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Farming Quotes

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Farming Quotes

“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.”

LoveLifeCharacterPurposeVirtueDutyRainSharingFarming
Book:Mystery Ride
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“I should understand the land, not as a commodity, an inert fact to be taken for granted, but as an ultimate value, enduring and alive, useful and beautiful and mysterious and formidable and comforting, beneficent and terribly demanding, worthy of the best of man's attention and care... [My father] insisted that I learn to do the hand labor that the land required, knowing--and saying again and again--that the ability to do such work is the source of a confidence and an independence of character that can come no other way, not by money, not by education.”

LandFarmingSelf Sufficiency
Book:The Hidden Wound
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“How could it be progress when the countryside was being stripped of its life, he wondered. Without successive generations of families keeping their feet on their own land, the countryside would be a dead place - a desert. A thousand efficient machines could never replace the joy and satisfaction that a man drew from hearing the laughter of his children playing in the fields as he tended his finca, no matter how small it might be.”

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Author:Peter Kerr
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“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)”

DesireSongHopeGrowthHistoryFarming
Book:The Collected Poems, 1957-1982
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“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!”

DreamEnvironmentProgressPositionAcceptanceFood For ThoughtIsraelmore AyivorSeedsLocationFarmingFertileAcceptHiroshimaFarmSecondFarmerHiroshima And NagasakiFarmlandBig DreamEnvironsRelocateNagasakiDream SeedsRepositionFarm LandRepositioning2ndFertile GroundsSecond Look
Book:Shaping the dream
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“Sprout looked through the wide-open door, focusing on the world outside. It had been a while since she’d had an appetite. She had no desire to lay another egg. Her heart emptied of feeling every time the farmer’s wife took her eggs. The pride she felt when she laid one was replaced by sadness. She was exhausted after a full year of this. She couldn’t so much as touch her own eggs, not even with the tip of her foot. And she didn’t know what happened to them after the farmer’s wife carried them in her basket out of the coop.”

LossDreamsSorrowChickensFarmingDefianceDespondencyHenHatchery
Book:The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly
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“Life isn't about winning or losing. Between those two extremes there is a middle ground, and that middle ground is where I let my ducks roam and graze on and lay their eggs—which are now ON SALE at Trophies For All prices.”

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Book:Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.
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“She loved the smell of old truck; thick cotton and vinyl seat covers, old gasoline and oil, the smell of country, decades of farmers, workers and families taking trips back and forth to town, up backroads to swimming holes, over fields, through all the weather. She imagined what this truck would have seen if it had eyes and a memory. She was about to become one more episode in its existence.”

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Author:Glenda Love
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“A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is "a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.'" The husband, unlike the "manager" or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble.”

MysteryLandHumilityFarmingHusbandry
Book:Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food
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“Well, it’s something I never felt before I joined up,” he said, returning to his slow careful manner. “But coming back this time, I’ve felt it all right. [Farming] seems to cut you off too much. After a time, if you don’t look out, you don’t seem to care what’s happening to other people. You aren’t part of anything. You’re out for yourself – and just your family. Mind you, it’s easy to feel like that – because you have to work hard and it takes nearly all your time—and you don’t meet many people who are doing different jobs, the way you do in towns. But it’s not right somehow. It shouldn’t be like that. We’ve had enough of that.”

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Book:Three Men in New Suits
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“It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or even symptoms, might well correspond to the thickening armor of the great reptiles—a tendency that can end only in extinction. If this should happen to be true, nothing stemming from thought can interfere with it or bend it. Conscious thought seems to have little effect on the action or direction of our species.”

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Book:The Log from the Sea of Cortez
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“Ask me about my childhood, and I will tell you to walk to the edge of the woods with a choir of crickets chirping from every direction, a hot, humid breeze brushing through your hair, your feet, bare and callused. Stand there, unmoving, and watch the dance of ten thousand fireflies blinking on and off in the darkness. Inhale the scent of cured tobacco, freshly plowed southern soil, burning leaves, and honeysuckle. Swallow the taste of blackberries, picked straight from the bushes, and lick your teeth, the after-taste still sweet in your mouth. Now, stretch out on the ground and relax all your muscles. Watch nature's festival of flickering lights.”

ChildhoodFarmingSouthern WritersFirefliesGeorgia Writers
Author:Brenda Sutton Rose
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“When people think about farmers, they think about people who grow things. Well, I'm a duck farmer, and what I grow is impatient waiting for some committee to recognize duck farming as an Olympic sport.”

SportsDucksOlympicsFarmingDuckDuck QuoteDuck QuotesDuck FarmingDuck Farmer
Book:Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.
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“Living off the land took a lot of getting used to for these city folk. They had to learn how to garden and grow their own crops. Of course, they were learning how to hunt and clean their prey, so it could be cut up and cooked. Smoking the meat was another necessary lesson to be learned.”

SurvivalSmokingHuntingGardeningFarmingJason MedinaCropsThe Manhattanville IncidentAn Undead NovelLiving Off The Land
Book:The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel
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“Check your environment and be sure that it is supportive. Some environments do not support progress. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not fertile lands for a farmer’s dream seeds. Change location.”

ChangeSupportEnvironmentProgressLandEnvironmentalFood For ThoughtIsraelmore AyivorProgressiveLocationSupportiveAssuranceFarmingFertileFertilityHiroshimaSureFarmerHiroshima And NagasakiCheckFarmlandChange PositionEnvironmental FactorsNagasakiDream Seeds
Book:Shaping the dream
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“Planting these cover-crop seeds is my first step to save my Sun Crests. I begin by planting hope - hope that the seeds will germinate, hope that they will add life to the farm and even help save the wonderful taste of my fruits. I had no training to be a father, I could only hope I'd learn quickly, on the job, As I grew my first cover crop, I had a similar feeling. I hoped an enriching harvest would follow. Babies and planting seeds: they demand that you believe in the magic and mystery of life.”

