Agricultural Resilience Quotes

Humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.

Even after a bad harvest there must be sowing.

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.

Floods, droughts, and natural disasters are a fact of life for farmers, ranchers, and foresters. They have persevered in the past, and they will adapt in the future - with the assistance of the scientists and experts at USDA.

American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.

Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.

We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you're cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn't you say?

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.

Let’s help farmers when they need it; let’s not, when they don’t.

Over 80% of the poor are people who have small plots of land and grow their own food and they don't grow enough to sell much into the marketplace. So they will be hit hard by the worst in climate. They really get hit hard starting in the 20-year time frame and thereafter.

My aim is to make Andhra Pradesh a drought-proof state.

Prosperous farmers make for a prosperous nation, and when farmers are in trouble, the nation is in trouble.

How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing? How much courage to go on and do that after you've spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, "I have to quit these peas. Peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans.

Ultimately, multiple livelihood opportunities alone can insulate farmers in rainfed areas from the debt trap.

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

We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue.

Crop insurance should be a policy that keeps people from going broke, to make sure they can farm next year, but not to make them rich.

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.

It rained in the Middle West. Farmers are learning that the relief they get from the sky beats what they get from Washington.

There's this about a farm: when the market's good there's money, and when it's bad there's food.

It is easy to think of potatoes, and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety. Potatoes are one of the last things to disappear, in times of war, which is probably why they should not be forgotten in times of peace.

The coldest growing seasons of the future [will be] hotter than the hottest of the past. Is agriculture adapted to that? I don't know. Can fish play the piano?

Isn't the necessity for keeping a real American agriculture alive evident? Remember you can't make a peasant out of the American farmer, for he will merely quit and go to town, and you can't feed the city workers at the minimum cost unless you have an efficient and contented agriculture to back them up. Is it any wonder that the Farm Bloc has worked so hard to salvage the wreck of our greatest business from the slough into which the deflation period dropped it?

The pious farmer, who ne'er misses pray'rs, With patience suffers unexpected rain; He blesses Heav'n for what its bounty spares, And sees, resign'd, a crop of blighted grain. But, spite of sermons, farmers would blaspheme, If a star fell to set their thatch on flame.