Wes Jackson Quotes

Soil erosion is a national menace.

You can't chemical your way out of soil infertility

A field becomes exhausted by constant tillage.

China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

Soil is a living ecosystem, and is a farmer's most precious asset. A farmer's productive capacity is directly related to the health of his or her soil.

Unkindness to anything means an injustice to that thing. If I am unkind to you I do you an injustice, or wrong you in some way. On the other hand, if I try to assist you in every way that I can to make a better citizen and in every way to do my very best for you, I am kind to you. The above principles apply with equal force to the soil. The farmer whose soil produces less every year, is unkind to it in some way; that is, he is not doing by it what he should; he is robbing it of some substance it must have, and he becomes, therefore, a soil robber rather than a progressive farmer.

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.

In fact, because of their connection to the land, farmers do more to protect and preserve our environment than almost anyone else. They are some of the best environmentalists around.

If a man farms his land to the waste of the soil or the tress, he destroys not only his own assets but Nature's assets.

Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.

Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.

When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.

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.

History is largely a record of human struggle to wrest the land from nature, because man relies for sustenance on the products of the soil. So direct, is the relationship between soil erosion, the productivity of the land, and the prosperity of people, that the history of mankind, to a considerable degree at least, may be interpreted in terms of the soil and what has happened to it as the result of human use.

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

Vegetables deplete soil. They're extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals.

You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.

E. B. White had a romantic tenderness toward nature in a capital R, 19th-century way. He was knowledgeable, a part-time farmer, and a hardheaded realistic person.

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.

Africa is the most weathered continent in the world; 75 percent of its soil has been degraded. You don't just bring that back. I always like to say it's like putting an oxygen mask on a cadaver; it just isn't going to work.

Our performance should be based on the long-term health of the land, rather than the number of board feet produced.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

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.

Each year some 1,400 square miles of land in Northern China turns into desert …. Civilization can survive the loss of its oil reserves, but it cannot survive the loss of its soil reserves.