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Plow Quotes

“With each surge of westward movement a new community came into being. These communities devoted themselves not to marching onward but to cultivating the earth. They plowed the virgin land and put in crops, and the great Interior Valley was transformed into a garden for the imagination, the Garden of the World. The vision of this vast and constantly growing agricultural society in the interior of the continent became one of the dominant symbols of nineteenth-century American society - a collective representation, a poetic idea (as [Alexis de] Tocqueville [1805-59] noted in the early 1830s) that defined the promise of American life. The master symbol of the garden embraced a cluster of metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase and blissful labor in the earth, all centring about the heroic figure of the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow.”

FrontierFarmerAmerican WestPlowAlexis De Tocqueville
Book:Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
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“It seems fitting, however, that the single Western film which most unambiguously endorses the agrarian ideal, The Covered Wagon, should contain one of the cinema screen's most graphic attacks on Industrialism. The film's intertitles inform viewers that one of the most formidable hazards facing the character of Wingate (Charles Stanton Ogle), the leader of the wagon train, is greed arising from the California gold strike of 1849. Several pioneers opt to dig gold in California rather than plow land in Oregon. In a visual composition symbollically resonant with the importance and irrevocability of that choice, the wagon train divides, one part going north and the other south, while visible in the foreground lie the discarded plows of those who have foresaken the agrarian ideal. These shots from a silent Western summarise a major split in the American psyche.”

CaliforniaOregonWesternsAgrarianismPlowAmerican PsycheCovered Wagon1849California Gold RushWagon Train
Book:Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays
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“People tend to assume that organic farming and sustainability go hand in hand. But that's not necessarily the case - and it hasn't been for most of history. While going organic has some big advantages, even today most organic farmers still rely on the plow - the chief culprit in the this story. Why? Because it provides cheap, reliable weed suppression." David Montgomery - Growing a Revolution”

Sustainable LivingOrganicPlow
Book:Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life
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