Tom Vilsack Quotes

The rich agricultural nations are the ones that can adapt to the new biotechnologies.

There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

Consumers cannot enjoy the prices and variety we farmers produce without embracing the technologies we use.

Surely, if we are going to be better at producing food of the right value, then we have to accept that genetic technology... is going to be part of that.

To affordably feed the next billion people, we must have higher-yielding crops with even greater nutritional value. America should be at the vanguard of the innovative advances that will make this happen.

In the food case in particular, one of the technologies that could help there - genetic technologies that could create better crops with higher yields and less need for water and fertilizer - is tremendously feared. Very little of that fear is scientifically grounded.

Too often, parents whose children express an interest in farming squelch it because they envision dirt, dust, poverty, and hermit living. But great stories come out of great farming.

I am interested in agricultural corporations and how they function. The idea that they own the genetics of our food supply is a really compelling thing to me.

I am committed to strengthening our agricultural economy by protecting the unique interests of small and medium size family farms so that they can continue to operate.

It is obvious that the greatest and most important service that is required of our agriculture under existing conditions is an enlarged production of the staple food crops.

The battle over genetically modified crops is rife with business interests and political opportunism. When GMOs were first produced in laboratories around the world, they were rightly heralded as a tremendous leap forward in our ability to supplement nature by providing high-nutrient foods.

New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops in ways that are both more environmentally benign and beyond the capability of older methods.

I said that if I were an industrialist or entrepreneur, I would invest in agriculture-based enterprises, for there is so much that can be done in manufacturing, in food preservation.

Now listen, the one thing about agriculture is we've lost our manufacturing, we've lost a great deal of jobs overseas, lots of our industry. The last thing in the world we need to do is lose the ability to produce our food.

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

The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front.

My father was a farmer, and we have had some farming land in Haryana. Maybe I would have followed his footsteps and become a farmer.

Printing novel DNA might open the way to achievements once only conceivable in science fiction: designer bacteria that can produce new chemicals, such as more efficient fuels, or synthetic versions of our cells that make us resistant to the effects of radiation.

Microbes such as bacteria and yeast use enzymes to make fuels from biomass. We use directed evolution to perfect those enzymes and make new fuels efficiently.

Agriculture can trigger job-led economic growth, provided it becomes intellectually satisfying and economically rewarding.

A technological revolution on the farm has led to an output explosion--but we have not yet learned to harness that explosion usefully, while protecting our farmers' right to full parity income

Agribusiness and food processing are important parts of modernizing our economy, of modernizing our agriculture and moving into a phase where a more modernized agriculture helps not only farmers but also helps consumers.

Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind.

The current food crisis is an opportunity for companies to engage in agriculture or biotechnology.

Here is my Farm Relief bill: Every time a Southerner plants nothing on his farm but cotton year after year, and the Northerner nothing but wheat or corn, why, take a hammer and hit him twice right between the eyes. You may dent your hammer, but it will do more real good than all the bills you can pass in a year.