Agriculture

"Ten acres and a mule."

"Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise."

"Three acres and a cow."

"Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects."

"Look up! the wide extended plain Is billowy with its ripened grain, And on the summer winds are rolled Its waves of emerald and gold."

"When you have decided to purchase a farm, be careful not to buy rashly; do not spare your visits and be not content with a single tour of inspection. The more you go, the more will the place please you, if it be worth your attention. Give heed to the appearance of the neighbourhood, - a flourishing country should show its prosperity. "When you go in, look about, so that, when needs be, you can find your way out.""

"Arbores serit diligens agricola, quarum adspiciet baccam ipse numquam."

"For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well-bred man than agriculture."

"Oculos et vestigia domini, res agro saluberrimas, facilius admittit."

"We must plant the sea and herd its animals … using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about — farming replacing hunting."

"Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians."

"Agriculture was launched in the Fertile Crescent by the early domestication of eight crops, termed "founder crops" (because they founded agriculture in the region and possibly in the world). Those eight founders were the cereals emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and barley; the pulses lentil, pea, chickpea, and bitter vetch; and the fiber crop flax. Of these eight, only two, flax and barley, range in the wild at all widely outside the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia. Two of the founders had very small ranges in the wild, chickpea being confined to southeastern Turkey and emmer wheat to the Fertile Crescent itself. Thus, agriculture could arise in the Fertile Crescent from domestication of locally available wild plants, without having to wait for the arrival of crops derived from wild plants domesticated elsewhere. Conversely, two of the eight founder crops could not have been domesticated anywhere in the world except in the Fertile Crescent, since they did not occur wild elsewhere."

"Aristotle, who has taught us most of the wise things we know, never said a wiser thing than that the cultivators of the soil are the class least inclined to sedition and to violent courses."

"The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land."

"Although no conclusive proof exists that GM cereals may be harmful to human beings, and in some regions their use has brought about economic growth which has helped to resolve problems, there remain a number of significant difficulties which should not be underestimated. In many places, following the introduction of these crops, productive land is concentrated in the hands of a few owners due to “the progressive disappearance of small producers, who, as a consequence of the loss of the exploited lands, are obliged to withdraw from direct production”. The most vulnerable of these become temporary labourers, and many rural workers end up moving to poverty-stricken urban areas. The expansion of these crops has the effect of destroying the complex network of ecosystems, diminishing the diversity of production and affecting regional economies, now and in the future. In various countries, we see an expansion of oligopolies for the production of cereals and other products needed for their cultivation. This dependency would be aggravated were the production of infertile seeds to be considered; the effect would be to force farmers to purchase them from larger producers."

"The farmer, the guy getting a sloppy-with-somewhat-processed-grass tail whipped across his face, the fellow squatting planting seeds he kept from last year, the fisherman on a wild and rolling sea… these are my people, my heroes and my role models. These are the builders, the makers. These are the foundation stone people on which my Australia and the US and Canada (yes there are others, but at least I know a little about those) were built, and still actually stand."

"The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings."

"We are returned to mystery and the power of cooperating with life—rather than, as so often now, working against it."

"Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield: Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke: How jocund did they drive their team a-field! How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!"

"From the dawn of agriculture until this very day, billions of humans armed with branches, swatters, shoes and poison sprays have waged rentless wars against diligent ants, furtive roaches, adventurous spiders and misguided beetles that constantly infiltrate the human domicile."

"As valuable as animal protein is, livestock are relatively inefficient protein-making machines. ...only 23 percent of the protein that a cow takes in ends up as usable protein in its meat or milk. Beef cattle pay back about 10 percent... while pigs return 12 percent. ...Grazing in a pasture, a 1,000-pound cow turns the grass into edible protein at the rate of about a pound a day. The same weight of bacterial organisms... produces 2,750 pounds of protein in the same "grazing" day. Bacteria are also less demanding... they do not care what the weather is and do not need as much personal attention..."

"There are now about 100,000 different types of protein-producing plants that are almost completely ignored as food staples. These unused protein suppliers are the fungi, which include the yeasts, mushrooms and molds. ...there are many carbohydrate-containing plants that can be used as food for fungus... in low-protein areas of the world. ...even wood pulp has been a fair starting material for the protein-manufacturing machinery of the '. Dr. [William D.] Gray has calculated that if only seven major crops were converted into fungal protein, the protein would meet the yearly needs of more than four and a half billion people."

