough to love her entire cast of distinct and memorable characters. In The Cure for Death by Lightning she fashions an irresistible song out of the joys and dangers of growing up, the mysteries and wonders of life on a farm, the thrilling terror of trying to outrun the awful unseen force that pursues a growing girl. This novel opens a door to a shining, surprising world.
Barack wants to stop all children from working on the farm... Can you imagine this? I just, I can't fathom that. Did you ever think we’d grow up in America and see something like that? Let me take it one step further. He wants to disallow the 4-H from training children to work on a farm.
We lived on isolated farms and ranches, far from anybody, and when I was young I knew very few other kids, so I lived to a great extent in my imagination.
I know how to set an irrigation tube, and I helped with the harvest. I learned the law of the harvest without even knowing I was learning it. On the farm, you learn early that you reap what you sow.
Blue Jeans? They should be worn by farm girls milking cows!
Daddy had a farm - cows, pigs, OK, a big garden, OK? We did live off the land, and then we would supplement all that with whatever we could kill or catch. Whether we'd kill squirrels, deer, duck, or caught catfish or brim, that was what went on the table.
We must educate the public. The average person has no idea of what's going on in factory farms, in laboratories, circuses, roadside zoos or rodeos.
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
You can go back to tulip bulbs in Holland 400 years ago. The human beings going through combinations of fear and greed and all of that sort of thing, their behavior can lead to bubbles. And it may have had and Internet bubble at one time, you've had a farm bubble, farmland bubble in the Midwest which resulted in all kinds of tragedy in the early '80s.
I'm very comfortable with horses. I love horses and I have grown up around farm-hands. There's something very universal about anyone who's on horseback night and day. When you get off that horse, you are still walking as if there's still a horse between your legs.
The most agreeable thing in life is worthy accomplishment. It is not possible that the idle tramp is as contented as the farmers along the road who own their own farms, and whose credit is good at the bank in town. When the tramps get together at night, they abuse the farmers, but do not get as much satisfaction out of it as do the farmers who abuse the tramps. The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it.
Of course we will continue to work for cheaper electricity in the homes and on the farms of America; for better and cheaper transportation; for low interest rates; for sounder home financing; for better banking; for the regulation of security issues; for reciprocal trade among nations and for the wiping out of slums. And my friends, for all of these we have only begun to fight.
I was raised to farm work.
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