quotations about farming
Farming isn't something that can be taught. Each plant tells its own story that has to be read repeatedly.
KELSEY TIMMERMAN
Where Am I Eating?
Depressions are farm led and farm fed.
ANONYMOUS
A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
E. B. WHITE
"The Practical Farmer", One Man's Meat, August 1940
Yet a great deal of planning on the farm will remain on a day to day basis, it is because farming is like that. The best laid plans can be kicked sideways by the weather, by disease and pests and poor financial institutions. Performance usually is short of expectations. Rules are made to be broken.
JOHN P. STANLEY
Farming by Design
Farming isn't for pansies, son.
TERRY MARSHALL
Soda Springs
Farming is a matter of dirt and dung. It is not the kind of thing we look to to find the meaning of human life. It is too ordinary, too inescapably a part of life to be interesting. We know that it has to be done, but see no reason to pay much attention to it. But it is just because farming is inescapably a part of human life that it may provide a clue to what is most basically human, and so a clue to our place within the cosmos.
STEPHANIE NELSON
preface, God and the Land: The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil
He was a very inferior farmer when he first begun ... and he is now fast rising from affluence to poverty.
MARK TWAIN
Henry Ward Beecher's Farm
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
speech in Peoria, Illinois, September 25, 1956
Farming isn't a battle against nature, but a partnership with it. It is respecting the basics of nature in action and ensuring that they continue.
JEFF KOEHLER
Darjeeling: The Colorful History and Precarious Fate of the World's Greatest Tea
Even if a farmer intends to loaf, he gets up in time to get an early start.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.
MASANOBU FUKUOKA
The One-Straw Revolution
It took only a dozen pulls of the saw to transect the few years of our ownership, during which we had learned to love and cherish this farm. Abruptly we began to cut the years of our predecessor the bootlegger, who hated this farm, skinned it of residual fertility, burned its farmhouse, threw it back into the lap of the County (with delinquent taxes to boot), and then disappeared among the landless anonymities of the Great Depression. Yet the oak had laid down good wood for him; his sawdust was as fragrant, as sound, and as pink as our own. An oak is no respecter of persons.
ALDO LEOPOLD
A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There
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.
JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER
World Made By Hand
There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.
ALDO LEOPOLD
A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There
A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. Its blackmail, really.
KRISTIN KIMBALL
The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love
My grandfather used to say that once in your life you need a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman and a preacher, but every day, three times a day, you need a farmer.
BRENDA SCHOEPP
attributed, Niagara Food: A Flavourful History of the Peninsula's Bounty
Farming -- a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
The farm fits a boy for the city but the city does not fit a boy for the farm.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman’s cares.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter, Jul. 20, 1794
Most of all, a farm is like a wife--or, I suppose, like a husband. I don't say the name "Linda" the same way I say any other name. My Linda is a part of me, and I am part of her. Without each other, we are not whole. When I say "farm," referring to this place of ours, well, it almost brings tears to my eyes every time.
ROGER WELSCH
This Old Farm