"Farming here often reminds me of the man who when asked to embark upon some rather doubtful business venture replied that if he wanted to gamble he would prefer ,…where the chances were only 32 to 1 against him."

"While early American society was an agrarian society, it was fast becoming more commercial, and commercial goals made their way among its agricultural classes almost as rapidly as elsewhere. The more commercial society became, however, the more reason it found to cling in imagination to the noncommercial agrarian values. The more farming as a self-sufficient way of life was abandoned for farming as a business, the more merit men found in what was being left behind. And the more rapidly the farmers' sons moved into the towns, the more nostalgic the whole culture became about its rural past. The American mind was raised upon a sentimental attachment to rural living and upon a series of notions about rural people and rural life that I have chosen to designate as the agrarian myth. The agrarian myth represents a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins. Like any complex of ideas, the agrarian myth cannot be defined in a phrase, but its component themes form a clear pattern. Its hero was the yeoman farmer, its central conception the notion that he is the ideal man and the ideal citizen."

"Beatus ille qui procul negotiis, Ut prisca gens mortalium, Paterna rura bobus exercet suis, Solutus omni fænore."

"Ye rigid Ploughmen! bear in mind Your labor is for future hours. Advance! spare not! nor look behind! Plough deep and straight with all your powers!"

"The of animals and plants took place thousands of years ago, with different forms springing up independently in different parts of the world at different times. The Fertile Crescent, China, India, (central and southern Mexico and adjacent areas), the Andes of and the eastern United States all boasted food production from a very early time (Diamond, 2005)."

"The historical contexts in which plant and animal domestication have taken place should also be taken into account. The domestication of large animals (and plants) gave Europeans a considerable advantage over other regions, as evidenced by their worldwide conquests (Diamond, 2005)."

"Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independant, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to it’s liberty and interests by the most lasting bands. As long therefore as they can find emploiment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or any thing else. But our citizens will find emploiment in this line till their numbers, and of course their productions, become too great for the demand both internal and foreign."

"Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest."

"The life of the husbandman,—a life fed by the bounty of earth and sweetened by the airs of heaven."

"England is the only country in Europe that can boast of having improved its agriculture and the cultivation of its soil beyond that of any other European nation. The condition of English agriculture, compared with that of our own, is like light contrasted with shade."

"If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out."

"All I saw before me were acres of skin… It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time."

"In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not everybody cared where the supermarket got it as long as it was there on the shelves. A few elderly dairymen hung on. Many let their fields and pastures go to scrub. Some sold out to what used to be called developers, and they'd put in five or ten poorly build houses. Now, in the new times, there were far fewer people, and many houses outside town were being taken down for their materials. Farming was back. That was the only way we got food."

"Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing."

"Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a ‘scenic’ area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has ‘outgrown.’"

"The status of women up to now has been compared to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this. They will only be completely emancipated when we change from small-scale individual farming to collective farming and collective working of the land."

"The proletarian state must effect the transition to collective farming with extreme caution and only very gradually, by the force of example, without any coercion of the middle peasant."

"Cujus est solum, ejus est usque ad cœlum."

"Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the ."

"When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade, and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land."

"Adam, well may we labour, still to dress This garden, still to tend plant, herb, and flower."

"It is certain that by a special dispensation of Providence in favor of those who make up the bulk of the human family, a man may secure a simple livelihood in agricultural pursuits, with less of energy, less of promptitude, less of calculation, and greater unthrift generally, than would be compatible with even this scanty aim, in any other calling of life."

"Continua messe senescit ager."

"La terre, elle, ne ment pas [The land, it does not lie]."

"France will become again what she should never have ceased to be—an essentially agricultural nation. Like the giant of mythology, she will recover all her strength by contact with the soil."

"Majores fertilissium in agro oculum domini esse dixerunt."

"Our rural ancestors, with little blest, Patient of labour when the end was rest, Indulg'd the day that hous'd their annual grain, With feasts, and off'rings, and a thankful strain."

"Where grows?—where grows it not? If vain our toil, We ought to blame the culture, not the soil."