Wes Jackson Quotes

The time has come to recognize that food, how we produce it, process it, package it, sell it, cook it and eat it, is as important as any other issue.

People come to me with their passion about transportation, about education, about health care, about agriculture, the dairy industry, the almond growers. I'm just a kid in a candy store, learning and eating up all this different knowledge.

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

Viewed from a holistic ecological perspective, some meat - such as conscientiously hunted animals - involves less suffering and environmental damage than arable agriculture, while both of these are significantly less harmful than indiscriminately purchasing meat on the market.

We have to draw the line someplace with all the pesticides being used by the farmers.

We all know that cattle and beef are among the biggest contributors to carbon emissions.

In many places where coffee is grown, deforestation is a major issue.

How we grow food has enormous effects on the environment - climate change as well as pollution of air, water, and soil.

… whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

Some environmentalists demands are counter productive. Avoiding pesticides for example means farming more land less efficiently, which leads to higher prices, more hunger, more disease …, and less biodiversity.

No you don’t have the right, just because it’s your land to dig as many wells as you want, and dry up the water for the rest of the farmers downstream..

The growth in ethanol and biodiesel is something that I have worked on since I was secretary of agriculture in Kansas. I would like to see a lot more progress, because I think there is a real score to be made on this.

We pretend that the debate about genetically modified crops is a debate about science when the reality is, actually, that the science is very clear. It is really a debate about values.

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

To me, one of the easiest ways of addressing climate change and potentially remedying climate change is to stop subsidizing animal agriculture.

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.

Eating is an agricultural act.

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.

It is vitally important that we can continue to say, with absolute conviction, that organic farming delivers the highest quality, best-tasting food, produced without artificial chemicals or genetic modification, and with respect for animal welfare and the environment, while helping to maintain the landscape and rural communities.

Since nature has the most sustainable ecosystem and since ultimately agriculture comes out of nature, our standard for a sustainable world should be nature's own ecosystem.

It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived.

If you think about the last 50 years, Africa's proximity and historical context has absolutely been with Europe and the United States, but their approach in dealing with the economic challenges that Africa faces in particular has been one of handing out aid, not developing economies, not building a long term relationship around agriculture and so on.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

We have the industrial agriculturalists who try and make an argument that big is beautiful. But if you do the math, and particularly if you factor in that the price of oil is going to go through the roof, and so the price of transportation is going to go through the roof - making it abundantly clear that it's out of whack. The efficiency arguments are already crumbling, particularly if you actually include the cost of food pollution that these industries cause. They are tremendously unsustainable and tremendously inefficient.