Dan Barber Quotes

After the Green Revolution, I came up with the concept of the Evergreen Revolution. In this we will see increase in farm productivity but without ecological harm.

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

Far from being a “luxury for the rich,” organic farming may turn out to be a necessity not just for the poor, but for everyone.

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

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

The linear, single species idea of farming is an assault on ecological function. Something's going to break down in that system - anything from soil structure, in economics... but where to start is with true ecological function.

Well, sometimes you need the fields to lie fallow in order to gain nutrients.

A paradigm shift, where, in addition to physical inputs for farming, a focused emphasis placed on knowledge inputs can be a promising way forward. This knowledge-based approach will bring immense returns, particularly in rain fed and dry land farming areas.

We must continue as in millennia past, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves and, each year, plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered.

I see many youngsters giving up their IT jobs and going to farming or taking up organic farming so that kids in future will stay a bit more healthier. That's one cause I really want to take up.

Farmers, young and old, educated and uneducated, have easily taken to the new agronomy. It has been heart-warming to see young college graduates, retired officials, ex-armymen, illiterate peasants and small farmers queuing up to get the new seeds.

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

With wrong farming methods, we turn fertile land into desert. Unless we go back to organic farming and save the soil, there is no future.

All money for agricultural extension, land grant universities has been toward developing industrial food. Lots of money has been invested toward maximizing yield. If you took even a small amount of that money and put it toward organic research, I don't have any doubts you could match those yields.

The best thing for you to do is shop at your local farmer's market and support the organic growers who are there. Because those are the guys who are taking care of the soil that is ultimately going to take care of us.

The real path to natural farming requires that a person know what unaltered nature is, so that he or she can instinctively understand what needs to be done - and what must not be done - to work in harmony with its processes.

I think that if people would be willing to grow some of their own food or eat locally grown organic foods on a regular basis we could significantly decrease the amount of harmful chemicals we pump into our soil every day.

It's as if the whole notion of growing soil is something only lunatics would think about. But why not grow soil? Does anything make more sense than growing soil? Isn't that more important than tractors, trucks, silos, barns, county fairs and country music? Of course it is. And yet to the lion's share of American farmers, the very notion of growing soil is just plain silly.

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

If, on the other hand, conservationists are willing to insist on having the best food, produced in the best way, as close to their homes as possible, and if they are willing to learn to judge the quality of food and food production, then they are going to give economic support to an entirely different kind of land use in an entirely different landscape. This landscape will have a higher ratio of caretakers to acres, of care to use. It will be at once more domestic and more wild than the industrial landscape.

Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.

You can't chemical your way out of soil infertility

The final principle of natural farming is NO PESTICIDES. Nature is in perfect balance when left alone.

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