Agriculture Quotations | Page 2

Tax reform and expanded trade are going to be so important to the economy of Illinois, particularly the 11th Congressional District, which is a major manufacturing and a major agricultural district.

There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song

People forget that eating represents their most profound engagement with the natural world. Through agriculture is how we change the world, more than anything else we do.

Those externalized costs have always included labor. It is only the decline over time of the minimum wage in real dollars that's made the fast food industry possible, along with feedlot agriculture, pharmaceuticals on the farm, pesticides and regulatory forbearance. All these things are part of the answer to the question: Why is that crap so cheap? Our food is dishonestly priced. One of the ways in which it's dishonestly priced is the fact that people are not paid a living wage to process it, to serve it, to grow it, to slaughter it.

...think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people to conquer the trees.

Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.

The whole problem of industrial agriculture is putting all of your eggs in one basket. We need to diversify our food chains as well as our fields so that when some of them fail, we can still eat.

The production of natural resources in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, stable natural hydrological cycles, fertile soils, a balanced climate and numerous other vital ecosystem services can only be permanently secured through the protection and sustainable use of biological diversity.

A few little flowers will spring up briefly in the dry gulley through which torrents of water pass occasionally. But it is steady streams that bring thick and needed crops. In the agriculture of the soul that has to do with nurturing attributes, flash floods are no substitute for regular irrigation.

I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music.