Wendell Berry Quotes

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.

We have to stop treating soil like dirt.

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.

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.

The farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself.

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.

Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by the careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be saved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints, conditioned by small fidelities, skills, and desires. Soil loss is ultimately a cultural problem; it will be corrected only by cultural solutions.

Somali is turning into a desert. Rwanda, you can hardly find a place to plant a potato, it's so crowded.

The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than anywhere else; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.

Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert.

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.

Land is becoming a diminishing resource for agriculture, in spite of a growing understanding that the future of food security will depend upon the sustainable management of land resources as well as the conservation of prime farmland for agriculture.

A field becomes exhausted by constant tillage.

To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.

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.

A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief.

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.

A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period.

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 uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.

If we can't afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we're in an insurmountable mess.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

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

All over the land are vast and handsome pastures, with good grass for cattle, and it strikes me the soil would be very fertile were the country inhabited and improved by reasonable people.