Wendell Berry Quotes

In Africa, you can make three acres sustainable relatively easily, but 50,000 acres? It's not about picking up towels or sleeping in a tent.

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

The loss of land for food security has to be measured not only in quantitative terms but also in respect of land use.

The farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself.

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.

Great quantities of fertile land are standing idle in our State, while at the same time great numbers of men and women and children are going hungry. We intend to start today to end that condition, and to put the idle people on the idle land to produce food for themselves

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.

Land is becoming a diminishing resource for agriculture, in spite of a growing understanding that the future of food security will depend upon the sustainable management of land resources as well as the conservation of prime farmland for agriculture.

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

To see rich land eaten away by erosion, to stand by as continual cultivation on sloping fields wears away the best soil, is enough to make a good farmer sick at heart.

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.

To achieve a Green Revolution, African farmers, must have access to land and security of tenure. They also need access to markets, technology and improved infrastructure.

In a world of growing food demand, Africa is home to two-thirds of the world's unexploited arable land.

If we can't afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we're in an insurmountable mess.

Food and the way we grow it and produce it are a major cause of environmental degradation.

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

I have been busy working in order to make agriculture a priority sector not on a small scale, but into an agro-based industry.

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

Every state has the right to take the necessary steps to maintain under public control the use, possession, disposal and reservation of land. Every state has the right to plan and regulate the use of land, which is one of its most important resources, in such a way that the growth of population centers both urban and rural are based on a comprehensive land use plan.

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

It results from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant: here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.

Land use is becoming more and more a general national interest and should be as much a study in the cities as in the country. For with the proper use of land, many of our greatest troubles—dust storms, floods, over-production of this and that, would at least be measurably controlled.

The Green Revolution is neither.

These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution