Agricultural Labor, Migrant Labor Quotes

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

It is the peasant, the true producer, who is also the true owner and master of Turkey.

The American farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything he buys at retail, sells everything he sells at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.

In his new autobiography, 'Capital Gaines,' Chip talks about the farm work - and he says he does, in fact, do it himself.

There is more honor in a field well plowed than in a field steeped in blood.

Our South Australian farmers left their holdings in the hands of their wives and children too young to take with them, but almost all of them returned to grow grain and produce to send to Victoria.

To this day, I hate walnuts and I hate onions because on weekends when the walnuts and onions were in season, we were out there first thing in the morning and out there until the sun went down topping onions or picking walnuts.

Free African Society shall operate without regard to religious tenets. The members shall be banded together to support one another in sickness and for the benefit of their widows and fatherless children.

Were the workers who sweated to put food on my table paid at least minimum wage? Did they get health benefits? Overtime? Were they unionized? Protected from pesticide exposure?

The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.

I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.

I feel closest to God with a pitchfork full of crap in my hands. I'm serious!

The population feels the physical pressure of the foreigners coming and working here, some [of whom] are prepared to work longer hours or accept less.

My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.

In Uzbekistan, up to two million children under 15 are put to work harvesting cotton each year — just as the mills of St. Petersburg, Manchester and Alsace once heavily depended on child labor from poorhouses and orphanages.

I'm glad I don't have to make a living farming. Too much hard work. Too many variables you don't have control over, like, is it going to rain? All I can say is, god bless the real farmers out there.

I agree that we need to have real temporary foreign workers, who are working in the fields, picking fruits.

Working with people on a field turns me on.

I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.

As I grew older, farms in Kentucky provided me with many jobs in hauling hay and in cutting tobacco. In addition to helping fund my college years, these jobs helped me to meet an array of very interesting and amazing men and women.

I do feel like food should cost more, because we aren't paying farmers a living wage. It has to cost more.

All the guest worker programs result in permanent settlement.

As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivated, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common.

Gunsmiths and other artisans shall [henceforth] be compelled to worke at theire trades and [are] not suffered to plant tobacco or corne or doe any other worke in the ground.

I went to live on a kibbutz, and I'd idealized the world of collective, agrarian work, where everyone was equal, everyone contributed, that all this awful European intellectual stuff just fell away.