Cheech Marin Quotes

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

To make agriculture sustainable, the grower has got to be able to make a profit.

A field becomes exhausted by constant tillage.

We can move water easily with plastic pipes. We can move shade around with nursery cloth like a tinker toy for animals and plants. Yet we have developed this necessity to grow food with chemical fertiliser because we have forgotten the magic of manure.

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.

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

The winter period between September and March in this country, when land sits fallow and is subject to topsoil loss, we could be enriching the soil and growing all the biomass we need to replace imported gasoline.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

The more we can grow on already cultivated land, the better.

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.

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

Cursing the weather is not good farming

We have to stop treating soil like dirt.

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.

Growing things and being able to live off the land has always appealed to me.

Spreading manure is a great way of bringing yourself down to earth.

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.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

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.

Farming is not for the feint of heart. It is fraught with the possibility of failure.

Depending on how you farm, your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon.

If we didn't have a sustainable agriculture industry, who would be paying the then-missing taxes to support our defence, police, roads, airports, elderly, parks, public sporting facilities and much more?

It's a free society. But don't tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That's when this misinformation becomes destructive.

A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.