Isabella Bird Quotes

Cambodia is barbarian. The people do not know the proper way to grow food. They use mattocks and hoes but no oxen. They grow enough rice … but do not know how to store rice for an emergency.

The Green Revolution focused on the big three - maize, rice and wheat - and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.

To us in Asia, rice is such a staple, we take it for granted. I didn't even think about how I made it until I came to the Western world.

I am a Bengali, I like my rice.

Polenta is to northern Italy what bread is to Tuscany, what pasta is to Emilia-Romagna and what rice is to the Veneto: easy to make, hungry to absorb other flavours, and hugely versatile.

The combination of lentils with rice or bulgur is the absolute height of Levantine comfort food. I could eat it every day.

I like both potatoes and rice. You can do a lot with both of them. But if I could eat only one carbohydrate for the rest of my life, I wouldn't choose bread, potatoes or even noodles. I'd go for rice instead; I eat more of that than anything else.

I now understand how varied the world of cultivated rice is; that rice can play the lead or be a sidekick; that brown rice is as valuable as white; and that short-grain rice is the bee's knees.

I have learned how to plant coastal hay, fertilize and bale it.

Herein lies our problem. If we level that much land to grow rice and whatever, then no other animal could live there except for some insect pest species. Which is very unfortunate.

I like beans. Lentils are beans, right? I love beans and rice.

Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something.

Cursing the weather is not good farming

Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's free market enthusiasms.

Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-jammed streets ablaze with neon - all were built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice.

My ad-hoc empirical formula is that wherever you grow a lot of rice, there is a lot of art developing as well. My theory goes on to say that after having a nice meal of rice, one feels lethargic and don't think of work. When you don't think of work, you think of art.

I started paddy cultivation not for profit.

I love rice and pasta.

The cornerstone of every Persian meal is rice, or polo.

You cannot increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. We improve the performance of farms by irrigating them and fertilizing them to provide all these nutrients. But we cannot keep on doubling the yield every two years. Moore's law doesn't apply to plants.

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. We can classify our crops into those which are climate resilient and those which are climate sensitive. For example, wheat is a climate sensitive crop, while rice shows a wide range of adaptation in terms of growing conditions.

Cruising on the old rice boats in Kerala, southern India, with my wife was amazing.

As far as my planting program goes, I simply broadcast rye and barley seed on separate fields in the fall . . . while the rice in those areas is still standing. A few weeks after that I harvest the rice, and then spread its straw back over the fields as mulch.

I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.

Rice is the best, the most nutritive and unquestionably the most widespread staple in the world.