John Steinbeck Quotes

A field becomes exhausted by constant tillage.

The more we can grow on already cultivated land, the better.

Farming is not for the feint of heart. It is fraught with the possibility of failure.

The winter period between September and March in this country, when land sits fallow and is subject to topsoil loss, we could be enriching the soil and growing all the biomass we need to replace imported gasoline.

No man should have proprietary rights over land who does not use that land wisely and lovingly.

Farmers are farmers in the first place because they have the deep-seated instinct to raise crops, not to cut them back, not to leave the land unproductive.

Saying you must rotate three crops a year, a certain percentage of your land must be set aside, and some of the other proposals, my sense is that it's a little anti-technology, and the ability of European farmers to feed Europe is reduced as a result.

The loss of land for food security has to be measured not only in quantitative terms but also in respect of land use.

If we want to prevent both climate and ecological catastrophes, the key task is to minimise the amount of land we use to feed ourselves, while changing the way the remaining land is farmed. Instead, governments almost everywhere pour public money into planetary destruction.

I want Britain to lead the world in food and farming and to do that we need enough productive agricultural land.

Fields can lie fallow but we can't; we have less time.

The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.

History is largely a record of human struggle to wrest the land from nature, because man relies for sustenance on the products of the soil. So direct, is the relationship between soil erosion, the productivity of the land, and the prosperity of people, that the history of mankind, to a considerable degree at least, may be interpreted in terms of the soil and what has happened to it as the result of human use.

From the time I was a small boy, I remember working in the fields with my grandfather and father. We weren't growing grapes, but we were farming crops, creating something good out of the earth.

All over the land are vast and handsome pastures, with good grass for cattle, and it strikes me the soil would be very fertile were the country inhabited and improved by reasonable people.

A thousand acres that can feed a thousand souls is better than ten thousand acres of no more effect.

There cannot be a stronger natural right than that of a man's making the best profit he can of the natural produce of his lands.

My real emphasis is on the farmers who are taking care of the land, the farmers who are really thinking about our nourishment.

… a gospel of dirt

All the people of the earth could be fed from the land within a circle of a thousand mile radius [of Kansas City.]

It results from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant: here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics..

Drop a grain of California gold into the ground, and there it will lie unchanged until the end of time; ... drop a grain of our blessed gold [wheat] into the ground and lo! a mystery.

We have to stop treating soil like dirt.

Some environmentalists demands are counter productive. Avoiding pesticides for example means farming more land less efficiently, which leads to higher prices, more hunger, more disease …, and less biodiversity.