Vaclav Smil Quotes

Let me tell you about a place where technology won't work. When you walk onto a farm and are standing on soil, there is no technology that is going to take that soil and transform it into something that is five times more productive.

The agricultural potential of Africa is unlimited.

Green Revolution technologies are scale-neutral but not resource-neutral. Inputs are needed for output; therefore market-purchased inputs become important in providing soil and plant healthcare for higher yields.

To sum up, agriculture has made important progress and our farmers have now shown that they are second to none in terms of improving production and productivity.

I believe that agriculture land - productive agricultural land with water on site - will be valuable in the future.

In a world of growing food demand, Africa is home to two-thirds of the world's unexploited arable land.

The older, thinner, and less productive grass lands, however, frequently can be made to produce much larger yields of feed in corn than if left, as they are, in unproductive grass.

What farmers gain most of all from the increase in agricultural productivity, of course, is choice.

There are no miracles in agricultural production.

The most effective step that may be taken to increase the production of these crops is to enlarge the acreage devoted to them in the regions where they are grown habitually.

Washington state's 2nd Congressional District is a major producer of small fruit crops such as raspberries and strawberries. This research center is doing important work to help farmers enhance the quality, yield and marketability of their small fruit crops.

Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around - we'll adapt to that. It's an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.

There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song.

The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.

If you know how many acres you have sown of each kind of corn, inquire how much the acre the soil of that land takes for sowing, and count the number of quarters of seed, and you shall know the return of seed, and what ought to be over.

It looks as though yields of over 10 times what we can currently grow per acre are feasible if you control the CO2 concentration, the humidity, the temperature, all the various factors that plants depend on to grow rapidly.

Cereal production in the rain-fed areas still remains relatively unaffected by the impact of the green revolution, but significant change and progress are now becoming evident in several countries.

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.

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

Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production.

Close contact between science and the practice of collective farms and State farms creates inexhaustible opportunities for the development of theoretical knowledge, enabling us to learn ever more and more about the nature of living bodies and the soil.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.

You've got a global food problem. You've got a food problem in the United States. You've got a food problem in Africa... in Asia. And so the truth is, the U.S. is going to have to produce more, on not very many more acres, honestly. And so we're going to have to do a better job.

I know how to set an irrigation tube, and I helped with the harvest. I learned the law of the harvest without even knowing I was learning it. On the farm, you learn early that you reap what you sow.