Agricultural Hardship Quotes

That was where my dream began to take hold, of not havin' to pick cotton and potatoes, and not havin' to be uncomfortable, too hot or too cold. That in itself had driven me to try to find some better way of life.

The poor peasant here hives under conditions quite different from those of Russia. Though often terrible, they are not as appalling as they were there.

Our farmers feed the world. They are up before dawn and work till well after sunset. They face any number of challenges they can't control, from too much rain to not enough, from disease to insect infestations.

Well, farmers never have made money. I don't believe we can do much about it. But of course we will have to seem to be doing something; do the best we can and without much hope. The life of the farmer has its compensations but it has always been one of hardship.

No cracked earth, no blistering sun, no burning wind, no grasshoppers, are a permanent match for the indomitable American farmers and stockmen and their wives and children who have carried on through desperate days, and inspire us with their self-reliance, their tenacity and their courage. It was their fathers' task to make homes; it is their task to keep those homes; it is our task to help them with their fight.

The only difference between a pigeon and the American farmer today is that a pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere.

There are a lot of farmers and ranchers who are struggling. I get on my knees every day. If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it.

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.

Farming -- a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it.

It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.

What is nobler than a man wresting and wringing his bread from the stubborn soil by the sweat of his brow and the break of his back for his wife and children!

Crime doesn't pay, but neither does farming.

[My father] did get enough money to buy mules. We didn't have tractors, but he bought mules, wagons, cultivators and some farming equipment. As soon as he bought that and decided to rent some land, because it was always better if you rent the land, but as soon as he got the mules and wagons and everything, somebody went to our trough - a white man who didn't live very far from us - and he fed the mules Paris Green, put it in their food and it killed the mules and our cows.

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.

Picking a guitar was a lot easier than picking cotton.

As a son of Jamaican immigrants whose father cut sugarcane as a contract farm worker for over a decade and whose mother was a cook who fed those migrant workers out in the fields, the odds have always been against me growing up in rural South Bay, Fla.