HopeFarmingGeorgics
Book:Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm
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“There are many more ways we can adapt. For example, instead of using up our energies harping about big farmers (whom of course we need right now to provide enough food for all of us), buy your own little patch of land to turn into an oasis of food and wildlife abundance. More and more people are doing this rather than standing around wringing their hands about global warming. Your little sanctuary will not be prone to disappear when the inevitable financial crises hit the big commercial farms.”

AgricultureFarmingHomesteadingUrban Farm
Book:Gene Everlasting: A Contrary Farmer's Thoughts on Living Forever
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“जूआ खेलने का सदियों पुराना सामाजिक मान्यता प्राप्त नाम है खेती। इसमें किसान प्रकृति पर दांव लगाता है। सफल हुआ तो रोटी का प्रबंध हो गया, हार जाए तो अगली फसल पर फिर से दांव खेलता है।”

LifeGamblingFarmersFarmingGamble
Book:आई डोन्ट लाइक यू
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“Without this [Soil Food Web system of bacteria, fungi etc], most important nutrients would drain from soil. Instead, they are retained in the bodies of soil life. Here is the gardener's truth: when you apply a chemical fertilizer, a tiny bit hits the rhizosphere, where it is absorbed, but most of it continues to drain through soil until it hits the water table. Not so with the nutrients locked up inside soil organisms, a state known as immobilization; these nutrients are eventually released as wastes, or mineralized.”

GardeningFarmingOrganic FarmingMicrobiologyOrganic GardeningSoil HealthAllotmentSoil For GrowthNo Dig Gardening
Book:Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
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“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.”

FarmingTobaccoSouthern FictionFarm LifeSouthern WomenStringing Tobacco
Author:Brenda Sutton Rose
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“You all go running your yaps about using the funds— but we don’t use them! Not really. Bringing in a speaker, maybe, now and again, the Mercy Fund— what good does that do in the long run? No real tangible benefit.” Alaine saw some of the farmers’ mouths harden into angry lines. Those speakers brought new research and techniques that many of the farms now used. And the Mercy Fund had saved many of them from small calamities time and again. Olson didn’t understand how those small calamities could snowball into losing a farm outright. “No real long-term benefit, not like good policy from the mayor’s office.” “Yes, Mr. Olson, but you can’t buy good policy,” Alaine said.”

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Book:The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill
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“In time I told Clarissa the difficulties we had had escaping from the war zone. She warmed up to me as we worked together and I felt that I could trust her. Once when the farmer was away we undertook to till a field with a southern exposure. I wore the harness and pulled the plow like a horse as she steered it. Together we plowed an entire field alone, preparing it for the springtime planting. Their farm was alongside the main road going up the mountain directly behind the Village of Überlingen. It was situated high on one of the foothills of the Alps that surround the Bodensee.”

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Author:Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One...."
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“That’s how we’ve ended up,” Ivan said with a bitter smile. “We work, as in the proverb: Enough trading, father — there’s no change left to give. ‘Why did they suddenly increase the grain procurement plan?’ Vasyl protested. ‘Everything seems the same — but it isn’t,’ Danylo explained. ‘The status of our land has changed, and so has the status of the collective farmers. What grew last year is now taxed differently. Even the poor peasants who joined the collective are no longer considered poor — and the taxes rise accordingly.’ ‘Clever,’ Ivan muttered angrily. ‘They’ve laid out their accounting traps well.’ — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Two Context note: In Soviet collective farms, taxes and grain quotas were often increased not because of real agricultural growth, but due to bureaucratic reclassification. Accounting became a tool of pressure that made normal farming impossible.”

InjusticeBureaucracyFarmingPeasantsUkraine1930sSoviet HistoryCollectivizationState TerrorFarming Economy
Book:Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга друга. Непрості дороги до пекла: Виживання в умовах насильства.
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“En route to California I had a few drinks with an American executive for Falstaff Brewing Company who said he'd been a hobo from '37 to '39. He talked about a friend of his who had lost his legs beneath a freight train and died. He told me he knew something about farm labor contractors. "Killers," he called them. And said it again, "Killers.”

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Book:The Road to Yuba City: A Journey into the Juan Corona Murders
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“As a working definition of art, I lean toward Tolstoy's: "Art is a human activity having for it's purpose the transmission to other of the highest and best feelings to which mankind has risen." It seems to me that, regarding agrarian art, the farther it moves away from the natural world, especially when the main goal is money profits, the more difficult it becomes for it to reflect "the highest and best feelings" of humanity. The same is true of, of course, of agriculture itself. The farther it tries to remove itself from nature in search of money, the more it moves away from the highest and healthiest kinds of food.”

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Book:The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse
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“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.”

SustainabilityFarmingPesticidesOrganic Farming
Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
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“We must not only be concerned with what is happening to the soil; we must wonder to what extent insecticides are absorbed from contaminated soils and introduced into plant tissues. Much depends on the type of soil, the crop, and the nature and concentration of the insecticide. Soil high in organic matter releases smaller quantities of poisons than others. Carrots absorb more insecticide than any other crop studied; if the chemical used happens to be lindane, carrots actually accumulate higher concentrations than are present in the soil. In the future it may become necessary to analyze soils for insecticides before planting certain food crops. Otherwise even unsprayed crops may take up enough insecticide merely from the soil to render them unfit for market.”

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Author:Rachel Carson
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