Sandra E. Peterson Quotes

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.

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

My real emphasis is on the farmers who are taking care of the land, the farmers who are really thinking about our nourishment.

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

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

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.

Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

Farmers are farmers in the first place because they have the deep-seated instinct to raise crops, not to cut them back, not to leave the land unproductive.

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.

Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased: it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.

If we want to prevent both climate and ecological catastrophes, the key task is to minimise the amount of land we use to feed ourselves, while changing the way the remaining land is farmed. Instead, governments almost everywhere pour public money into planetary destruction.

It would be so simple for the government to support farmers to become more profitable and farm sustainably.

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

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.

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.

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.

We can't begin to feed ourselves with a local-centric system if we lock up land in royal manor models.

No man should have proprietary rights over land who does not use that land wisely and lovingly.

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.

Our deep respect for the land and its harvest is the legacy of generations of farmers who put food on our tables, preserved our landscape, and inspired us with a powerful work ethic.

Almost all the knowledge required to produce more food than eroding soil is available today - we just need to use that knowledge within a holistic paradigm - managing agriculture holistically, forming the policies that undergird it holistically.

Agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds - it's the production of food and fiber from the world's land and waters. Without agriculture it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, university, church or army. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy.

Africa's agricultural sector has enormous scope for development, which would benefit both the continent's economy and its people.

If we make it national policy that we will support small farmers the way we support agribusiness, we'll suddenly see it change in terms of the cost of organic food.