Agricultural Decline Quotes

This demand for fixity of tenure is not, as is often supposed, a mere cry of disaffected and impracticable Socialists. It springs from a vague but true perception of the causes of the depression under which the agricultural interest, and with it the whole prosperity of Ireland, labors

In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.

It has been attested by all experience that agriculture tends to discouragement and decadence whenever the predominant interests of the country turn to manufacture and trade.

As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories.

In the five years from 2007 to 2012, we only gained a little over 1,200 farmers. Since we aren't going to stop eating, we have to reverse that trend, or we'll see even more consolidation, more corporate farms, or increasing food imports; none of that is in our interest.

Rural America's not coming back. That idea was lost with the Industrial Revolution.

Back in the 1960s Africa not only fed itself, it also exported food. Not anymore.

In the U.S. there are many people willing to work on $9 per hour, which is causing Tasmania to lose its famous apple industry and Australia to import more and more of its fruit and food from lower cost countries. In fact, all over Australia there are warning signs of us killing or restricting our own industries.

All over Russia, spades are worn out, men are plowing with burnt staves instead of with plowshares, scratching the surface of the ground, and instead of harrowing with a steel-spiked harrow of some weight, are brushing the ground with light constructions of wooden spikes bound together with wattles.

Poor France, thy fine climate, rich vineyards, and the wishes of the learned avail nothing; thou art a destitute beggar, and not the powerful friend thou wert represented to me.

I look upon the introduction of guano, and the success attending its application to our barren lands, in the light of a special interposition of Divine Providence, to save the northern neck of Virginia from reverting entirely into its former state of wilderness and utter desolation. Until the discovery of guano—more valuable to us than the mines of California—I looked upon the possibility of renovating our soil, of ever bringing it to a point capable of producing remunerating crops, as utterly hopeless. Our up-lands were all worn out, and our bottom-lands fast failing, and if it had not been for guano, to revive our last hope, a few years more and the whole country must have been deserted by all who desired to increase their own wealth, or advance the cause of civilization by a proper cultivation of the earth

The small family farm is dying; people's lives are being dislocated.

Whole towns, communities and forms of agriculture with their homes, schools and churches have been built up under this system of protection [tariffs]. The grass will grow in a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun millions of farms if that protection is taken away

Over the last three decades, Mexico has made the transition from a commodity and agricultural-based economy to one dominated by manufacturing and services.

The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles. In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?

Destroy or take away the employment and wages of those artisans - which the corn laws in a great measure do - and you will, ere long, render the land in Great Britain of as little value as it is in other countries.

Lanai at one time grew 98% of the world's pineapples. But the world's pineapples are now grown in two places, Costa Rica and Panama, because no one wants to spend $45 for a pineapple from the United States.

We're still here trying to get the word out that 330 farmers are quitting every week.

..the fields might fall to fallow and the birds might stop their song awhile; the growing things might die and lie in silence under snow, while through it all the cold sea wore its face of storms and death and sunken hopes...and yet unseen beneath the waves a warmer current ran that, in its time, would bring the spring.

In the US in the 1900's 60 % of people were employed on the farms. Today it's less than 1%. If you told people back then that this would happen they wouldn't have believed it. If you told them we would have therapy, massages and spas that played important parts in our lives they would've have believed us.

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.

America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.

I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer.

The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.

The organized banking interests which own the railroads, control credit, and dominate the industrial life of the nation, will further oppress labor, rob the consumer, and, by extortionate railroad rates and dictation of terms of credit, reduce agriculture to the level of European peasantry, if longer permitted to control this government.