Marvin Harris Quotes

As human pastoralists discovered 8,000 years ago, raising animals can be an efficient way of harnessing otherwise unusable resources such as grass.

In the Netherlands - where I come from - you actually never see a pig, which is really strange, because, in a population of 16 million people, we have 12 million pigs. And well, of course, the Dutch can't eat all these pigs. They eat about one-third, and the rest is exported to all kinds of countries in Europe and the rest of the world.

When I grew up, we always had our chickens, and we ate our eggs, and we ate our chickens. The family always had a pig, and we would kill it at Christmas and eat it for three or four months afterwards.

Large-scale deforestation can be prevented while increasing food production through better, smarter agriculture.

Agriculture involves crop husbandry, animal husbandry, forestry and fisheries. Your income will go up only if you look at the system, and not from one crop alone.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

If I had a mind to rent pigs, I'd be mighty upset. A man that likes to rent pigs won't be stopped.

More pigs less parsons!

In many parts of Ireland the breed of cows is so wretched that feeding them involves a certain loss of land.

You shall not breed together two kinds of your cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed

Loss of soil productivity, which is causing extensive land abandonment, is a widespread by-product of current practices in agriculture and animal husbandry. Since 1945, 11 percent of the earth's vegetated surface has been degraded—an area larger than India and China combined—and per capita food production in many parts of the world is decreasing.

It's a free society. But don't tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That's when this misinformation becomes destructive.

New Mexico's agricultural economy is primarily composed of dairy and range livestock production.

I actually just bought a ranch, and I'm going grow as much of my own foods - I've got thirty chickens, and I'm going to try to live as sustainably as possible.

I hope people will learn more about agriculture in America. About locally grown farming and about water conservation. About how much pollution results from beef and pig farming.

I want to pursue farming, and what better place to do it than at a hill station, which has a cool climate almost through the year.

Evolution has made us omnivores, and substantial quantities of meat can be produced by feeding plant matter whose production does not directly compete with growing food crops: crop residues, food processing waste, low-quality grain, and controlled grazing by ruminants.

We all buy our meat wrapped in plastic because we don't like to think about the animal that died.

The best sheep breeders are in Australia and New Zealand.

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

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.

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

If you go to Italy and you drive from the airport to the town, there isn't 30 square feet that isn't planted by someone. Even next to the train tracks, they see the joy of the interaction with the planet as integral to the experience. The idea that you can get free arugula just by planting seeds... because it will regrow itself the next year. We've come a long way from foraging to now planting. The next step of that will be continuing that expansion of planting and really owning the crops.

All I'm saying is that there is a price to be paid at the sharp end.. environmentally and everywhere else.. for the food that is produced in a particular way.

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.