Prince Charles Quotes

Many organic practices simply make sense, regardless of what overall agricultural system is used. Far from being a quaint throwback to an earlier time, organic agriculture is proving to be a serious contender in modern farming and a more environmentally sustainable system over the long term.

China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.

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

If we moved from industrialized agriculture to re-localized organic agriculture, we could sequester about one quarter of the carbon moving into the air and destroying our glaciers, oceans, forests and lands.

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

I myself did not officially become organic until 1997, although I was always hopeless at using chemicals.

Agricultural sustainability doesn't depend on agritechnology. To believe it does is to put the emphasis on the wrong bit of 'agriculture.' What sustainability depends on isn't agri- so much as culture.

It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'

An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing.

There's a lot of research that suggests that organic yields are close or superior to conventional yields depending on factors like climate. In a drought year an organic field of corn will yield more - considerably more - than a conventional field; organic fields hold moisture better so they don't need as much water. It simply isn't true that organic yields are lower than conventional yields.

I went to university for a couple of years and I didn't enjoy university. The studying and the accountancy, economics, I just hated that stuff. Now the irony is here I am lawyer, accountant, I do it all day every day and sit at a desk. So I've never ended up where I wanted to be in many ways. I always wanted to be a farmer.

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

Natural farming is just farming, nothing more. You don't have to be a spiritually oriented person to practice my methods.

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.

Organic farming has been shown to provide major benefits for wildlife and the wider environment. The best that can be said about genetically engineered crops is that they will now be monitored to see how much damage they cause.

The mode of clearing and planting is to fell the trees, and burn once what will burn, then cut them up into suitable lengths, rollinto heaps, and burn again; then, with a hoe, plant potatoes where you can come at the ground between the stumps and charred logs; for a first crop the ashes suffice for manure, and no hoeing being necessary the first year. In the fall, cut, roll, and burn again, and so on, till the land is cleared; and soon it is ready for grain, and to be laid down.

Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?

Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.

Blessed be agriculture! if one does not have too much of it.

A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land.

Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.

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

In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

Capitalist agricultural production prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer.