William Petty Quotes

Population must increase rapidly, more rapidly than in former times, and ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil.

The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.

Even if you could use all the organic material that you have--the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues--and get them back on the soil, you couldn't feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.

Meat is an inefficient way to eat. An acre of land can yield 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but that same acre would only graze enough cows to get 165 pounds of meat.

If women had equal access to fertilizer and modern farm machinery, developing countries would produce between 2.5-percent and 4-percent more food.

Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production.

You've got a global food problem. You've got a food problem in the United States. You've got a food problem in Africa... in Asia. And so the truth is, the U.S. is going to have to produce more, on not very many more acres, honestly. And so we're going to have to do a better job.

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

Great quantities of fertile land are standing idle in our State, while at the same time great numbers of men and women and children are going hungry. We intend to start today to end that condition, and to put the idle people on the idle land to produce food for themselves

An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop.

In a world of growing food demand, Africa is home to two-thirds of the world's unexploited arable land.

What farmers gain most of all from the increase in agricultural productivity, of course, is choice.

During the past three years spectacular progress has been made in increasing wheat, rice, and maize production in several of the most populous developing countries of southern Asia, where widespread famine appeared inevitable only five years ago.

If we can't afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we're in an insurmountable mess.

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

In Africa, you can make three acres sustainable relatively easily, but 50,000 acres? It's not about picking up towels or sleeping in a tent.

The agricultural potential of Africa is unlimited.

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

No loss, in proportion to its amount, affects the interest of the nation so deeply, and vitally, and is so difficult to recover, as the loss of agricultural capital and produce

… whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

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.

I want for us to be self-sustained so we can export. The government has a responsibility to have agricultural programs so people are able to grow their own food.

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.

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