Ron Finley Quotes

The winter period between September and March in this country, when land sits fallow and is subject to topsoil loss, we could be enriching the soil and growing all the biomass we need to replace imported gasoline.

The Second Green Revolution, as the world's population grows to over 9 billion by 2050, is the new revolution we have to have to lift food production by another 75 percent.

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.

If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn't support the earth's current population - maybe half.

Vegetables deplete soil. They're extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals.

Depending on how you farm, your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon.

I have been a long-term environmental advocate for the agriculture industry. I have particularly tried to push carbon farming or carbon sequestration.

A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

Organic farming and other earlier methods can be effective, provided they can help us improve soil health and plant health. Plant pesticides like neem and tobacco need to be promoted.

There is talk about the need for a second Green Revolution. However, such a revolution is nowhere in sight.

Let's get government support for farmers to make the transition to organic.

If we don't get sustainability right in agriculture first, it won't happen anywhere.

Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.

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.

Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

When I was a kid, we always had big gardens, acres of stuff we grew out in the yard.

I have a long attention span, and I am also a good scientist, and there are a lot of problems that remain in the organic agricultural movement that the government does not invest in solving.

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.

Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture - from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding.

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.

In fact, because of their connection to the land, farmers do more to protect and preserve our environment than almost anyone else. They are some of the best environmentalists around.

I thought I'd love to be a gardener because I grew up with a vegetable garden and I love being close to the Earth and growing things. At my home in L.A., I have a great garden and I grow all kinds of things. I even have a worm farm! The worms help create organic compost out of kitchen scraps.

We need the humbleness and clarity to see that our food, while benefitting from technological advances, has benefitted even more from free ecological resources: Cheap energy, lots of water everywhere, and a stable climate.