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Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

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Lailah Gifty Akita

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“there are no winners here. The farming businesses who rule these fields have got so big they are entirely reliant on one or two monopolistic buyers who screw them on prices and can bankrupt them at will. The money flows off the land to the banks that finance the debt on which it is all built, to the engineering companies selling the tractors and machinery, the synthetic fertilizer and pesticide corporations, the seed companies and the insurance agents. And yet, judged solely as productive businesses, focussing on efficiency and productivity (and ignoring fossil fuel input and ecological degradation), these new farmers are amazing - the best farmers that have ever lived. In the year 2000 the average American farmer produced twelve times as much per hour as his grandfather did in 1950. And this amazing efficiency means the end for most farmers. In the UK, the number of dairy farmers has more than halved from more than 30,000 in 1995 to about 12,000 today. In turn, the number of dairy cows in Britain has halved in the past twenty years. The amazing productivity of the remaining farmers and super-cows in demonstrated in the simple fact that milk production has remained more or less stable.”

ProductivityEfficiencyFarmingAgribusinessDairy CowsDairy FarmersMilk Production
Book:Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey
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“Eunan was against anything without set purpose and complete predictability and a human tended to fail on these requirements… He mocked anything frivolous: placemats, dessert, having a lie-in, suffering from your nerves. 'Get away out of that!' he'd shout at cream cakes and people with hay fever. To him harsh words weren't a bad thing, they were just a little sandpaper, giving a person a hard-wearing exterior. 'I was often spoken to harshly and it's done me no harm, he'd say and no one dared disagree.”

IrelandIrishCurmudgeon
Book:The Boy from the Sea
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