Verlyn Klinkenborg Quotes

I started natural farming after the war with just one small plot, but gradually I acquired additional acreage by taking over surrounding pieces of abandoned land and caring for them by hand.

Unless people can become natural people, there can be neither natural farming nor natural food.

The only investable idea I have real confidence in is farming and forestry. My family owns some forest, and now we're closing on a farm. Make the farming more sustainable and the forestry more sustainable, and everyone benefits.

Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place.

Of course, I prefer organic farming to chemical-dependent farming, but sometimes absolutist organic prescriptions go too far. I don't even rule out the possibility of genetic modification generating some benign ideas, as long as we can keep them away from monopolists such as Monsanto.

Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it's never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives.

I'm a farmer now, and it's fantastic. My goal is to be totally self-sufficient and grow everything that I eat. There's something about earning your dinner that's cool.

An orchard can grow pastured poultry underneath. A beef cattle or sheep farm can run pastured poultry behind the herbivores, like the egret on the rhino's nose.

There is also a marked global trend towards sustainable agriculture, building on traditional methods which use fewer chemical inputs, carefully manage soil and water resources, and work hand-in-hand with nature.

Almost all the knowledge required to produce more food than eroding soil is available today - we just need to use that knowledge within a holistic paradigm - managing agriculture holistically, forming the policies that undergird it holistically.

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

Farmers, young and old, educated and uneducated, have easily taken to the new agronomy. It has been heart-warming to see young college graduates, retired officials, ex-armymen, illiterate peasants and small farmers queuing up to get the new seeds.

My label is just "good farming", which isn't something you can put on a t-shirt.

The best farming systems are ones where animals and plants are put into a synergistic relationship.

A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.

The real path to natural farming requires that a person know what unaltered nature is, so that he or she can instinctively understand what needs to be done - and what must not be done - to work in harmony with its processes.

If a farmer does abandon his or her "tame" fields completely to nature, mistakes and destruction are inevitable.

The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.

Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.

Although natural farming - since it can teach people to cultivate a deep understanding of nature - may lead to spiritual insight, it's not strictly a spiritual practice.

Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.

After the Green Revolution, I came up with the concept of the Evergreen Revolution. In this we will see increase in farm productivity but without ecological harm.

Land is becoming a diminishing resource for agriculture, in spite of a growing understanding that the future of food security will depend upon the sustainable management of land resources as well as the conservation of prime farmland for agriculture.

I'm attracted to people who work their little plot of land and cultivate it and cultivate it.