Vandana Shiva Quotes

I thought maybe I'd be a farmer. That was another silly notion. I think I'd last about five minutes, being a farmer.

I grew up on a dairy and beef farm.

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

All the farmers in this area have electricity, even in their barns. There have been times where the writing of a book is just as important as the milking of a cow.

I will put rings in the noses of these hogs.

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

The rural nature of our district relies heavily on the profitability of our family farms.

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 they asked us what we wanted to be when we grow up, in kindergarten, I always said I wanted to be a farmer.

I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman's cares.

As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.

One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.

Agriculture is the greatest and fundamentally the most important of our industries. The cities are but the branches of the tree of national life, the roots of which go deeply into the land. We all flourish or decline with the farmer.

Small family farmers are the only things that can save us because they take care of the land. Future farmers of America are going to be our heroes. Same with biodiesel, either way we need small family saustainable and organic farmers.

Keep a cow, and then the milk won't have to be watered but once.

You can butcher the sheep only once. But if you are careful, you can shear the sheep every year.

Horses raise what the farmer eats and eats what the farmer raises. You can't plow the ground and get gasoline.

To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.

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

When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"-to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to-he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.

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.

Our toil is lessened, and our wealth is increased, by our dominion over the useful animals . . .

Farming -- a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it.